Everyone is using Claude to write their resume. Here’s how to beat them.

The average job now gets 254 applications, and 78% of them were written with AI. I built you a tool so yours doesn’t read like one of them.

Back in April I wrote “How to Use Claude to Build the Perfect Resume for Every Job.”

It’s the most popular thing I’ve ever published here. 15,000 views. It’s the number 3 result on Google when you search “Claude resume.” I never realized how popular it would become.

When I lool back on it now, you realize everyone has started to use Claude, and the exact same way of building their resume, so you start to get a lot of resume’s looking similar. You just end up becoming another resume in the crowd. You’re not really much different. But don’t get me wrong. The advice in there is still great, but it’s time we take it farther you know?

So that’s why I’m writing this now. This is the evolution. This is Ace Ventura Pet Detective 2. Is that too old of a reference?

The numbers

The average job now gets 254 applications(!!!). That’s a lot. Which means recruiters have less and less time to look at anything. I’m married to a recruiter. I hear it from her all the time.

Applications PER recruiter are up 412% since 2023. That’s WILD. And open roles stayed flat over the same stretch. That tells me the average amount of jobs applied is going way up per person. Linkedin has made it really easy.

Greenhouse surveyed a couple thousand job seekers, recruiters and hiring managers and got back that 78% of candidates said they’re using AI on their application materials at least some of the time.

Honestly, I can’t blame anyone for doing it. It’s helpful. We’re all applying for hundreds of jobs. You want to personalize it everything. It makes sense.

But we’re all applying for hundreds of jobs with AI. So things kind of start to look the same, right?

Here’s something thought that jumped out at me. 86% of recruiters said they’ve caught or suspected “fraud” in the last twelve months. 56% said AI makes it easier for people to misrepresent themselves.

So what I think is starting to happen is, if a recruiter THINKS you resume was built with AI, the w ill believe there’s some level of fraud potentially. I’m not saying every recruiter will, but there’s a connotation their that you want to avoid.

So recruiters are looking for Claude now. And as soon as they see it, they’re ditching it.

There’s a problem here. There’s got to be a better way to do this.

It’s about editing now

I’m not telling you to stop using Claude. I use Claude every single day for a multitude of things. This isn’t that.

When I first started, I thought using Claude was all about understanding how to prompt better. I remember telling someone that using AI was like being a great wizard. They’re only as strong as the spell they cast. I joined a “Chat GPT Prompts” subreddit.

It still matters ocasionally for more complex things, but Claude’s gotten so good that it’s not about prompting better in general. It’s about editing better.

That’s the whole thing. That’s the shift.

Anyone can generate a resume in sixty seconds. 78% of your competition just did. What almost nobody is doing is sitting with what came back and cutting it apart. Learning how to edit yourself, and how to edit what Claude gives you, is the actual skill now.

So let’s talk about what to edit for.

What actually made me stop scrolling

When I was hiring at TONE, or Activision, or Nike, here’s what made a difference.

I wanted to see actual callouts of work.

“I helped grow things 50%.” Grew WHAT 50%?

“I worked on big campaigns.” What campaigns?

When you’re scrolling through resume after resume, the things that pop out are campaign names. Brand names. Celebrity names. Percentages. Growth. Actual hard numbers. But more than that, what you actually did instead of cookie cutter stuff like “I helped grow this” or “did brand strategy work for this client.”

You want real moments and real people in the resume. A specific resume with a specific point of view on what you do. That’s what matters.

And I’ll say this too. I want to see someone who’s really good at a couple of things. Not someone telling me they did 800 different things. Pick the couple. Then keep showing me how good you were at them.

Real examples

Let me give you some actual ones.

“Grew Call of Duty’s Instagram channel by millions of followers.”

Now compare that to this.

“Grew the Call of Duty Instagram by 5 million followers in one year.”

Very hard to miss that second one, right?

Same job. Completely different resume.

You’ve got to be really specific about examples. That’s what makes the difference, and that’s what I put on my own resume.

You’ve probably looked at your resume 100’a of times. You can’t see it the way a recruiter sees it at 4pm on their 200th application of the day.

So I built you something that does.

Paste your resume in and it scores every bullet you’ve written. It tells you which ones any of your 254 competitors could have written, and it hands you the exact question that fixes each one. Ten seconds. No signup. Nothing gets uploaded anywhere.

I tested it on a completely normal, perfectly well written marketing resume first.

It scored a 15 out of 100.

The tool’s below, along with the questions it asks, the two things it scores you on, and the one thing on a resume I’d take over every bullet point combined.