There's a particular kind of dread that comes with reading a resume that describes someone as a "results-driven professional with a proven track record of leveraging synergistic solutions." You don't know the person. You have no idea if they're good at their job. All you know is that whoever wrote this document was either deeply committed to corporate theater or ran their bullet points through something that stripped out every trace of personality. Either way, the document tells you almost nothing.
This isn't a new problem, but it's gotten measurably worse. A 2024 ResumeBuilder.com survey found that 46% of job seekers used ChatGPT to write their resumes and cover letters. The result is a labor market flooded with documents that technically say all the right things and somehow feel completely hollow. Recruiters notice. Hiring managers notice. And yet the cycle keeps going because the incentives haven't changed.
The Language Has Been Laundered
Resume writing has always had its own dialect, and that dialect has always been a little strange. Decades of advice telling people to start bullet points with action verbs, quantify their achievements, and avoid first-person pronouns created a genre of writing that was stilted from the start. When you tell someone to describe their job without using the word "I," you're already asking them to narrate their own life in a voice that isn't quite theirs.
What AI writing tools did was turbocharge that tendency. The models were trained on enormous amounts of existing text, including the mountains of resume advice, LinkedIn profiles, and career coaching content that already favored a certain kind of inflated, frictionless language. When you ask an AI to improve your resume, it very often gives you back something that sounds like every other resume because that's what the training data rewarded. Words like "spearheaded," "orchestrated," and "championed" appear because they appear everywhere, not because they're accurate.
Linguist Amanda Montell, writing about the way institutions develop their own vocabularies, has described how certain environments create pressure to adopt shared language as a form of belonging. That dynamic is extremely visible in resume culture. Using the right buzzwords signals that you understand the game. The problem is that when everyone signals the same way, the signal collapses entirely, and you end up with a pile of documents that all promise to be exceptional.
Quantification Ate the Context
Somewhere along the line, the advice to quantify your achievements turned into a mandate to attach numbers to everything, whether or not the numbers actually meant anything. You increased sales by 30%? Great. Compared to what baseline, over what time period, in what market conditions? Managed a team of 15? What did the team do, and what was your actual role in their success? The numbers are there. The meaning isn't.
A study in Personnel Psychology demonstrated that resumes with specific, quantifiable achievements—such as "increased sales by 25%"—led to higher ratings from recruiters on competence and hireability, even absent verification details. That's a reasonable cognitive shortcut in theory, people trust precision, but it created a perverse incentive to manufacture the appearance of impact rather than describe it. When every resume claims to have increased revenue, reduced costs, or improved efficiency by a suspiciously round percentage, the numbers stop working as evidence and start working as decoration.
The deeper problem is that most work doesn't reduce cleanly to metrics. A lot of valuable professional contribution happens in the ambiguous middle: the meeting where you asked the question nobody else would ask, the document you rewrote so it actually made sense, the judgment call that kept a project from going sideways. Resume advice has no real framework for any of that, so people either force it into numbers that don't fit or leave it out entirely.
Authenticity Became a Performance
There's a point where the advice to be authentic on your resume becomes its own kind of script. Career coaches began recommending personal brand statements. LinkedIn introduced the summary section as a place to tell your professional story. The result was a new set of templates for performing realness, complete with phrases like "passionate about driving change" and "dedicated to building meaningful connections."
What gets lost is that actual authenticity is specific. It involves details, contradictions, and particular experiences that don't generalize. When someone writes that they are passionate about leveraging data to tell compelling stories, that sentence could describe approximately four million people. When someone writes that they spent three years rebuilding a reporting system that everyone hated because the old one crashed every other Tuesday, that's a real person doing a real thing.
The resume as a format may simply be too constrained to carry the weight we're asking it to carry. It was designed to get someone in the room, not to represent a whole person, and that gap between function and expectation is where all the fakeness lives.
