Feeding the Machine - Why Your AI Prompts and Inputs Matter for Your Resume

Feeding the Machine - Why Your AI Prompts and Inputs Matter For Your Resume

Feeding the Machine - Why Your AI Prompts and Inputs Matter For Your Resume

When it comes to AI and resumes, there’s one golden rule: garbage in, garbage out.

AI tools like ChatGPT or free AI resume builders can be incredibly powerful. But they’re not mind readers. They don’t know what makes you different from the other 200 executives applying for the same role. They can only work with the raw material you give them.

And if that raw material is vague, incomplete, or missing the numbers that prove your impact? The AI-generated resume will be just as vague, incomplete, and forgettable.

If you want a resume that passes ATS and gets noticed by recruiters and hiring managers, you need to keep pushing the AI you’re using, until it gives you what you need.

Why Specificity Matters

AI thrives on specificity. Give it a strong prompt with context, achievements, and detail, and it can help you structure something usable. But feed it a weak prompt, and you’ll get a weak resume.

Take this example:

❌ Weak prompt: “Write a resume for a sales director.”
➡️ Result: a bland, generic resume filled with clichés like results-driven and strong leadership skills.

✅ Strong prompt: “Write a resume for a Sales Director with 15 years’ experience leading SaaS sales teams across North America. Increased annual revenue from $85M to $125M in three years, reduced churn by 14%, built and scaled a team of 40 reps, and launched a new enterprise sales channel that delivered $30M in its first year.”
➡️ Result: specific, tailored bullet points that show leadership impact and measurable results.

The difference is night and day.

📊 A LinkedIn survey (2024) found that 65% of recruiters skim resumes in under 30 seconds. If your AI-written resume is built on vague inputs, it won’t survive that skim.

What Executives Miss When Using AI

Most executives fall into the same trap: they type a quick prompt, hit enter, and assume the machine will magically know their value.

But AI can’t invent what you don’t provide. It doesn’t know:

  • Quantifiable results — revenue growth, cost savings, headcount
  • Leadership stories — how you built, inspired, or transformed a team
  • Culture and change impact — mergers, digital transformation, turnarounds
  • Strategic scope — budgets managed, geographies covered, stakeholders influenced

Without these, AI defaults to the tired stock phrases it has learned from millions of resumes online. Exactly the phrases recruiters roll their eyes at.

That’s why you can’t stop at the first draft. You have to keep editing, tweaking, and refining until you’re confident the output reflects the real you.

👉 Call to Action: Not feeling 100% confident in what AI has given you? Our Professional Resume Review Service will compare your resume with a live job description and give you an ATS score; so you can see exactly where you’re strong, and where you need fixes, before you press apply.

Case Study: Numbers Change Everything

When Anne, a VP of Sales for a national SaaS consultancy, used AI to update her resume, she rushed the process. With a role closing in just a few days, she entered a quick prompt: “Write a VP of Sales resume.”

The end result? Stock phrases and vague language like:
❌ “Improved sales across the region.”

When Anne used our Instant Download Executive Resume Template, she learned how to feed AI with sharper prompts, numbers, and context. For the same role, she adjusted her prompt to include specifics:
✅ “Increased sales 23% YoY across EMEA, adding $18M in new annual revenue.”

That one change stopped recruiters in their tracks.

📊 According to The Ladders’ eye-tracking study, recruiters spend just 7.4 seconds scanning a resume before deciding whether to keep or discard it. Numbers and specifics force the eye to stop. Generic AI fluff doesn’t.

Practical Tips: What to Feed AI Before You Start

If you want AI to give you something worth using, you need to supply the right data. Here’s your checklist before hitting “generate”:

  • Job titles and dates (don’t assume AI knows your path)
  • Key achievements with numbers (growth %, cost savings, revenue, headcount)
  • Scope of role (regions, team size, budget responsibility)
  • Projects delivered (digital transformation, M&A, system rollouts)
  • Recognition (awards, speaking, board-level presentations)
  • Keywords from the job description (woven naturally)

Without these, AI will fall back on beige templates and buzzwords.

🔍 Searching question for you: When you last updated your resume, did you feed AI with real results, or just responsibilities? If you used AI, are you sure it truly captured your impact?

👉 Call to Action: Our Professional Resume Review Service benchmarks your resume against live job descriptions and ATS filters, then gives you clear, actionable fixes. So you’ll know exactly what to improve before you hit apply.

AI Won’t See the Bigger Picture

Even with stronger prompts, AI doesn’t know how to connect the dots. It won’t see the golden thread of your career: the leadership style you bring, the transformations you’ve driven, or the consistency of your results.

That’s why executives who rely 100% on AI resume writing tools often end up with documents that look polished but feel hollow. The machine can’t capture the story of you.

No wonder so many executives tell us they feel like they’re sending their AI-written resume into a black hole.

Questions to Ask Yourself This Week

  • Am I giving AI measurable results — or vague responsibilities?
  • Do my prompts include leadership and culture change stories?
  • Would my AI-generated resume sound any different if 10 other executives used the same tool?
  • Is AI helping me highlight my impact — or hiding the details that make me stand out?

Where We’re Going Next

Tomorrow we’ll look at how to spot the tell-tale signs of AI in a resume; the clichés, the awkward phrasing, and the keyword stuffing that scream “ChatGPT wrote this.”

Call to Action

Want to know if your AI-written resume is helping or hurting you?

Try our Professional Resume Review Service. We’ll stress-test your document against ATS filters and recruiter expectations and give you clear, practical fixes to boost your chances.