One rule settles nearly every case: a model may help you say what is true about you, and it may not decide what is true about you. Drafting is help. Supplying the content of a claim about your own experience is not.
The line, and why it is there
An application is a set of representations about a person, made by that person, on which somebody else will rely. That is what makes fabrication in one different in kind from fabrication in an essay: there is a party who acts on it, and there are consequences downstream for colleagues, clients and sometimes patients.
So the test is not “did a machine touch this”. It is “does the document assert something the applicant does not know to be true”. A cover letter drafted from your notes and edited by you asserts nothing you did not supply. A cover letter that describes a project you did not run asserts something false regardless of who typed it, and would be equally dishonest written by a friend.
Case Description rewriting: fine Rewriting your own bullet points more clearly. Fixing grammar. Translating your industry’s jargon into the target industry’s. Cutting 900 words to 300. Generating ten possible openings so you can choose one. decoding: fine Asking what a job advert is actually asking for, then checking your own experience against that list yourself. metrics: not fine Letting it fill in achievements, metrics or responsibilities you have not verified. ‘Increased conversion by 32%’ is a fact about the world; if you do not know the number, it is a fabrication with a number in it. motivation: not fine Any statement of motivation you have not read and would not say out loud. ‘I have long admired your work in X’ when you have not is a small lie that is very cheap to expose in an interview. assessments: not fine Completing an assessment designed to measure your unaided ability, where the employer has said not to, or where the whole point of the task is the thing you outsourced.What genuinely helps
The honest uses are also the effective ones, which is convenient. Most applications fail for reasons that have nothing to do with prose quality: they do not address the advert, they bury the relevant experience, or they are written in the vocabulary of the applicant’s current sector rather than the target one.
- Decoding the advert. “List what this advert is actually asking for, separating hard requirements from preferences, and name anything it implies but does not state.” Then you check yourself against the list. This is the highest-value step and it involves no writing at all.
- Translation between sectors. A teacher moving into corporate training, a soldier into logistics: the experience transfers and the vocabulary does not. Describing what you did in plain terms and asking how that work is described in the target sector is legitimate and it is genuinely hard to do alone.
- Ruthless cutting. “Cut this to 250 words, keeping every specific and losing every adjective” produces something better than most people write, because it removes the hedging that a nervous applicant adds.
- Finding the gap. “Given this advert and this CV, what will they be unsure about?” It will identify the two-year gap, the sideways move and the missing qualification. You then decide how to address them.
The CV: tailoring without inventing
Tailoring is reordering and re-emphasis, not rewriting history. The method that keeps the distinction structural: maintain one long master document containing everything you have actually done, in your own words, with the real numbers where you have them. Every application is generated by selection from that document.
Below are two things: a job advert, and my master experience file.
Select from the master file only. You may reorder, shorten and
re-word. You may not add any responsibility, achievement, tool,
figure or date that is not in the file.
Produce:
1. The six experience lines most relevant to this advert, in
priority order, each rewritten in the advert's vocabulary.
2. A list headed GAPS: requirements in the advert with nothing
matching in the master file. Do not attempt to cover these.
3. A list headed CHECK: anything you have rephrased in a way that
might overstate what the master file says.
[advert]
[master file]
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The GAPS list is the useful output. It tells you what to address directly in the letter, or that this is not your job. The CHECK list exists because rephrasing drifts upwards: “helped coordinate” becomes “led” without anybody deciding it should.
Applicant tracking systems parse CVs for keywords, and it is reasonable to use the advert’s own terms where they describe what you did. It is not reasonable to list a tool you have not used because a filter screens for it, and this fails in the most embarrassing possible place, which is a technical question about that tool in the first interview.
The cover letter method
A generated cover letter reads like a generated cover letter, and recruiters now see hundreds. The failure is not detectable style; it is that the letter contains nothing only this applicant could have written. That is fixable, and the fix is the same one as any other prompt that returns something generic: supply the specifics.
- Write, badly and quickly, three things in your own words: why this job, one thing you have actually done that is relevant, and one genuine question about the role.
- Give those three things plus the advert to the model and ask for a 250-word letter that uses all three and adds no facts.
- Read it aloud. Delete any sentence you would not say to the hiring manager in a corridor. This usually removes the opening paragraph entirely.
- Put back one specific detail that only you know — the thing about the product that annoys you, the reason the sector interests you. This is the sentence that gets a reply.
Take-home tasks and tests
Here the position needs to be plain, because the hedging in most advice is doing no one any favours.
If the employer says do not use AI, do not use AI. There is no interpretation under which that instruction means something else, and it is not a rule you get to disagree with while accepting the assessment. Withdraw, or ask them to reconsider the format, or comply.
If the employer says nothing, ask. A one-line email — “may I use AI assistance on this task, and if so would you like me to note where?” — is answered within a day and it removes the problem entirely. Applicants report this reads well rather than badly, because it demonstrates the judgement the task is often trying to assess in the first place.
If the employer says it is allowed, use it as you would in the job, and be ready to explain every line. The exposure is not detection; it is that you will be asked why you did something in the way you did, and an answer you did not construct cannot be defended.
Interviews and the preparation that survives them
Preparation is the strongest honest use in the whole process, because nothing produced ever leaves your desk. Generate the twenty questions this advert implies. Rehearse the answer to the gap in your CV until it is thirty seconds long and not defensive. Have the model play a sceptical interviewer — the method, and the ways a simulated counterpart misleads you, are in preparing for a difficult conversation.
Do not memorise generated answers. They come out flat, they do not survive a follow-up question, and the follow-up is the part being assessed. Rehearse the material; improvise the words.
Whether to say you used it
If asked, answer honestly. If a form has a declaration, the declaration binds you. Beyond that there is no general obligation to disclose that a word processor, a spell-checker or a language model was involved in drafting a document whose content is yours, and no employer expects a disclosure of the first two.
The test that stays useful as the norms move: would you be comfortable if the hiring manager watched you produce this? Editing your own material, yes. Answering a competency question with content you have never verified about yourself, no. Everything else in this page is a consequence of that one question.
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