A résumé gets about six seconds on the first pass, from someone who has already read four hundred of them that week. Generated bullets fail for one specific reason: they describe a job description instead of a person. The fix is not a better vocabulary. It is fewer adjectives and more nouns you would be comfortable being asked about.
Hiring managers are not reading for style. They are scanning for a reason to say yes or a reason to stop, and they stop at the first line that could describe anybody. Generated bullets are built from role nouns plus achievement verbs, so twenty of them from twenty different applicants look like one paragraph with the names swapped.
There is a second, quieter tell: balance. Model output distributes credit evenly across every duty, because it has no way to know which one mattered. A person always knows which line to put first.
Run these four passes over the bullets, not over the whole résumé at once.
That last pass matters more than it sounds. Uniform sentence length is the most reliable single signal that a model wrote the list.
Paste your own draft, not a job description. A model given a job description will return the job description with your name on it, which is exactly the failure mode you are trying to avoid.
Then ask for the opposite of what most people ask. Not 'make this sound professional', ask it to remove anything that sounds generated, keep every number exactly as written, and add no claims that are not already in the draft. Numbers are the part you cannot let it touch; that is the part you will be asked about.
Finally, keep one bullet that is not impressive. A bullet about something that went badly and what you changed reads as a person. Very few applicants do that, and it is the fastest way to be remembered.
| What people usually write | What it looks like after |
|---|---|
| Spearheaded cross-functional initiatives that significantly improved operational efficiency. | Replaced the Monday status meeting with a one-page doc. Engineering stopped asking for updates by Thursday, so I deleted the meeting. |
| Responsible for managing social media accounts and creating engaging content to drive brand awareness. | Wrote 40 LinkedIn posts over five months. Two of them brought in a customer; the rest did nothing, which is why the budget went to email. |
| Leveraged data analysis to drive strategic decision-making across departments. | Pulled six months of refund data in SQL, found that two SKUs caused half of them, and got both delisted in March. |
If you want this done to your own draft: ShipCopy takes a piece of text you already wrote and rewrites it in one of three modes — rewrite it to read human, turn a product description into launch copy, or turn a plain-language request into a reusable prompt. Six output formats, 13 languages. 10 generations free, no card.
See what it does Pricing — US$15/monthNo. Keep the ones you can defend. 'Sole engineer on the payments rewrite' is an adjective doing real work; 'dynamic, results-driven professional' is not.
It gets skimmed past, which is a rejection without a notification. That is the more common outcome.
One line on screen, two at most. If it needs three lines, it is two bullets.
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