Bland, boring: AI can ruin your chance of getting a new job

2 hours ago 1

Opinion

September 18, 2025 — 1.54pm

There’s a certain word that’s now starting to regularly appear after the letters ‘AI’. It first appeared in Google searches in 2024, and it’s risen exponentially since then. Last month it even entered the Cambridge English Dictionary.

The word? “Slop”, with the full official term – “AI slop″⁣ – describing the endless stream of low-quality content that artificial intelligence is enabling anyone to create at the click of a button.

Using AI to craft your cover letter is a quick way to have your application ignored entirely.

You’re likely to see versions of lazy AI slop appear everywhere, from vomiting out buzzwords in lengthy reports at work, to crafting robotic-sounding prose on emails and social media, and now it’s also taking over how we apply for jobs.

Writing a CV is a prime target for AI slop, as they were already strange documents we had to cobble together every few years in a vain attempt to summarise our careers into small bullet points.

Of course, we can use AI to help us polish up our resumes, but ChatGPT and other programs are being used to craft entire cover letters and CVs out of nothing, causing headaches for hirers.

The 2024 Global Workforce Report by Remote, a HR platform, found that 83 per cent of Australian companies received AI-generated resumes in the past six months that contained inaccurate information.

Use AI to assist, not replace, your thinking.

So spare a thought for the people who have to wade through the tsunami of AI-generated content when searching for new candidates to hire.

Lisa Millar is a HR Business Partner at Clifford Chance, one of the world’s largest law firms, and estimates she’s seen around 40,000 CVs in her twenty-year career.

She’s noticed a big change recently as the amount of AI-assisted resumes have flooded the market, especially for entry-level jobs that she specialises in.

“It is clear that CVs are becoming more and more similar lately with students using online templates like Canva and other AI tools to assist them,” she says. “It’s becoming harder to see someone’s true personality shine through and understand who they really are.”

The tell-tale signs that a CV has been generated by a robot is the similarity in language, and a vague intended audience. “It’s also obvious when people don’t tailor their applications to the firms they’re applying to,” she says.

Millar believes that it’s perfectly OK to use AI to help with some of the writing process, but you still need to tweak the language, rewrite and add your personality, as well as specific research about the business you want to join and your potential role on it.

“The last thing a recruiter wants to see is a generic resume,” says Millar. “Use AI to assist, not replace, your thinking.”

One simple rule to avoid turning in slop for anything created with AI is to think of the creation process as three distinct stages: the start, middle and end.

AI is very useful at either end, but still needs human intervention in the middle. For example, you could use it as the beginning of your resume writing process to generate thought starters or create a first draft, but you then need to add and edit your own experiences.

Or you can use it at the end to polish your CV and suggest ways of ensuring it really reflects what you’re trying to say.

But if you use it as the start, middle and end of the entire process without adding any critical thought, you’re most likely to end up with generic content that no one wants to read.

So the next time you dust off your CV for an upcoming job interview, don’t just ask an AI program to churn out the same template using bland language and hand that in.

Write it from your perspective, add genuine learnings and finish it off with the little details that will help you stand out. That’s the only way that we’re going to be able to stop the slop.

Tim Duggan is author of Work Backwards: The Revolutionary Method to Work Smarter and Live Better. He writes a regular newsletter at timduggan.substack.com

Get workplace news, advice and perspectives to help make your job work for you. Sign up for our weekly Thank God it’s Monday newsletter.