More than your resume.
The first real test of whether you know how to use the thing you’ve been using.
My son needed a job.
He’d been using AI for years, the way his generation uses AI — fluently, casually, without thinking much about it. He knew the tools. He had opinions about them. If you’d asked him whether he was comfortable with AI, he’d have looked at you the way seventeen-year-olds look at adults who ask obvious questions.
Of course he was comfortable. He’d grown up with it.
And then he needed to write a resume, and something interesting happened.
The first real test
Here’s the thing about growing up with a tool: you learn it for the uses you encounter first. And the uses a seventeen-year-old encounters first are mostly school-shaped. Essays. Assignments. The particular category of task that has a right answer, a word count, and a due date.
Those tasks have something in common. They’re not really about you. They’re about a subject. You feed the subject in and something comes back about the subject. The photocopier runs. The paper comes out.
A resume is different.
A resume is entirely about you — specifically, the version of you that you want a stranger to see, written in language that makes that version sound credible and real. You can’t feed the subject in because you are the subject. And if you haven’t had a conversation with your AI — a real one, where you’ve brought yourself rather than a task — you don’t know how to do that yet.
My son fed his resume into the AI and asked it to improve it.
What came back bore no resemblance to him. The witty, cheeky, responsible, charming, hard-working young man I know had been translated into something generic and slightly airless — the kind of resume that could belong to anyone, and therefore belonged to no one.
The problem wasn’t the AI. The problem was that he’d treated it like a photocopier. Paper in, paper out. And when the paper came out wrong, he did what you do with a photocopier that’s misbehaving.
He thumped it.
What he didn’t know yet
Here’s what I would have done, in his position.
Before I touched the resume, I’d have asked Claude to interview me.
Not to write anything. Just to ask me questions. What am I good at? What am I proud of? How do I work best? When do I excel — and when do I struggle, and what does that struggle look like? What’s my style when I’m working with other people? What would the people who’ve worked alongside me say about me, if they were being honest?
That conversation — that unhurried, non-judgmental, genuinely curious conversation — would have produced something the resume could be built from. Not the presentable surface version. The actual one.
Then I’d have fed the resume in.
The AI can only reflect what you give it. Give it a document and it improves the document. Give it a person — with specifics, with stories, with the particular texture of how that person actually operates in the world — and it builds something that sounds like them.
My son didn’t know this yet. Most people his age don’t. They’ve grown up fluent in the tool without ever having a real conversation with it. They’re AI natives in the way that someone who has only ever driven in a car park is a driver — technically, yes. But the freeway is a different thing entirely.
The resume is the smallest possible use
I want to say this clearly, because it’s the whole point of this post.
The resume is the thing everyone reaches for first. It’s low-stakes in the right ways — the output is just words on a page, the worst case is that you ignore what comes back, nobody gets hurt.
But it’s also the smallest possible use of something that can help you think through a difficult decision, prepare for a conversation you’ve been avoiding, understand a medical result, plan something you’ve never planned before, work out what you actually want from the next chapter of your life.
The resume is the test, not the destination.
And the test is this: can you have a real conversation with this tool? Can you bring yourself — your specific, particular, irreplaceable self — rather than a task? Can you treat it as a thinking partner rather than a photocopier?
If you can, the resume will be the least interesting thing you ever ask it to do.
If you can’t — if you’re still thumping it when the paper comes out wrong — then this is where you start. Not with a better prompt. With a conversation.
Tell it who you are. Let it ask you questions. See what it does with the actual person rather than the document.
That’s the resume worth sending.
Sandi is a Melbourne-based problem-solver, crisis-averter, and translator of the technical into the human. She spent decades being the person everyone called when something was broken, confusing, or just needed explaining properly — earning a reputation that preceded her wherever she went. Now she’s channelling that same instinct into AI: making it accessible, practical, and genuinely useful for people who think it isn’t for them.