This is a hard confession to make. Since my time as a young lad in Alaska, I’ve always been pretty good with language and had a pretty good eye for writing, editing, and proofreading. With the rise of modern AI tools, however, these skill sets are becoming largely commoditized — especially when it comes to proofreading, where ChatGPT or its ilk can run rings around virtually any human screener.
For example, as meticulous as I try to be, there have been numerous times recently when I’ve updated a client’s resume or similar document to an AI tool, asked it to proofread the file, and been shocked by the range of minor glitches and inconsistencies that it caught.
Now to be fair, proofreading (and writing in general) is far from an exact science and one can’t take every AI suggestion at full value. There are obviously still plenty of cases when a good writer chooses to buck conventional grammar rules to make a point — or decides to handle something in a way that an English teacher might frown upon. But in terms of basic errors and inconsistencies? Outright typos, inconsistent punctuation, extra spaces, and that sort of thing? AI puts human readers to shame in terms of both speed and accuracy. Not only is it fast as all-get-out, but it doesn’t suffer from the #1 issue that leads to typos in documents — which is the fact that human eyes get fatigued and tend to see what we think we wrote, not necessarily the text that’s actually there.
Case in point? If you open this link in LinkedIn, you’ll see page after page of people whose opening headline, in big bold letters, showcases their background as a Project Manger.
So as obvious as it might seem and as many times as you’ve reviewed your key job search documents to date, I’d encourage all active job hunters to run their resume, cover letters, and/or LinkedIn profile text through any standard AI tool and simply put “proofread this” in the prompt. Experience tells me you’ll be thankful you did.
