Opinion: Why You Shouldn’t Let AI Write Your CV (and Why That’s Good News)

Finito World

Grant Thornton’s warning to graduates not to use AI to write their CVs has been widely reported as a kind of rebuke: *don’t cheat, don’t cut corners, don’t let the machine do the work*. But that slightly misses the point. The real issue is not ethics. It’s **attention**.

AI-written CVs are not immoral. They are simply *undifferentiated*. And in a world where firms are drowning in applications, undifferentiation is fatal.

We are entering a curious moment in recruitment. On the one hand, it has never been easier to produce a superficially competent CV. On the other, it has never been harder to produce one that feels *humanly intentional*. The very ease of generation has made care more visible. And care, increasingly, is the signal.

When Grant Thornton’s chief executive talks about firms receiving hundreds of identical, machine-polished applications, he is really describing a crisis of sameness. AI does not fail because it is inaccurate; it fails because it is **average at scale**. It produces prose that is fluent, neutral, well-mannered—and utterly forgettable.

This is where many graduates go wrong. They assume recruitment is about clearing a bar. It isn’t. It’s about *creating an impression of mind*. A CV is not a form; it is an argument. And arguments cannot be delegated without cost.

At Finito, we see this constantly. The strongest candidates are not those who sound most “professional”, but those who sound most *deliberate*. They know why they made certain choices. They can account for themselves. Their CV reads not like a performance of employability, but like a trail of decisions.

That takes time. It also takes discomfort. Writing a CV properly means deciding what matters and what does not, which is a surprisingly difficult intellectual exercise. AI is excellent at avoiding that difficulty. It fills space. It smooths edges. It removes the small asymmetries that make a person legible.

But recruiters—especially senior ones—are not looking for smoothness. They are looking for *judgement*. And judgement reveals itself in what you include, what you exclude, and how you frame causation. Why this role? Why this gap? Why this pivot? These are not questions a machine can answer persuasively, because they are not linguistic questions. They are questions of meaning.

There is also a deeper irony here. Much of the anxiety around AI and recruitment assumes a zero-sum game: that if machines get better, humans must retreat. The opposite is happening. As routine competence becomes automated, **human distinctiveness becomes more valuable**. Taste, discernment, self-knowledge, coherence—these are not soft skills. They are scarce skills.

This is precisely why Finito Education exists. Not to game systems, but to help candidates *stand out honestly*. That means slowing down, thinking harder, and treating the CV not as a hurdle but as a crafted object. Something made with intention, not speed.

The graduates who will thrive over the next decade will not be those who use AI most efficiently, but those who know **when not to use it**. They will understand that some forms of work—especially self-presentation—are not optimised by delegation. They will recognise that care is visible, and that indifference scales badly.

So by all means, use AI to brainstorm, to organise, to reflect. But when it comes to the final document that stands in for you when you are not in the room, do the old-fashioned thing. Sit with it. Argue with it. Rewrite it. Take responsibility for it.

Because in the end, a CV is not a summary of your past. It is a signal about how you think. And thinking—real thinking—remains stubbornly, gloriously human.