An AI résumé tool that cannot invent experience

Why tools invent experience

A model asked to make a résumé match a posting will close the gap the cheapest way it can, and the cheapest way is words. If the posting wants Kubernetes and your résumé does not say Kubernetes, adding the word is a smaller edit than explaining why your container experience transfers.

Three product decisions make it worse: scoring the output against the posting, so invention is the shortest route to a better grade; rewriting the whole document at once, so a single changed word hides in a wall of plausible text; and no per-edit approval, so accepting means accepting everything and nobody reads everything.

The invention is rarely dramatic. It is 'led' where you wrote 'worked on'. It is 'reduced costs by 30%' on a project that had no cost measurement. It is one line in a skills list. These survive a skim, which is exactly the problem.

What gets through, and what gets dropped

Four checks run on the model's output before any suggestion reaches you. These are illustrations of the rules, not screenshots of a specific review.

The rules, stated once

• Every edit must quote your résuméA suggested edit has to quote an exact, unique passage of the file you uploaded. If the quoted original is not found verbatim, or is found twice, the edit is discarded before you ever see it — which removes the whole class of edits that invent a new bullet point.
• Invented figures are strippedA replacement may not introduce a number that was not already in the passage it replaces. Percentages, headcounts, latency and cost figures that appeared from nowhere are dropped mechanically, not by asking the model nicely.
• No overlapping rewritesIf two suggestions touch the same sentence, applying both would produce a sentence neither proposed. The overlap is dropped, so an accepted edit means what it said it meant.
• Your original is never rewrittenThe file you uploaded stays as you uploaded it. You approve edits one at a time, and changing your profile details invalidates an earlier approval so a stale review cannot follow new facts.

Where the honesty ends

These checks narrow the failure; they do not remove your review. They cannot tell whether a true sentence is well judged, and they cannot catch an invented claim that quotes a real sentence and contains no digits. Read the diffs.

A technology name inserted into an existing sentence can survive these checks, because the edit legitimately quotes that sentence and adds no digits. 'Built the ingestion service' becoming 'Built the ingestion service in Kafka' is anchored and number-free. That is the case that is still yours to catch, and it is why edits are shown one at a time rather than applied.

The same applies to the cover letter. It has fewer structural constraints than a résumé, which is where invention tends to hide. Read it.

Test any tool against this list

Ten minutes on a free tier, with your real résumé and a posting asking for one thing you have never done.