Dear Stephen,
I'm an HR professional—specifically, the senior recruiter at a major Midwest manufacturer. I lead internal recruiting for outside sales positions, managing several recruiters who report to me. I have a counterpart who handles operations and factory roles.
We post our jobs on our website's careers section, then on LinkedIn and job boards like Indeed. This generates many resumes. One purpose of my department is to build a strong internal candidate database so when openings arise, we have candidates ready. We also avoid using outside recruiters like you—saving our company significant money on recruiting fees.
Here's a new phenomenon I'm seeing more often as an internal recruiter. I wonder if you see it too in your role—candidates sending AI-generated cover letters. I hate it. The letter literally reads like someone pasted our job description into ChatGPT and copied whatever it spit out. It's called Artificial Intelligence for a reason—the letters look artificial, inauthentic, with too many bullet points and numbers. It's like the AI is trying to sound profound, but the whole thing just lands as totally bland.
My department is called Human Resources. The whole point of our job is to determine what the human applying to our job is actually like.
Here's the thing—our HR department uses AI like everyone else. We respect it. We understand it. We know it's the future. But we're recruiting salespeople! We want to understand their personality, their voice, and whether they have the gravitas we're looking for in our salespeople and leadership.
Recently, while evaluating a candidate for the next steps, we found their cover letter so distracting because it was obviously AI-written. It completely took away from this candidate's excellent resume and interview. In other words, people we'd normally advance are now being second-guessed or passed on altogether because of their AI cover letters.
My question is: do you notice more candidates using AI for their cover letters and follow-up thank-you correspondence? If so, should we be judging it? After all, there's always the possibility we're mistaking someone's writing style for an AI letter. We never know for sure.
Signed,
HR Pro, AI No!
Dear HR Pro,
Over the years, before AI, I heard from HR professionals like yourself who couldn't stand receiving follow-up letters from candidates with typos or misspelled names. For years, I saw candidates in my own business lose jobs over poorly written follow-up letters—or worse, forgetting to send one altogether.
Today, candidates feel there's a benefit to running their introduction and thank-you letters through AI. The issue is they feed the job description into AI to craft a cover letter, like you said. You're right—it's too perfect and nondescript. Let me be clear: AI should never write the letter for you. You should write your own letter authentically, then let AI edit it. So theoretically it's still not your genuine letter, but it's all about the prompts you give AI. I'm an advocate of this approach.
I don't entirely agree with you about using AI because there is a place for it. It just shouldn't write the letter for you. Write the letter yourself first, then ask AI to edit it for your specific goals. AI isn't the problem—using the right prompts is. Think of AI like a copy editor, not a ghostwriter.
Beyond that, you can't really avoid using it these days considering every search engine now uses it. However, I tell people to take a course on AI and learn how to work with it so it creates their own voice and helps their letters become more authentic. You can do that by entering samples of your own writing to let the AI understand your voice. It's better than just spell check and can help create a nuanced message.
For example, you can ask AI to edit the letter (remember, AI should never write the letter!) with a certain tone, which can suggest words you could use in the letter you write yourself. Since its "brain" is the internet, it may recall a perfect word you've forgotten that captures exactly what you're saying. But you have to be mindful of the diction to make sure it's believable. That's another place where AI use becomes obvious. Keep in mind the AI has never lived as a human. It doesn't understand certain social cues and has no grasp on what it means to connect authentically, human to human. Think about it this way—AI doesn't get embarrassed, so it will say whatever. It doesn't care if it's uncomfortable or odd.
I decided to research how to ask AI to edit a letter that would achieve my goals without looking AI-written. Here are the instructions it gave me:
First, write the letter, then put it in AI and tell it "edit this cover letter for a sales position." If you prompt just that, you'll get a perfectly polished, completely forgettable letter. This is what we don't want. If you want an AI-edited letter to sound like you, you must give AI instructions that force specificity, personality, and imperfection. Here's what a candidate should tell AI:
"Write this in my voice—direct, concise, and slightly conversational," because otherwise AI defaults to overly formal, overly polished, and overly enthusiastic. Tell AI: "Do not sound corporate." "Avoid clichés." "Avoid phrases like 'I'm thrilled to apply.'" "Keep the tone confident but natural."
If you're in sales, give specific sales numbers from your career. Write it out yourself. Talk in your voice. Remove generic closing paragraphs—AI loves to say things like "thank you for considering my application, I look forward to the opportunity to discuss…" HR people like you and me see this 200 times a day. Instead, instruct the AI to end with a simple, direct closing.
Here's one of the biggest tips I've learned from studying AI: Tell AI to avoid certain words like "dynamic," "leverage," "synergy," "passion," "strategic," and "excited." You'll immediately remove 80% of AI's fingerprints. Another tip—make one sentence imperfect. Real people vary sentence length. AI writes evenly balanced prose. Tell AI to "vary my sentence length." Include one shorter sentence, one longer sentence.
Finally, reference something specific about the company you're applying to. AI letters look generic because the prompts are generic. After you've studied the website and researched the company, tell the AI what's in your heart about why you want to work there, so that comes through in the edit too.
So, HR Pro, AI is something we need to learn to work with. I get your point about generic-looking AI letters. But throughout history, there's always something new that comes along technologically that people reject at first—the television, the electric typewriter, the laptop, the smartphone. Now it's AI. We're all learning and fumbling with it at the same time. It creates different opinions, but it's here to stay. Personally, I'm going to learn to work with it.
Signed,
Stephen