AI Resume Prompts That Work

Most resume prompts fail the same way: they ask for a rewrite without giving the model anything to write about. These give it something. The last section is the job no prompt will do, whatever you type.

From the team behind PassATS. Free to read, no email required.

Why most prompts produce filler

"Make my resume better" gives the model nothing, so it returns the average of every resume it has ever seen: confident verbs, no facts, "spearheaded cross-functional initiatives".

A model cannot invent what you achieved. It can only sharpen what you tell it. Every prompt below therefore makes you supply one fact first, which is the actual work.

If you have no number for a bullet, go and find it before prompting. Your analytics, your old tickets, your manager's review. The number is the bullet.

Rewriting a weak bullet

Paste one bullet at a time, not the whole resume. Whole-resume rewrites come back uniformly bland.

Here is one bullet from my resume: "[BULLET]". The real outcome was [NUMBER or RESULT]. Rewrite it three ways, each leading with the outcome. Keep it under 25 words. No buzzwords, no "spearheaded", no "leveraged". Do not invent any figure I have not given you.

That last sentence matters. Without it you will get plausible invented percentages, and a fabricated metric on a resume is a problem you carry into the interview.

Finding your own vague lines

Here is my experience section: [PASTE]. List every bullet that contains no measurable outcome. Do not rewrite them. Just list them, worst first, and say what fact is missing from each.

Asking for the diagnosis before the cure is the trick. If you ask for rewrites straight away, the model papers over the gaps with stronger verbs, and a stronger verb attached to nothing is still nothing.

Matching a job description

Job description: [PASTE]. My resume: [PASTE]. List the hard requirements in the posting that my resume does not address at all. Separate the ones I could address with better wording from the ones I genuinely do not have. Do not suggest I claim anything I have not done.

The split is the useful part. Half of what looks like a gap is usually something you did and did not mention. The other half is a real gap, and knowing which is which tells you whether to rewrite or to move on to a better-fitting posting.

Writing the summary last

These are my last three roles and the strongest outcome from each: [LIST]. Write a four-line professional summary that leads with total years of experience and the domain. No adjectives about my character. No "passionate", no "results-driven".

Write the summary after the bullets, never before. It is a distillation of the evidence, and you cannot distil what you have not written yet.

The job no prompt can do

Every prompt above operates on text you pasted. That is the right tool for content, and it is free.

It is not the tool for the file. When you paste, you paste what you could select, which is not what an applicant tracking system receives. Contact details can fail to survive extraction. Content from separate places on the page can come out interleaved in an order nobody would choose. Text set to be invisible does not arrive in your clipboard at all.

No prompt reaches any of that, because the information is not in the conversation. It is in the document.

The cheap way to check is the one we describe in the chat assistant comparison: copy your resume into a plain text editor and read what appears. Our free parse preview does the same job more precisely, and also costs nothing.

Fix the file first. Then use every prompt on this page, because at that point the words you sharpen are the words being read.