Rewrite your CV for a career change with AI

Switching fields, you already have the experience. What you do not have is the vocabulary, so a hiring manager reads your CV and cannot see the thing you are good at. One myth is worth dropping before you start, because it will save you a lot of wasted effort.

Applicant tracking systems do not automatically bin CVs for formatting or fonts, and the widely quoted claim that 75% of CVs never reach a human traces back to a 2012 sales pitch from a company that closed in 2013. What does filter people out is describing the right experience in the wrong industry's language.

The myth to drop before you start

You have read that 75% of CVs are rejected by a robot before a human sees them. Christine Assaf, an HR practitioner, went looking for the source of that number and found the trail ran to Preptel, a company selling CV-optimisation software, which went out of business in August 2013. There is no published methodology behind it. It is a sales pitch that outlived the company that made it.

Nobody is filtering your font. A human set a filter for exact criteria, and your CV describes those criteria in your old field's words. The evidence for that is further down, once you have the thing that fixes it.

Why the prompt is built the way it is

1. Start from the job ad, not from your CV. Paste the actual advert you are applying to and let it set the vocabulary. A generic "make my CV better" gives you a generic CV, because the model has nothing to aim at. The advert is the dictionary you are translating into, and it is sitting right there.
2. Feed it one true achievement at a time. Take a single thing you actually did, with the real numbers, and translate that. Handing over the whole document invites the model to smooth everything into the same beige register. One achievement at a time keeps the specifics alive, and the specifics are the only part a stranger finds convincing.
3. Ban invention out loud. Say it in the prompt: never add a tool, a number, a title or a responsibility that is not in what I gave you. Models fill gaps helpfully by default, and a helpful invention on a CV is a lie you will have to defend in an interview.
4. Make it show its working. Ask for the original line next to the rewrite, and one sentence on what changed and why. You need to be able to read every line back and recognise it as true, because you are the one sitting in the room defending it.

The Translator

Paste this into Claude or ChatGPT, then paste the job advert and one achievement underneath. It works one achievement at a time on purpose. Give it the messy, detailed version of what you did, with every real number you can remember. A rough dump with the specifics in it beats a tidy one-liner, because the specifics are what it translates and what it flags back when they are missing.

You are helping me change career. Your job is translation, never invention.

I will give you two things: a job advert for the field I am moving into, and one real achievement from the field I am leaving. Rewrite that achievement so a hiring manager in the new field immediately recognises what I am good at.

ABSOLUTE RULES
1. Never add a tool, a number, a job title, a team size, a budget, a timeframe, a result, or a responsibility that is not in what I gave you. If something is missing that would make the line stronger, write it as [ASK ME: what was the actual number here?] and tell me at the end what you flagged.
2. Never make a claim sound bigger than what I wrote. If I said I helped, do not write that I led.
3. Keep my ordinary words where they work. Do not reach for a fancier verb just because it sounds more senior.
4. UK English. No jargon the advert does not itself use.

BEFORE YOU REWRITE ANYTHING
First, read the advert and work out which one or two of its requirements this achievement could honestly speak to. If it speaks to none of them, tell me plainly that this is the wrong achievement for this advert and ask me for a different one, rather than stretching it to fit. Then ask me any questions you need. In particular, if my achievement is vague about what I personally did, ask before guessing. Wait for my answer.

WHAT TO GIVE ME BACK
For the one achievement, produce:
- ORIGINAL: my line, unchanged.
- TRANSLATED: one or two CV bullet points in the new field's language, each led by the thing I did, and the result if I gave you one, with every number carried over exactly as I wrote it.
- WHAT I CHANGED: one sentence naming the words you swapped and why the new field uses those instead.
- KEYWORDS COVERED: the three to five words from the advert this bullet now genuinely speaks, and which words the advert asks for that this achievement still does not earn.
- WHAT I COULD NOT SAY: anything you had to leave out or flag because I did not give you the detail, and anything the advert asks for that this achievement genuinely does not show.

THEN CHECK YOUR OWN WORK
Read the translated bullets back against my original. Ask yourself: is every fact in here also in what I wrote? If any one is not, say so plainly and fix it. Then tell me which requirement in the advert this achievement still does not answer, so I know what to cover with a different one.

What one run looks like

A teacher moving into project work, against an advert asking for co-ordinating several workstreams to a deadline and reporting progress to stakeholders:

That last line is the point. Every number carried over untouched, and the gap flagged back to you instead of filled in. If it reports that almost none of the advert's words are earned yet, that is the tool working, not a verdict on you. It usually means this was the wrong achievement to answer that advert, so reach for a different one.

Where the line is

What is really filtering you out

Accenture and Harvard Business School surveyed more than 8,000 hidden workers and more than 2,250 executives across the US, the UK and Germany for their 2021 Hidden Workers report. They found that "roughly 90% of all executives surveyed noted that both qualified highly-skilled and middle- and low-skilled candidates are vetted out of the process because they do not match exact job criteria."

Do not read that as permission to ignore the software. The same report found more than 90% of employers use a recruitment management system to filter or rank candidates, 94% for middle-skills roles and 92% for high-skills ones. The systems are real and widely used. People decide what they filter for, and what they filter for is the wording in the advert, which is the whole reason translation beats rewriting.

The report is free: Hidden Workers: Untapped Talent. The Preptel trail was traced by the HR practitioner Christine Assaf, who wrote it up here.

UK CV rules, and when to apply

The National Careers Service, which is the government's own careers advice, says plainly that you should not include your age, your date of birth, whether you are married, or your nationality. Its list of what a CV does need is short: contact details, an introduction, education, work history and references.

The other one is about timing. Ashby, which makes hiring software, publishes an Applications Per Job report drawn from its own hiring data, and it found applications per business role grew 207% between January 2021 and January 2024, with the strongest peak landing in the first week a job is posted at two and a half to three times any following week. Applying in week one puts you in the batch that actually gets read, because that is when a recruiter is working the role.

One more tool worth knowing

Lee Harding is a UK recruiter with over twenty years in hiring, and he built a free CV Feedback custom GPT that reviews your CV against what he actually looks for. His own advice about AI and CVs, posted on LinkedIn in February 2025, is more honest than most: "Don't use ChatGPT to write your CV for you. Why? Not because it's 'cheating', because it isn't. Because it'll do a really bad job of it. By all means ask it to rephrase certain parts for you, or give you feedback on it, but your CV should sound like you." That is the same instruction as the prompt above, from someone who reads CVs for a living.

The free tool: CV Feedback on ChatGPT. He writes at The Introverted Recruiter, where most of the longer posts are for paying subscribers.

Do one achievement tonight

Pick the job you actually want and the one thing you are proudest of from your old field. Paste the advert, paste the achievement, run The Translator once. Ten minutes, one bullet point, and you will see straight away whether the gap was your experience or only the words for it.

Then build out from there. Run it on your four or five strongest achievements to make a master set, and per advert you swap and reorder those rather than starting again. Write your opening introduction last, once the bullets exist, because that is the line that has to explain the switch and it writes itself off the translated bullets.

FAQ

Do applicant tracking systems automatically reject CVs?

Mostly no. The widely repeated claim that 75% of CVs never reach a human traces back to a 2012 sales pitch by a company that closed in 2013, with no published methodology. Filters are configured by people, and what they filter for is whether you match the stated job criteria.

Can recruiters tell if AI wrote my CV?

There is no independent evidence either way. Every figure in circulation comes from a company selling a CV tool or an AI detector. What recruiters consistently say they reject is generic writing, which is a risk whether or not AI was involved.

How do I write a CV when changing career?

Translate rather than rewrite. Take the advert for the job you want, take one real achievement from your old field, and ask AI to say that same achievement in the new field's language, with a hard rule against adding any fact you did not supply. Do it one achievement at a time.

What should a UK CV not include?

The National Careers Service says not to include your age, your date of birth, whether you are married, or your nationality. It lists contact details, an introduction, education, work history and references as the sections you do need.