Debola Ogunmolu's first sweep of the CV took less than two minutes. Her voice was intentional, like someone who had been doing this for a long time. "The summary is very strong and specific," she said, adding that "you've already established a niche from the summary—you're not just a content writer, you're a tech content writer."
For the last few years, she has been the Recruitment Lead at The People Practice, a boutique upstart full-suite talent manager that offers everything from recruitment services to human resource consulting to less buzzy West African companies.
"When I speak to people I train on CV writing, I always say there is a difference between 'I am a recruiter at The People Practice ' and 'I am a recruiter at The People Practice who handled 68 projects on this topic and this topic,'" she said. "Numbers show impact, and that's what differentiates you from every other candidate with the same job title."
We are talking about my new recruitment credentials—my new CV and LinkedIn account that I asked Claude, the Anthropic chatbot (and if you're reading this, you’ve probably seen talking head videos on how to use them to make your life better), to make. Debola is telling me what my chances are of being selected for one of her clients.
“Recruiters who are sorting through dozens, sometimes hundreds, of applications are essentially running a pattern-matching exercise. The faster your document confirms you fit the pattern they're hunting for, the longer they'll look,” she said.
But a crisp identity alone won't carry you. What separates the shortlisted from the rest, Debola explained, is proof.
She pointed to specific figures in the Claude-built CV, “900 SEO-optimised articles, a 5% traffic growth metric,” as examples of what she calls “quantifiable achievements.” It is the kind of language that, increasingly, isn't just impressing human eyes but accurately says that an individual has achieved something.
The machines are reading your résumé before anyone else does
With the surge of AI-assisted hiring tools, a CV that looks good must first survive a gauntlet it will never see. Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) scan documents for keywords long before a human recruiter opens them. If your CV doesn't speak the right language, it will never make it to a desk.
"Whatever you tell the AI is what it's going to do," Debola said. "If you tell it, ‘I'm recruiting for a tech content writer, and whenever you see SEO, cloud computing, or AI, select that CV,' those are the buzzwords it expects to find. And if they're not there, you're filtered out before anyone ever sees your name."
My Claude-generated CV, she noted, passed this test. Keywords like “SEO,” “Cloud Computing,” and “AI" were embedded naturally throughout to highlight a job description I had seen online while writing the prompt for the CV, which can trigger penalties in smarter ATS filters if they aren’t what’s required when applying for a job.
The document, she remarked, also had something most individuals overlook but companies equally value: team collaboration. "You see collaboration with product managers and subject-matter experts. That's very key these days. You cannot work alone in everything, and recruiters know that."
The formatting, too, held up with clear sections like summary, experience, skills, and education, structured in a way that doesn't collapse when opened on a different computer or a different version of Word. It is a small thing that trips up more candidates than most would admit.
The LinkedIn question is more complicated.
Having a LinkedIn profile and being active on LinkedIn, Debola was quick to clarify, are not the same thing. "A lot of people open an account and zoom off. But visibility is what LinkedIn is actually going to push you forward with," she said.
She described a practice known in recruiting circles as headhunting, a proactive, direct outreach that has become one of the primary pipelines through which professional roles get filled, particularly in tech. “Recruiters go onto LinkedIn, search for a role and a location, and the algorithm does the sorting for them. The profiles it surfaces first are not necessarily the most qualified but are the most visible — the accounts that post, comment, share, and engage,” she explained.
"When you search for a name on Facebook, the first five results are the most active people, the ones with photos, with recent activity. LinkedIn works the same way. If you're passive, you're buried."
She found my new Claude profile active enough to be competitive. It published professional content — tech guides, industry commentary — and showed visible links to a company, which she said matters more than most candidates realise. “A lot of people say they work somewhere on LinkedIn, but there's no interaction between them and the company at all. It looks like a lie, even if it isn't."
There is, of course, the question nobody wants to answer honestly: what if you're simply not the type?
I put it to her directly, what about professionals who are genuinely introverted, who find the performative demands of LinkedIn alienating, who would rather let their work speak without a broadcasting medium attached to it?
She paused. Then said, "Everybody can say, 'I'm good at my job. I can do this and that.’ But as we are now, this is the stage we are at."
It was not exactly a concession to the system, and it was not exactly an endorsement of it either. But something more of an acknowledgement that the architecture of modern hiring has shifted in ways that reward visibility and that opting out carries a real cost. And as such, the question is no longer whether you want to play the game. It's whether you can afford not to.
Claude built me a CV and optimised my LinkedIn in under an hour, for free, in a way that an HR professional with over a decade of recruitment experience described as "structured, keyword-rich, quantifiably strong, and ATS-ready."
Whatever this means for our future, I hope the generation that comes after us doesn't look back and ask, “What were they thinking?”
David Adubiina
