Resume crafting: Using ChatGPT to help tell your story

Resumes kind of suck, right?

In April 2025, I was referred to a job I was genuinely excited about, but I didn’t have a resume ready.

Like many people, I’m not someone who keeps their resume up to date. When I went back to the document that landed me my current job.. let’s just say it wasn’t great. Outdated, unfocused, and definitely not ready for prime time.

I wanted a total do-over, and I wanted to offload as much of the pain as possible to ChatGPT.

How to write a resume in the age of Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS)

I’m not a resume expert, but after reading countless recruiter LinkedIn posts and lurking on job-hunting subreddits, here are a few things I’ve learned:

• Your resume needs to be machine-readable. Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) struggle with fancy formatting. Simple, single-column layouts without tables or sidebars are your best bet.

• Keyword matching is essential. Recruiters are overwhelmed. Your resume has to pass automated filters before a human ever sees it.

• Impact matters. Recruiters spend seconds on each resume. Make your accomplishments, skills, and outcomes obvious and impressive.

The approach

My strategy was simple: I would handle the formatting (titles, dates, sections, etc) and ChatGPT would help write and rewrite my bullet points.

Here’s how I made it work:

1. Start with a brain dump. I typed out everything I could remember about a role in a messy, stream-of-consciousness style. No formatting. No structure. Just details.

2. I fed that info to ChatGPT and asked it to turn it into resume-style bullet points.

3. I requested alternative versions with different focus areas, like technical leadership, pure engineering, business impact, and DevOps.

4. I reviewed all the options and picked phrases or sentences that fit my voice and goals, editing as needed.

5. Once I had all my job entries done, I asked ChatGPT to extract the core skills and organize them by category.

The process

My first prompt looked something like this:

Help me write my resume's bullet point for my most recent job. Focus on the bullet points, and I'll fill in the dates and stuff myself. In addition to the bullet points themselves, please try to highlight the most relevant and important skills, business impacts, and areas where I was the differentiator.

My last job was at a company called HealthVerity, where I started at the associate level. first project was to work on a greenfield application using Python/Django, Django Rest Framework, React frontend, and Postgres and ElasticSearch for data storage and for querying large scale data. the application was intended to help our client find patients and providers for clinical trials by allowing them to do advanced querying of lab result data to help find applicable patients. We delivered the MVP to the client in 6-8 works, and continued to expand features after that.

…

to which I got something that was already pretty great:

• Spearheaded development of a greenfield clinical trial recruitment platform using Python (Django/DRF), React, Postgres, and Elasticsearch, enabling clients to identify eligible patients and providers via advanced lab result queries; delivered MVP in under 8 weeks.

• Engineered performant full-stack applications for HealthVerity's flagship products, working across Django, React, Ember, and AWS Lambda services to support scalable, user-facing solutions used by healthcare clients nationwide.

• ….

Then I asked for variations with different emphases. Here are three alternate versions of the same core experience:

• Engineering focus: Delivered an MVP product in under 8 weeks, enabling advanced patient/provider search against large-scale lab data indexed in Elasticsearch.

• Business impact focus: Delivered a client-facing MVP in <2 months that enabled pharmaceutical customers to identify clinical trial candidates via advanced lab data filtering — unlocking new revenue streams.

• Leadership/ownership focus: Led end-to-end development of a new platform to support clinical trial recruitment, balancing architecture, implementation, and delivery under tight timelines.

This helped me come with alternate ways to tell my story.

Putting it all together

For each of my past roles, I repeated the process:

1. Brain-dump everything I could remember.

2. Use ChatGPT to extract bullet points and generate multiple versions.

3. Curate and edit.

4. Ask for a categorized list of skills and tools mentioned.

Then I dropped it all into a simple Google Docs resume template: single column, no frills.

Some additional guidelines I followed:

• Mix up your verbs. I’m a software engineer, but that doesn’t mean every line can begin with “Delivered”! Use a range: "Led," "Architected," "Optimized," "Partnered," etc.

• Tell a consistent story. In my case, I wanted to show that I was a hands-on engineer who also contributed to technical strategy and team leadership.

All in all, the whole process — from brain dump to final resume — took about two hours. Most of the heavy lifting was done by ChatGPT. I just edited, polished, and curated.

Customizing it

Every job description is different, and keyword filtering matters. Before submitting, I made sure to:

• Mirror keywords and phrasing from the job description

• Emphasize the most relevant parts of my experience for that job

• Sometimes, tweak my bullet points or reorder them based on the role

Because we already have a solid baseline resume, this tweaking step shouldn’t be too time consuming.

Final Thoughts

I still wouldn’t call resumes “fun,” but with the right tools, I felt like I finally had a resume that reflected my story. It wasn’t because I spent hours agonizing over every line. It was because I had a system for writing quickly, clearly, and with purpose.