Highlights from Our "Where to Use AI in Your Job Search (and Where Not To)" Webinar

The June 26th Networking for Life webinar, hosted by Charlotte Lee and Heather Maitre, generated a lot of insightful conversation about the over-use of AI in job search strategies and where executives are getting burned by relying too heavily on artificial intelligence. Attendees kept coming back to the same questions after the session ended, so we thought we would capture the greatest "aha" moments from the session.

When Everyone Is a Perfect Fit, Nobody Is

AI has raised the floor on resume quality. Documents are cleaner, bullets are quantified, language is sharper. That is genuinely good. But when everyone uses the same two or three generative AI tools, every resume sounds confident, strategic, and impact-focused, and almost none of them feel like a person wrote them.

Recruiters can spot this from miles away. They are seeing the same phrasing, structure, and even similar percentage improvements across hundreds of applications for the same role. A VP of Operations role receiving 340 applications will have 70% that were AI-optimized using the same tools. The recruiter can identify the tool from the sentence rhythm alone.

The shortlist is not the ten best-qualified candidates. It is the ten whose materials still felt like a human being who had thought about this specific company.

Need help with your resume or your search overall? Click here and fill out our intake form for consideration.

Resume Catfishing

Recruiters and hiring managers have a name for it now. The resume promises one candidate, and a different person shows up to the interview. The document is polished and compelling, but then the conversation falls apart when the interviewer asks "walk me through this initiative" and the candidate cannot.

A veteran recruiter with 20+ years in corporate recruiting can predict what happens next: s/he asks a question, then goes quiet, deliberately,  to see if the candidate will keep talking and bury themselves. You cannot own under silence what AI wrote for you.

AI Networking Outreach Is Killing Your Network

At the VP level and above, the person on the other end of your message has read enough AI-generated outreach in 2025-2026 to recognize the pattern in two sentences. A polished template signals the opposite of what networking outreach is supposed to signal. Instead, share your message in your voice and artfully state your unique approach with your unique style.

Struggling to build a warm, authentic, responsive career network? Click here and fill out our intake form for consideration.

Company Research the Night Before

AI training data has a cutoff. A model will confidently describe a company's strategy using information that is 12 to 18 months old. Boards change. CEOs are replaced. Walking into an executive interview referencing stale AI intel is worse than doing no research at all, and you will be corrected by people who lived those changes.

The fix: use Perplexity AI for company research the night before. It pulls from the live web with citations and no training cutoff (but be sure to always review the provided citations, and ensure it is the most recently available information. You are the intelligence officer. The AI is the assistant. Send it back for rework when necessary.

Not All AI Models Are Equal

Most attendees were using ChatGPT for everything. A few distinctions were provided in this session: Claude is a top model for cover letters, networking messages, and anything that needs to sound like you. ChatGPT is the best ATS optimizer and is best used after drafting in Claude to run the keyword pass. Gemini handles large documents well for pre-interview synthesis. Perplexity is your live intelligence tool for current news, earnings, salary benchmarks and other data with  no training cutoff.

The Bottom Line

The discussion kept coming back to this: use AI like an assistant and don’t trust it 100% for anything. Send it back like you would an intern who produced a decent work product but who likely missed several sources and doesn’t understand the big picture or your strategy.