A strange new tension is defining the job hunt: Gen Z applicants are rewriting their CVs because they're worried about sounding like AI, according to TechRadar — and they aren't the only ones.

The problem cuts both ways. Candidates increasingly lean on AI tools to draft applications, producing résumés and cover letters with a telltale machine-polished sameness. Recruiters, flooded with near-identical submissions, grow suspicious of anything that reads too smoothly. So applicants now face a double bind: write naturally enough to seem human to a recruiter, while still structuring their materials to survive the AI screening systems that filter applications before a person ever sees them.

TechRadar's framing is blunt: "Neither side thinks hiring is working." Employers distrust the flood of AI-assisted applications; candidates distrust opaque automated filters that may reject them on formatting or keyword grounds.

The result is an arms race with no obvious winner — humans editing their own writing to be less machine-like, for machines that were trained on human writing. Until hiring pipelines rebalance toward human review or more transparent screening, expect the CV-laundering cycle to keep spinning.