Tool 44 · Develop yourself
This exercise does not write your CV and it never invents a number. It tests what you claim against what you did.
A guided 18 to 22 minute conversation using ChatGPT. Free, no account, nothing to sign up to.
01
Copy
Take the TAIU prompt.
02
Paste
Open ChatGPT.
03
Talk
One question at a time.
Copies the TAIU prompt. Paste it into ChatGPT.
You don't need ChatGPT Plus. The free version is fine.
If the honest answer is that it would have gone much the same, that is activity and you should say so rather than dress it up.
One inflated line costs you the whole page. The reader will not tell you which line it was.
What you'll explore
A note from Mark
I have read a lot of CVs and the failure is almost never a lack of experience. It is that the page describes a role rather than a person. Two hundred words that could have been written by anybody who held that job title.
The line I always test is ownership. Delivered, led, supported and was part of the team that are four different claims, and people slide between them without noticing. It matters because a reader who catches one inflated claim quietly discounts everything else, and you never find out that is what happened.
The other half of the problem is modesty, and it is more common than exaggeration. People leave out the most distinctive thing they have done because it is obvious to them. If you turned round a failing branch, that is the headline, not a bullet in the middle of the third job.
And I would resist the urge to make everything sound corporate. If you ran a kitchen, say you ran a kitchen. The people worth working for can tell the difference between somebody who did something and somebody who has learned the vocabulary.
What you'll get
01
Claim against evidence
02
Activity against achievement
03
What was yours
04
The missing material
+
Your TAIU handover — a portable summary of everything the conversation established.
What now?
01 · Save it
The story the page currently tells.
02 · Test it
Give one line to somebody outside your field and ask what they think you did.
What I would do
Take one role and describe it in tasks before you describe it in outcomes.
Say plainly whether you led it, contributed to it or were in the room.
Put a number on scale wherever you honestly can, and leave it out where you cannot.
Find the achievement hiding inside each piece of activity.
Read it as somebody who does not want to be impressed.
Test it
Did you lead it, contribute to it, or were you in the room?
What would have happened if you had not been there?
What is the first question a sceptic would ask?
The alternative
The expected conclusion is that the CV needs strengthening. Two alternatives are frequently truer. The document may be overclaiming in a way that is costing interviews rather than winning them, because a reader who senses inflation in one line discounts the whole page. Or the writing may be fine and the problem is that the CV is honestly describing a job the user no longer wants, in which case no amount of rewriting will help and the work belongs elsewhere. Sometimes the finding is simply that the evidence is much stronger than the page and the user has been modest to the point of self harm.
Think about this
Take this to Ask Mark
Interpretation, not another copy-and-paste exercise.
Take this to Ask Mark →Finished the exercise?
Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.
Next tool
If the CV honestly describes work you no longer want
Further thinking
Impression Management and Faking in the Employment Interview
Julia Levashina and Michael Campion
Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs
Lauren Rivera
Belief in the Unstructured Interview: The Persistence of an Illusion
Jason Dana, Robyn Dawes and Nathanial Peterson
Article
Julia Levashina and Michael Campion
Research on how routinely candidates inflate, and how experienced readers detect it. It explains why a vague claim costs you more credibility than a modest one.
Book
Lauren Rivera
Rivera sat inside hiring committees. What she found about how people actually read a CV is uncomfortable and extremely useful if you are writing one.
Article
Jason Dana, Robyn Dawes and Nathanial Peterson
Interviewers form confident impressions from very little. That cuts both ways, and it is why the evidence on your CV has to do the work your presence cannot.
Book
Herminia Ibarra
Ibarra followed people through major career and identity change and found that almost none of them thought their way to an answer first. They acted first, in small reversible experiments, and their sense of who they were caught up afterwards. It is the strongest available argument against sitting still until you feel certain.