Your AI-Generated CV Won't Get You Hired. Here's What Will.

A lot of people in Silicon Valley said we'd lose our jobs in 12 to 18 months.
That was about 12 to 18 months ago.
"But in the next 12 to 18 months, it will definitely happen."
Meanwhile, companies are still hiring. They're still searching for people, software engineers included. Who would have thought?
Nobody knows what the job market will look like down the road. But right now, today, the market needs people. So I want to skip the "will AI replace us all?" debate and talk about something more useful: what has actually changed about getting a job, and what you can do about it.
Because the funny thing is...Companies need people. Some are hiring like crazy. And yet I keep hearing from talented folks who can't land a job, or even get invited to a single interview.
This tension is real, and I'm far from the only one noticing it. Greenhouse CEO Daniel Chait recently described the hiring market as an "AI doom loop": recruiters drown in applications while candidates feel it has never been easier to apply and never been harder to actually get hired. Both sides are frustrated at the same time, which he says is something genuinely new. The result is an authenticity crisis. When every application looks equally polished, the hard part becomes figuring out which ones are real.
Plain old applying can still work. But AI has changed the game, and I see it firsthand when I'm involved in hiring at our company.

One thing stands out more than almost anything else: a personal brand.
I know how that sounds. Like I'm telling you to become an influencer. Let me be clear about what I mean. Done right, a personal brand is simply a way of showing people your authentic self: the things you care about and the work you actually do. That turns out to be a real advantage when you're looking for a job.

What is a personal brand, and why should you care?
Maybe you've heard the term before. Maybe from some shady internet guru trying to sell you his "personal brand course" for just a few thousand dollars.
Strip all that away, and a personal brand is really just one thing: a representation of who you are and what you care about. That doesn't sound so shady, does it?
Most people still see it as unnecessary, or even a little cringe. But if you've ever felt that people don't really get you, that they don't see what you're actually about, a personal brand can help.

It starts with an interest
So how do you start? Like most things in life: simple.
Write down what you're actually interested in and where your areas of expertise lie. Maybe you're thinking, "but I don't have any expertise." That's completely fine. That can be your personal brand too. You don't have to be an expert. You just have to be someone who wants to share the journey and what they learn along the way. Nobody is born an expert. And the more I think about it, the looser that word gets the closer you look at it. So put your curiosity front and center. Most companies want exactly that: people who are curious and want to learn and grow.

You don't have to be an expert to show your work
This idea is older than the current AI panic. Years before ChatGPT, the writer Austin Kleon published a small book called Show Your Work!, and his core argument fits this moment perfectly. You don't need to be a genius or a recognized authority to start sharing. Often the amateur, the person still learning out of pure curiosity, has the advantage, because they still remember what it feels like to be a beginner and can explain things to other beginners.
Kleon has one line I think about often: imagine your next boss never has to read your résumé, because they already follow your blog. That flips the whole job search around. Rather than begging a stranger to size you up in thirty seconds, you let your work speak for you long before you ever hit apply.
He also draws a useful distinction between "flow" and "stock." Flow is the steady stream of small things you post day to day. Stock is the lasting stuff: a blog post, a project, a video that keeps working for you long after you publish it. One small post counts for very little on its own. Publish consistently for a couple of years, though, and you've quietly built a body of work that represents you better than any CV ever could.

Then start creating
Once you've defined your interests, take the next step and start creating.
Yes, this sounds like the influencer thing again. All I mean is this: start talking, writing, even singing if you must, about what you care about. Share your take on the topics that matter to you. Into AI? Write a LinkedIn post about it. Love software development? Start a blog about your journey. Into design? Share your work on Instagram, or wherever you like.
When you put your thoughts out into the world, you give people a chance to understand who you really are and what you care about. The whole point is sharing your perspective, rough edges and all. Being right every time matters far less than being real. If there's one thing I've learned in my career, it's that everyone has something worth sharing. Everyone has an angle someone else doesn't, and people are hungry for different angles and stories.

But how does this actually help me get a job?
Let me tell you what I've seen in the current market and in our own hiring rounds.
We were looking for a new test engineer and posted the role on LinkedIn. We'd set a few hard constraints, because the market in Switzerland has shifted over the past few months. One of them: candidates needed German at C1 level.
The moment we posted, the applications poured in. Many of them came from India, everyone with no German anywhere on the CV. I want to be clear about one thing here: the issue is what AI has done to the whole process.
With AI, people now apply to every single job their agent or tool can surface. And the numbers back this up: one 2025 survey found that some recruiters spend up to half their week just filtering spam and low-quality applications. So companies adapted. They started screening applicants with their own AI, scanning for the right buzzwords and constraints.
Here's the catch for job seekers, though. The same wave of research shows hiring managers have grown wary of generic AI output. In a 2025 Resume Now study, most hiring managers said a clearly AI-generated résumé with no personal touch is more likely to land in the reject pile, and a large majority said personalized detail is what signals real interest and fit.
So at our company we went looking for something beyond a polished, possibly machine-written CV. We went looking for a bit of a personal brand.
And we found it.
One candidate sent us his GitHub repo. It was full of test automation projects, and on top of that he'd built his own digital twin as an AI side project, which told us more about his curiosity than any cover letter could. A woman linked us to her YouTube channel, where she walked through QA and testing topics in her own words. Another candidate shared his personal website, with blog posts on quality engineering that made his thinking easy to follow.
These candidates jumped out at us immediately. Within minutes we could see what they were good at and what they cared about, and that is exactly what a wall of identical AI-written applications can never give you. That's why I believe a personal brand can be a genuine game-changer when you're applying for a job.

So where does that leave you?
No, I don't know whether the AI overlords are arriving in the next 12 to 18 months. But I do know what's helping people get hired today. The job market is louder and more crowded than it has ever been, and that's precisely why showing who you are now counts for more, not less.
So start small. Share something you care about this week. Write the post, push the repo, record the video. Let people see what you can do and what you care about, long before they ever open your CV.
That's a brand worth building. And it might just be the thing that gets you in the room.