AI use
Use AI to find work and to check your work. Do not let it write your resume, your application answers, or your interview answers. Interviewers go layers deep on every line, and a line you did not write is a line you cannot defend. A tool can build you a job-posting scraper. It should not write a line of your resume.
What to hand the tool, and what to keep
Two columns. Hand to the tool: finding postings with a scraper or a filter, checking a draft for gaps and typos, rehearsing questions on one resume line, and explaining a concept such as volatile or a buck converter against an LDO. Keep for yourself four things. Every bullet, because the verb, tool, and number are yours. Application answers, because some employers set a rule for AI there. Take-homes and interviews, where AI is usually banned. The measurement, because no tool reads your oscilloscope.
Where a tool helps
Section titled “Where a tool helps”A scraper that checks the career pages you follow and flags each new role is the best use. Read each posting yourself and apply by hand on the company's site.
Take-home tests and whiteboard interviews often allow no AI tools at all. The section on take-home tests on the how to interview page covers how to handle that.
Finding postings
Section titled “Finding postings”This is the best use. Ask the tool to write a script that checks the career pages of your top companies every day and tells you what is new. Ask it to sort a daily list by the titles you want: test, validation, controls, firmware. Then read each posting yourself and apply on the company's own site. Applying early matters, because most recruiters review applications in the order they arrive (opens in a new tab). The section on where to look on the getting hired page lists the pages to watch.
Checking a draft
Section titled “Checking a draft”Paste your resume and the posting, and ask for the gaps, not for new bullets. UC Davis's career office suggests asking the tool to review your resume "like an expert coach" (opens in a new tab) and name five specific changes. Treat the answer as a list of places to look, not as text to paste in.
Reject any suggestion that adds a tool, a number, or a result you do not have. A keyword you cannot back up in an interview is a fabrication, and a recruiter on X says candidates who padded their resumes with AI got caught in later rounds (opens in a new tab). The tool cannot measure your ripple or your efficiency. Every [X] on this site is a number you read off an instrument.
A chatbot also smooths everything into the same shape. If three suggestions start with the same verb, you are looking at the pattern, not at your work. Keep the specific version.
If you draft with a coding agent such as Claude Code or Cursor, give it the rules before it writes. The eeprep resume skill is a folder of plain Markdown files the agent reads first. It holds the layout rules, the bullet pattern, the tailoring steps, and the audit. Its one rule above the rest is that the agent never invents a number, a tool, or a result you did not give it. It writes [X] where a measurement belongs and tells you to go measure it. The README has the install command.
Writing it yourself
Section titled “Writing it yourself”Hiring managers are reading for sameness. In a May 2025 survey of 600 US hiring managers by TopResume, which sells resume writing (opens in a new tab), about one in five said they would reject an application that appears fully AI-generated. The same managers found AI use least acceptable in skills assessments, at 40.8 percent, then in resume writing, at 30.3 percent, and in cover letters, at 25 percent. Given four resumes and asked which were written by AI, 33.5 percent spotted them. Detection is the smaller risk. The larger one is a page that reads like everyone else's and a bullet you cannot defend.
Tech employers can be more relaxed. Tech leaders quoted by IEEE-USA InSight had no problem with AI help on a resume or cover letter as long as the content stays accurate (opens in a new tab).
Employers set their own rules. Anthropic's candidate guidance, updated in July 2025, asks applicants to write their first draft themselves, then use Claude to refine it (opens in a new tab). It allows no AI in take-home tests or live interviews unless the company says otherwise. Read each posting's rules and follow them. Assume a take-home or an interview bans it unless the posting says otherwise.
Career centers draw the same line. Southern Connecticut State University's career center warns (opens in a new tab) that submitting AI-generated content as your own work, even after you edit it, carries ethical and legal risks.
Where students stand
Section titled “Where students stand”In NACE's 2025 student survey (opens in a new tab), 67.1 percent of graduating seniors said they did not use AI in their job search, and the most common reason was concern about the ethics of it, at 28.9 percent. A year later, 46 percent of graduating seniors said they used it (opens in a new tab). The survey reached more than 17,000 students at 258 schools, and more than 1,860 of them were graduating seniors. The question now is which jobs to hand the tools.
Rehearsing interviews
Section titled “Rehearsing interviews”Ask the tool to play the interviewer. Give it one resume line and have it go five layers deep, with the questions from the section on your projects, line by line on the how to interview page: how did you do that, why that way, what broke, what would you change. Answer out loud, at a whiteboard if you have one. Ask it to explain a fundamental you are shaky on, such as what volatile does, and then check the answer against Nigel Jones's article on volatile (opens in a new tab).
A chatbot is a rehearsal, not an audience. In a 2020 study, having an interviewer watch cut performance by more than half (opens in a new tab), and a text box does not do that to you. Book a mock interview at your career center as well. Illinois Engineering Career Services calls it the best way to prepare (opens in a new tab).
Rules for using a tool
Section titled “Rules for using a tool”- Use it to find, sort, and check. Write every line yourself.
- Never add a tool, a number, or a result it suggests unless you did the work and can defend it at a whiteboard.
- Follow the posting's rule on AI. Assume take-homes and interviews ban it.
- Measure every [X] yourself. A tool cannot read your oscilloscope.
- Read the final page aloud. If you would not say a line to the interviewer, do not send it.
Content by eeprep contributors (opens in a new tab), licensed CC BY 4.0 (opens in a new tab). Code licensed MIT (opens in a new tab). Source is in the eeprep (opens in a new tab), resume-generator (opens in a new tab), and company-lists (opens in a new tab) repositories.