When an AI reads your CV

Agents at Work — CC BY 4.0

There’s a decent chance the next job you apply for will have your CV read first by a machine, not a person. It might sort you, score you, or filter you out before a human ever sees your name. That’s increasingly ordinary — and you have more say in how it goes than you think. This page is for you, the applicant. It won’t give you control you don’t have; it will help you use the control you do.

Submit less

A machine can only judge you on what you hand it — and much of what people put on a CV out of habit is exactly the stuff a fair process shouldn’t weigh. Unless a role genuinely requires it, you can usually leave off:

• Date of birth and age.
• A photo.
• Home address (a suburb or city is plenty).
• Marital or family status, nationality, religion.

None of these should decide whether you can do the job, and each is a handle for bias — human or machine — to grab. Leaving them off isn’t hiding; it’s keeping the focus where it belongs, on what you can do.

Format so a machine reads you fairly

Screening tools parse text. Help them read you straight:

• Plain structure — clear headings (Experience, Skills, Education), normal fonts, no text buried in images, tables, or columns a parser will scramble.
• Say the words — if a role asks for a skill you have, name it in plain terms rather than leaving it to be inferred. Machines match; they don’t read between the lines as generously as a person might.
• A clean file — a straightforward document, not a designed graphic, unless you’re told otherwise.

Ask three questions

You’re allowed to ask an employer how they’ll handle your application. These three are fair, and asking them tells you a lot:

1. “Do you use AI or automated tools to screen applications?”
2. “If so, what happens to my data — is it stored, for how long, and does it go to an outside service?”
3. “Can I ask for a human to review the decision?”

An employer who answers these openly is one taking it seriously. One who bristles has told you something too.

Your actual rights

Be clear-eyed here, because it differs by where you are, and honesty serves you better than false comfort.

In New Zealand: - You can ask to see the personal information an organisation holds about you, and ask them to correct it if it’s wrong (the Privacy Act’s access and correction principles, IPP6 and IPP7). - If you believe you were discriminated against on a prohibited ground — age, sex, ethnicity, disability and others — you can complain under the Human Rights Act, and that includes a process that falls unfairly on your group even without intent. - But be straight about the gap: New Zealand has no specific right to object to a purely automated decision. There’s no local equivalent of Europe’s rule. Your protections run through general privacy and discrimination law, not a bespoke AI right.

In the European Union (if you’re applying there): - You have stronger, specific rights over solely-automated decisions: to obtain human intervention, to express your point of view, to get an explanation, and to contest the decision (GDPR Article 22).

The honest part

Two things no one selling you “CV tips” will tell you. First, once you’ve submitted your CV, your control over what happens to it is limited — you’re relying on the employer’s diligence more than your own. Second, there’s no practical way today to watermark or trace a CV to see where it travelled or how it was used; that technology doesn’t exist yet. So the real leverage is before you send: submit less, format clean, ask the three questions, and weigh the answers.

You are not powerless in front of the machine. You’re just most powerful before you hit send.

Shared freely, in good faith, as part of the Agents at Work course — a plain guide for the people businesses build these agents about. If it helped, pass it to someone job-hunting.