How to Check an AI-Written Bullet Against Your Own Record

Checking an AI-written bullet is not proofreading. Proofreading asks whether the sentence is correct English; this asks whether the sentence is true about you, which is a different question and needs a different pass. The method is to break each bullet into its individual claims, name the evidence for each one, and rewrite anything that has no evidence behind it. It takes a few minutes per bullet the first time and much less once the habit forms.

Separate the claims from the sentence

A single resume bullet usually contains three or four claims stacked into one line. Take this shape, common in generated drafts:

Led a cross-functional team of six to redesign the onboarding flow, reducing drop-off by 22% in the first quarter.

That is not one claim. It is five:

1. You led, rather than participated.
2. The team was cross-functional.
3. It had six people.
4. The subject was the onboarding flow, as a whole.
5. Drop-off fell by 22 per cent, in a specific window, as a result of this work.

Write them out as a list the first few times. Stacked claims are how overstatement survives review: you read the sentence, recognise the general situation as familiar, and approve all five at once because one or two of them are right.

Name the evidence for each claim

For each claim, answer one question in a few words: what would show this? The answers fall into four categories.

• A document you still have. An offer letter, a performance review, a saved report, an email confirming a decision. Strongest position.
• A record that exists but you cannot reach. A dashboard at a former employer, a ticketing system you no longer have a login for. The fact is real; the proof is out of reach.
• A person who would confirm it. Your former manager remembers who ran the project. This is real evidence, but it is evidence you do not control, and it is worth being certain they would describe it the same way you do.
• Nothing but your own memory. Which is not worthless, but is the category where rewriting is usually the right response.

A claim in the fourth category is not automatically a lie. It is a claim you should phrase so that your memory is enough to support it — which generally means describing what you did rather than quantifying what resulted.

The three failure modes, and what to do

The claim is false. Delete it. Not soften it, delete it. If the team was three people, “six” is wrong, and changing it to “a small team” leaves an inaccuracy where a correction belongs.

The claim is true but unevidenced. Rewrite it as the part you can stand behind. If drop-off did fall but you cannot source the figure and cannot separate your work from three other changes that shipped the same month, write about the change you made and what it was intended to do. You lose a number and gain a sentence that survives scrutiny.

The claim is true and evidenced but overstated in emphasis. Rebalance rather than delete. If you did lead the redesign but the cross-functional framing inflates a working relationship with one other team into a programme, cut the framing and keep the lead.

Fix the verb before the numbers

Work from the verb outwards. The verb sets the relationship between you and everything else in the sentence, so correcting it often makes the rest of the edit obvious. If “led” becomes “worked on”, the six-person team stops needing to be in the sentence at all.

There is a reliable test. Imagine a former colleague reading the bullet. Would they recognise the description of who did what? If they would raise an eyebrow, the verb is wrong, regardless of how you felt about your contribution at the time. Attribution is the distinction between your contribution and the team’s result, and it is where most of the trouble lives.

Check the fixed fields separately

Titles, employer names and dates are not prose and should never be edited for flow. They either match the record or they do not. Read them straight off your own documents rather than from the draft, because a generated resume will happily normalise a title into something more conventional, and a title that differs from what an employer confirms is a discrepancy even when the difference is flattering to nobody. If your day-to-day title and your official one were genuinely different, decide deliberately which one goes on the page.

Dates deserve the same treatment. They are the single most reliably checked element of a resume, so they should come from a payslip or letter, not recall.

Do the pass in a separate sitting

Draft on one day, check on another if you can. Checking your own draft immediately after generating it is unreliable, because the sentences still feel like descriptions of things you did rather than sentences a tool produced. A gap of even a few hours restores enough distance to read them as text.

It also helps to check with the resume in one window and your own facts file in the other, assembled before any drafting started. Checking a draft against nothing is just re-reading it.

What the pass gives you

The obvious benefit is a resume with fewer indefensible claims. The less obvious one is preparation. By the end of the pass you have, for every line on the page, a short answer to “how do you know that?” — which is close to a list of the questions your resume invites in an interview. The checking work and the interview prep are largely the same work done once.