AI in CVs and School Job Applications
The use of AI in CVs and job applications has become a real point of debate in education recruitment over the last couple of years and I don't think it's going away any time soon.
On one hand, schools are increasingly comfortable with AI. Timetabling, MIS reporting, financial analysis, even some elements of safeguarding administration now lean on AI tools in some form. I've seen the requirement for AI competency creeping into some jobs specs too and not just those that explicitly are data or IT roles.
On the other hand, a lot of schools now include some version of “please do not use AI in your application” in their job adverts and the strictness of that line varies enormously from a gentle steer to something closer to a hard rule with detection software behind it.
I don't think it's really about AI itself, but rather authenticity. A school wants to read a personal statement and hear the candidate, not a generic paragraph that could belong to anyone applying for any SBM role in the country and that's a fair ask. The best applications have always been the ones where you can hear the person behind them. There's also a subtle, quieter opportunity in this for candidates. The personal statement has always been a chance to stand out from your peers and if AI use produces a wave of similar sounding statements, that chance only grows for anyone willing to write something genuinely their own.
The difficulty for schools is that the two are almost impossible to tell apart from the outside. Detection software can't distinguish between a candidate who used AI to tidy up their own thoughts and one who let it write the thoughts for them. So perhaps the more useful question for schools isn't how to catch AI use, but how to design a recruitment process, whether that's a task, a conversation, or a follow up question at interview, that reveals the person regardless of how the application was drafted.
