Can every line on your CV survive a follow-up question?

AI can make any CV read well. Fluent, confident, full of the right words. What it cannot do is sit beside you when someone asks, "Tell me more about that."

That is the real test of a CV, and it always has been. A line is only as strong as the story you can tell behind it. So before you send your next application, it is worth running one simple audit.

The audit: one follow-up question per line

Go through your CV one bullet point at a time and ask: if someone asked me one follow-up question about this, what would I say?

If the answer comes straight away, with a name, a rough date and what you personally did, the line is sound. If you feel yourself reaching, the line needs work. Claims tend to wobble in four predictable ways.

• The inflated verb. AI drafting tools love "spearheaded", "orchestrated" and "drove". If you contributed to a project someone else ran, say that. "Built the reporting module for a six-person project" is specific, true and still impressive.
• The orphaned number. "Increased sales by 40 per cent" invites the obvious question: 40 per cent of what, over what period, measured how? If you cannot answer in one breath, find the details or soften the claim.
• The borrowed skill. The job ad said Power BI, so Power BI appeared in your skills list, and you opened it once in 2023. Cut it, or describe it honestly: "familiar with", not "proficient in".
• The upgraded title. If your title was Customer Service Officer and your CV says Client Relationship Manager, use the real title and then describe the bigger scope you actually carried. The scope is the interesting part anyway.

None of this means underselling yourself. It means every line has a story behind it that you can tell without rehearsal.

Build an evidence file before you need it

Spend an hour making a plain document with one entry for each major claim on your CV. For each entry, write down:

1. The situation, in two sentences, with the employer and rough dates.
2. What you did yourself, as distinct from what the team did.
3. The result, and where the number comes from: a report, a dashboard, a performance review.
4. Who saw it, even informally.

This does double duty. It keeps your CV honest, and it is exactly the raw material behavioural interview answers are made of. When someone says "tell me about a time you handled a difficult stakeholder", you are not improvising. You are choosing from a stocked pantry.

If you are writing selection criteria, the same file feeds your STAR responses. Our guide to the STAR method shows how to turn one entry into a full answer.

Use AI as your editor, not your ghostwriter

The practical rule: AI should sharpen claims you supply. It should never supply claims for you to sign.

Give it your evidence file and the job ad, and let it tighten the wording, pick up the language the ad uses and fix the structure. Everything underneath stays true, and you know it cold because you lived it.

This is how CVelo is built. Paste your CV and a job ad and it shows you how closely the two match, which words the ad uses that your CV does not, and what to change. Where the ad asks for something your CV does not show, it asks you about it instead of filling the gap itself. It writes only from your CV and your own answers.

Then say it out loud. The interview coach writes practice questions for that company and role, and gives you feedback on each answer, typed on the free plan or spoken on Pro. If a claim wobbles when you say it in practice, you have found it at the right time.

You can start with the free ATS checker. No signup, no card, and nothing you paste is kept.