Keep polish. Cut synthetic polish.
The problem with AI-written career materials is not that they sound good. It is that they sound good in a way that could belong to anyone.
Something has shifted in how career materials get read. A resume or LinkedIn profile that would have signaled competence three years ago (smooth, confident, tightly structured) now triggers a different first question: did a person write this? Recruiters are not wrong to ask. The tools that produce fluent career copy are everywhere, and fluent has stopped being evidence of anything.
The common reaction is to write worse on purpose: rough it up, sound casual, hide the craft. That is the wrong lesson. Senior people write well. Executives are polished in real life, and their materials should be too. The distinction that matters is not polished versus plain. It is specific versus portable.
Here is the test we apply to every line we review: does this sound like a specific, credible human with real context wrote it, or like polished language generated from a prompt? Synthetic polish is portable. Lift the sentence off one resume, drop it onto a hundred others, and it fits them all equally well: "drove transformational outcomes through cross-functional leadership." Nothing in it belongs to anyone. Real polish is stuck to its owner. It names the product, the program, the constraint, the team, the number that survived scrutiny. It could not be pasted into someone else's profile without changing everything around it.
The tells are consistent. Inflated verbs where a simpler strong verb would be more credible. Abstractions stacked on abstractions with no concrete anchor underneath. The same sentence rhythm repeating until the page hums like a template. Ordinary work dressed as transformation without evidence of what actually changed. Each one reads fine alone; together they produce the unmistakable texture of language that was generated rather than authored.
And the fix is consistent too. You do not remove the polish; you anchor it. Every polished claim earns its finish by carrying something only you could carry: the metric you can defend, the platform you actually ran, the decision you were in the room for. Keyword-rich language stays when it is accurate and doing real work for search and scanning. It goes when it is only there because it sounds impressive.
Keep polish. Cut synthetic polish. In a market where everyone can generate fluency in thirty seconds, the scarce asset is writing that proves a particular person did particular things. That is what a skeptical reader is scanning for now, and it is the standard we hold every document to before it ships.
The Signal Audit reads your resume the way that skeptical reader does: claim by claim. Read about the Signal Audit.