It’s here! LinkedIn’s new Artificial Intelligence-powered resume tool, Resume Assistant, has rolled out to Office 365 users.

By promising to ease the challenge of writing your resume, this new capability has caught the attention of many job hunters.

However, Resume Assistant is much like any tool purported to streamline your job search: it works best when you see it as another way to improve the process, not as a means of handing off the process itself.

Here are the pros and cons of using LinkedIn Resume Assistant to develop a compelling resume:

1 – LinkedIn Resume Assistant can cut down on your keyword research efforts.

When you’re embarking on a job hunt, gathering keywords from job postings is an important step for your resume. By quickly generating a list of skills and other relevant terms found in LinkedIn jobs and other Profiles, Resume Assistant can help make this research more manageable.

A caveat:  many LinkedIn users fail to fully populate the site with valuable information, so you might get repetitive and mundane results (such as Operations Management for a COO or Budgeting for an Accountant).

A look at the Profiles of your most skilled colleagues or connections could yield better insights. Don’t forget to use other job boards, too, such as Indeed.com or Glassdoor.

2 – LinkedIn Resume Assistant will appear automatically if you open an Office 365 Word resume template.

And this is NOT a good thing. Rather than trying to populate a basic template, you’ll fare better with a customized presentation. Think of the reasons you’d tailor any important business document to the subject, target audience, and purpose. Your resume is of equal, if not greater importance!

When you limit yourself to the resume templates found in the Office 365 application, you’re showing employers a lack of imagination and resourcefulness. See How to Write a Standout Executive Resume for additional ways to distinguish yourself on a resume.

3 – LinkedIn Resume Assistant helps research competing LinkedIn Profiles for you.

If you’re not already using LinkedIn to assess your job-seeking competition, you’re missing an important exercise. Not only will LinkedIn research help you gauge whether your career goals are realistic, you’ll also be able to identify unique capabilities for use on your resume.

Resume Assistant will match your job title to that of similar LinkedIn users, and show you snippets of their work history. It will also generate detail from LinkedIn Jobs that align with your experience and career stature. The idea is to jog your memory and prompt you to write keyword-specific resume content, enabling you to compete among professionals at the same level.

4 – LinkedIn Resume Assistant is NOT intended to encourage copying.

No matter how you look at it, taking someone else’s resume or LinkedIn content is plagiarism, and LinkedIn takes this very seriously (read their Copyright Policy, complete with procedures for filing a claim).

If you’re stumped for ideas, look at job postings or even resume samples for inspiration. Often, you’ll see achievements or projects that will remind you of your own success stories. The idea in using Resume Assistant is the same:  you may have forgotten to note important facets of your work, such as the size of teams you’ve managed or new initiatives you’ve led.

This information is presented to help you recall important detail from past positions, education, or volunteer experience, NOT to claim it as your own.

5 – LinkedIn Resume Assistant won’t help you brand yourself.

This is probably the biggest objection most marketers have when it comes to Resume Assistant: a truly powerful and effective resume should distinguish you from others, not enable you to mimic them.

Want to make employers sit up straight when they get your resume? Then spend time on both keyword research from Resume Assistant and the hard work of real resume writing, where you develop power-packed success stories as proof of your performance.

If you find this part difficult, try a classic storytelling method such as Challenge-Action-Result (CAR). This technique helps you describe career wins by noting the Challenge or situation you faced, the Actions taken to resolve it, and the Result or business benefit to your employer.

You’ll see examples of achievement statements, quantifiable metrics, and powerful brand messaging in this sample CEO resume.

So, take time to check out LinkedIn Resume Assistant to see what it will show you for keywords and competitive research.

Spend even MORE time writing about your own personal qualities, strengths, and accomplishments for a resume that truly gets results.

Need a competitive edge in your job search? As an award-winning executive resume writer, I create branded, powerful resumes and LinkedIn Profiles that position you as the #1 candidate. My clients win interviews and top C-suite, EVP, VP, and Director positions at Fortune 500 firms, niche companies, start-ups, and emerging industry leaders, enjoying the competitive advantage of powerhouse documents and executive job search techniques tailored to today’s job market. Get in touch with me to experience the outstanding results I can bring to your transition. – Laura Smith-Proulx, CCMC, CPRW, CPBA, TCCS, COPNS, CIC, CTTCC