What words make a job application look AI-written?
23 phrases and three formatting habits give it away, and the list is stable: "I hope this email finds you well", passionate, leverage, delve, seamless, synergy, dynamic, thrilled, excited to apply, perfect fit, hit the ground running, fast-paced environment, proven track record, results-driven, detail-oriented, team player, I am writing to, utilize, spearheaded, esteemed, keen to, furthermore, moreover. Also exclamation marks, em dashes, and any markdown formatting. Asking a model to avoid them does not work, because it complies for two paragraphs and drifts back. Check the finished draft against the list and rewrite anything that hits.
The list
Ban these outright. If a draft contains one, rewrite the draft.
I hope this email finds you well · passionate · leverage · delve · seamless · synergy · dynamic · thrilled · excited to apply · perfect fit · hit the ground running · fast-paced environment · proven track record · results-driven · detail-oriented · team player · I am writing to · utilize · spearheaded · esteemed · keen to · furthermore · moreover
Also out, and these three are the loudest tells of the lot:
- Exclamation marks.
- Em dashes. The long ones. A model reaches for them constantly and most people typing on a phone never produce one.
- Any markdown. Bold, bullets with asterisks, headings. It means the text was written in a chat window and pasted.
Why asking the model nicely does not work
Tell an assistant to avoid these words and it will comply for two paragraphs and drift back, because the ban is a preference competing against everything the model has read about how a job application sounds. The preference loses.
What works is checking the finished text and rewriting on a hit. Enforced, not requested. That is the difference between a style note and a rule, and it is most of what the software behind this site does before a letter goes anywhere.
What to write instead
Plain English you would say out loud. Confident, warm, slightly informal, no grovelling.
| Instead of | Write |
|---|---|
| I hope this email finds you well | Nothing. Start with the role. |
| I am writing to express my interest in | I saw the fitter role at the Dyce site. |
| I am passionate about engineering | Four years on rotating kit. |
| Proven track record of results | 40 units on a planned maintenance round. |
| I would love the opportunity to | Is the role still open? |
Every replacement in that column does the same thing: swaps a claim about yourself for a fact that can be checked. That is also why they read as human. A person who has done the work reaches for the specific thing they did.
Does using AI to write it matter?
Not by itself. What gets a letter binned is reading as generated, which is a property of the words on the page rather than of the tool that produced them. A letter drafted by a machine, checked against this list and rewritten where it hit, lands as a letter. A letter typed by hand containing "I hope this email finds you well" does not.
Where these numbers come from
86 cold emails to real UK employers over four weeks, sent by one person looking for work, logged as they went. 22 replies. The full method and every table is in the playbook, free, no account.
They are engineering and technician roles in Scotland, so a different trade may behave differently. Where a row is thin it says so on the row.
Since then: 171 applications across 137 employers, 32 replies, 19%. Live, and updated after every run.
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