05 · AI, evidence, and proof · Chapter 14 of 35
Build your evidence bank and a safe tailoring prompt
The evidence bank is the source of truth for applications and interviews. AI only sees what you feed it. Feed it facts.
13 min read
If you skip this chapter, every later AI session will hallucinate on your behalf. If you complete it, tailoring a resume takes 20 minutes instead of 3 hours, and interview answers stop arriving as fog.
What belongs in the bank
- Achievements — results, praise, promotions, awards, improvements, measurable scope.
- Projects — situation, goal, your role, actions, tools, result, lesson.
- Challenges — conflict, mistakes, ambiguity, difficult customers, deadlines, recovery.
- Skills — at least one real example attached to every important skill you claim.
- Not-done list — tools, industries, and responsibilities you have not owned, so AI does not imply them.
Title: Monday stockout tracker Kind: Project / achievement Situation: Top SKUs were stocking out mid-week; warehouse blamed purchasing; purchasing blamed sales spikes. Goal: Make late risk visible before Thursday. My role: Built and owned the tracker; trained the buyer to use it. Actions: Listed top 40 SKUs, on-hand, on-order, average weekly demand in Excel. Highlighted anything under 10 days of cover. Reviewed every Monday with the buyer for 12 weeks. Tools: Excel, ERP export, email. Result: Same-week stockouts on those 40 SKUs stopped being a surprise; buyer moved two vendors to earlier cutoffs. Lesson: A simple view beats a perfect system nobody opens. Interview themes: initiative, cross-team, Excel, operations.
A safe resume-tailoring prompt
Give AI verified evidence and explicit constraints. Paste the job description plus your master resume. Ask for analysis, not invention.
Act as an editor, not a novelist. Here is the job description: [PASTE] Here is my verified master resume and evidence bank. Treat every fact not in these documents as unknown. Tasks: 1. List the 10 most important requirements, tagged Must / Preferred. 2. For each, quote the evidence I already have, or mark GAP. 3. Suggest rewritten bullets using only facts I supplied. Do not invent employers, dates, tools, metrics, credentials, or responsibilities. 4. Flag any language in my draft that sounds generic or inflated. 5. List unsupported requirements rather than silently filling them. 6. Output a tailored summary of 3 lines maximum. If you are unsure, ask me. Never guess a number.
Do this now
- Create 8 evidence cards in the Workbook this week: 3 achievements, 2 projects, 2 challenges, 1 skill-with-example.
- Write your Not-done list (10 items). Protect yourself from your own tools.
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