AI and your first resume with no jobs yet: turn babysitting into 'experience'

First-job resumes feel impossible because you have nothing to put on them. AI can help you turn school plays, tutoring, and your dog-walking gig into real experience bullets that sound legit.

How to use it

• List 5 things you've done outside school and ask AI to bullet them
• Ask AI to use action verbs and rough numbers ('led group of 8')
• Ask AI to suggest skills sections based on what you've done
• Ask AI to keep it to ONE page no matter what

Try it

List every non-school thing you've done in the last 2 years. Ask AI to turn it into a 1-page resume draft.

Hiring managers for high-school programs (Bank of America Student Leaders, NASA HUNCH) can spot 'spearheaded cross-functional initiatives' a mile away. AI helps you sound real, not robotic.

Some examples

• Prompt: 'Rewrite this for a 16-year-old, no corporate jargon'
• Ask Claude to cut every word that ends in -ize or -ate
• Have ChatGPT compare your draft to 5 real teen resumes you paste in
• Use AI to translate babysitting into 'managed three clients aged 4-9'

Try it!

Drop your current resume into Claude with the prompt 'Make this sound like a real 15-year-old wrote it.' Compare side-by-side.

You have more experience than you think — every group project, tutoring gig, and Discord mod role counts. AI knows how to translate teen activities into resume-grade bullets without making you sound like a CEO.

Some examples

• Ask Claude to turn 'I babysat my cousins' into a quantified resume bullet without lying.
• Ask ChatGPT for the standard one-page resume layout US recruiters expect for a 16-year-old.
• Ask Gemini which fonts and margins beat the most ATS systems in 2026.
• Ask Perplexity for examples of resumes that landed teens at Google Summer of Code.

Try it!

Open a doc. List your 5 biggest activities from the last year. Ask Claude to turn each into one quantified resume bullet. You now have a resume.