What is a cited CV?

The definition

A cited CV, also called a grounded CV, a provenance CV or a sourced CV, is a CV whose every line points back to the fact it was written from. The facts are things the candidate supplied: a field in a form, a sentence in an uploaded CV, or an answer given in an interview. On the page, the reference is a superscript number at the end of the line, resolved in a numbered source list, the way a citation works in an academic paper.

Three properties define the category

• Every line has at least one source. A line with nothing behind it is not a cited line, however well it reads.
• Every number, date and named entity on the line appears in its sources. "Cut reporting time by 30%" needs a source that says 30%.
• A line that fails the check is removed rather than softened. A cited CV gets shorter when the facts are thin; it does not get vaguer.

The word "cited" is borrowed from academic writing, where a citation lets a reader check a claim against where it came from. It has nothing to do with a legal citation, which is a summons or a fine.

Why the term exists

Language models write CV text from what they know about jobs in general. Given "marketing manager, 2021 to 2024", ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini will produce "grew qualified pipeline by 40% through data-driven campaigns", because sentences of that shape are common in their training data, not because the candidate did it. The research literature calls this hallucination: fluent output that the input does not support (Huang and colleagues, arXiv 2311.05232, 2023). Three pressures made a name for the alternative useful.

AI-written CVs invent numbers and titles

The failure is specific. A model rounds a vague memory into a percentage, promotes "coordinator" to "manager", and merges two employers into one date range. Each invention is plausible, which is the problem: the candidate often does not notice until an interviewer asks for the story behind the number.

Recruiters reject generic text

A recruiter who reads many CVs a day sees the same "results-driven professional with a proven track record" across candidates and discounts all of them. Harvard's Office of Career Services and MIT Career Advising give the same instruction from the other side: bullets should be specific, quantified where a real number exists, and easy to defend in an interview.

Applicant tracking systems do not detect AI, people do

Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, Taleo and SuccessFactors parse a CV into fields (name, employer, title, dates, skills) and match keywords against a job description. Their documentation describes parsing and matching, not detection of machine-written text. The invented figure is caught later, by the person who asks about it. "Cited CV" names the document built so that this question has an answer.

What a citation on a CV line is

A citation on a CV line is a reference to the fact the line was written from. It answers one question: where did this claim come from? In a cited CV the possible answers are limited to what the candidate provided.

A form field is the plainest source: employer, title, start and end dates, location, a headline result. An uploaded document is a previous CV in PDF, DOCX or TXT, and the citation points to the sentence that was read from it. An interview answer is the candidate's reply to a question such as "what changed because of your work there?", recorded as text and cited like any other fact.

A citation on a CV is not a reference in the recruiting sense, a former manager who vouches for you, and not a link to an outside website. It points inward, to the candidate's own material.

How verification works

Verification is the step that makes the citation mean something. In general terms it runs in four passes over every line.

1. Extract the checkable parts of the line: numbers, percentages, currency amounts, dates, and named entities such as employers, products, tools and places.
2. Look each one up in the fact set. A number must appear in a cited fact; a date must fall inside the cited role; an employer name must match a supplied employer.
3. Check the sentence as a whole. Even when every token is present, the sentence can claim more than the facts say: "took part in the migration" does not support "led the migration". A language-model entailment check catches this class of error.
4. Rewrite once, then drop. A failed line gets one more attempt from the same facts. If it still fails, it leaves the CV.

The limit matters. A verifier checks consistency with the sources, not truth in the world. If the candidate typed the wrong year, the cited CV carries the wrong year with a citation to it. The candidate is responsible for the facts; the cited CV for not adding to them.

AI-generated, hand-written and cited CVs compared

The comparison is about provenance, not prose. A careful candidate's hand-written CV is already close to a cited CV; what it lacks is the trail, which a cited CV makes explicit and enforces.

CV, résumé, cited and referenced

Four words on this page have a second meaning, so here is the one used.

• CV and résumé. In the UK, Ireland, the EU and Turkey the document is a CV, usually one or two pages. In the US and Canada it is a résumé, and "CV" means the long academic record. A cited CV can be either.
• Cited, academic sense. A citation points a reader to the source of a claim. This is the sense meant here.
• Cited, legal sense. To be cited is to be summoned or fined. Not meant here.
• Referenced. A CV "with references" lists people who will vouch for you. A cited CV does not need references in that sense, and does not replace them.

Where a cited CV helps and where it does not

Where it helps

• When you cannot remember exactly what you did, and would otherwise let a model guess for you.
• When you apply to many roles and edit the same CV often, and want each edit to stay true to the same fact set.
• When an interviewer asks about a line, because you can read the source before you answer.
• When a career changer needs to describe old work in new vocabulary without changing what happened.

Where it does not

• It cannot add experience you do not have. A cited CV with thin facts is a short CV.
• It cannot guarantee an interview. No CV tool can; the decision belongs to a recruiter and a hiring manager.
• It does not help with AI detection, because applicant tracking systems do not run any.
• It cannot correct a fact you entered wrongly. It will cite the wrong fact faithfully.

How to read a cited CV in CitedCV

On a CitedCV page each bullet ends in small superscript numbers. A bullet may carry more than one: a project line can cite the dates from a form field and the result from an interview answer. Reading one takes three steps.

1. Read the bullet as a recruiter would, without looking at the numbers.
2. Follow the superscripts to the numbered source list. Each entry shows the fact in the form the candidate gave it, and where it came from.
3. Check that the bullet claims no more than its sources. If it does, that is a bug in the CV, not a feature of the format.

A bullet with no superscript should not exist on a cited CV. If you see one, the line was not verified.

How CitedCV does it

CitedCV is a web CV builder built around this definition. It writes only from what you give it: a form, a PDF, DOCX or TXT you upload and that is read in your browser, or your answers in a short interview. Every bullet carries the ids of the facts it came from. A deterministic verifier checks every number, date and named entity against those facts, and a language-model entailment check runs on top. Lines that fail are rewritten once and then dropped; nothing unverified ships.

A filler linter scores each CV for human-likeness, flagging the phrases recruiters recognise as machine text. Templates are single-column with standard headings so that Workday, Greenhouse and Lever parse them, and each export is re-parsed to confirm it reads back correctly. Export is to PDF or DOCX; the interface is in English and Turkish.

Regional conventions it follows

CitedCV applies the conventions of the US, the UK, the EU, Turkey and Germany. A US or UK CV carries no photo and no date of birth; a Turkish or German CV customarily carries a photo. The facts do not change between regions; the layout and the fields shown do.

What it costs

CitedCV sells a monthly or yearly plan in US dollars that can be cancelled at any time; plan prices are on the pricing page. A new account gets 5 free credits. A full build costs 10 credits, a quick draft 6, and a single line edit 1. Exports are free. Eight templates are available, three free and five premium at 5 credits each. The refund policy is in the legal pages, and support is at support@citedcv.com.

Questions people ask

Sources

1. Harvard Office of Career Services: create a resume, CV or cover lettercareerservices.fas.harvard.edu/resources/create-a-resume-cv-or-cover-letter/
2. MIT Career Advising and Professional Development: how to write a resumecapd.mit.edu/resources/how-to-write-a-resume/
3. Huang et al., A survey on hallucination in large language models (arXiv 2311.05232, 2023)arxiv.org/abs/2311.05232
4. Greenhouse support centresupport.greenhouse.io/
5. Prospects: how to write a CVwww.prospects.ac.uk/careers-advice/cvs-and-cover-letters/how-to-write-a-cv