Once the land of blockbuster IPOs, golden-horned unicorns, and a workforce whose largest source of angst often came from an understocked office fridge, the tech world has recently undergone a seismic shift so pronounced that news feeds are often more likely filled with the latest round of massive layoffs than with the latest VC success story.
Until now, the one unspoken benefit of working in tech, one that was almost taken for granted in perpetuity, was ironclad job security. Exuberance was such a part of the moment that many’s main focus was figuring out how fast they could make millions and retire to some idyllic paradise.
At present, many of those affected by layoffs, massive or otherwise, have to face open roles in which they are 1 of 1294 candidates applying, per LinkedIn’s data. Stories of those spending ten hours on screening exercises, only to be ghosted or going through five rounds of interviews, are not uncommon.
To stand out amidst a horde of other applicants has come to seem near impossible.
So many desperately upskill, brandishing the latest learning certificate on their LinkedIn profile and adding it to a resume that’s been reworked hundreds of times.
I know all this because I was one of those 1200 applicants on many a job post. For a long stint in 2023, I refined my resume constantly, upskilled relentlessly, networked frequently, and interviewed quite often (I was one of those ghosted after committing ten hours to an “assignment” I’d initially gotten a glowing response to.)
I eventually landed a role, but I’m pretty confident that I wouldn’t have landed it, or even gotten as far in the interview process in other instances, had something also monumental been happening in tech: the meteoric ascendance of ChatGPT and other generative AI technologies.
In a short time, I became highly adept at wielding AI tools. I’m not talking about simply copy and paste plagiarism (hiring managers typically see through this) but creative ways of using AI as thought partner, critic, master editor, brainstormer, and a host of other roles that many people don’t talk about — or simply don’t want to talk about.
In this article, I’m going to cover some of what I believe are the most powerful ways to leverage Generative AI to get a job. Using these techniques will help you get far ahead of the pack of 1200. And they’ll also make you far savvier wielding and strategizing with AI, something that all employers these days prize.
Most importantly, what follows could very well help you land your next role.
1. Create a digital version of the hiring. manager
If you’ve done your due diligence pre-interview, you’ve likely looked up the Hiring Manager or whomever is scheduled to interview you. You might read their LinkedIn homepage, including any articles they’ve written or posted recently. Your hope is to get a deeper sense of that person, the questions they might ask you, the things they are most excited about.
But wouldn’t it be amazing if you could create a digital persona based on all these nuggets of information?
And then use that persona to ask you interview questions?
All you need to do is find information about them and input it into a large language model. This is usually a copy and paste job that should take all of five minutes. ChatGPT is usually a pretty good default here, especially when it comes to editing and writing feedback.
You will also want to include the job description so that the AI output will be as relevant as possible.
Here’s one possible prompt
“Based on the information I provided about the hiring manager, as well as the job description, can you please create a persona. Have that persona ask me [x interview questions relating to y.]”
This is not to say that ChatGPT will create a digital clone of this person. But feeding it relevant information around this person will help you get questions and generate the kind of dialogue that you’d be more likely, in fact much more likely, than were you to imagine what that person might ask you based on your research or simply feed ChatGPT the job description and then have it ask you questions.
2. Many experts at your disposal — Career Coach, Interviewer, Master Editor
ChatGPT uses something called a Mixture of Experts (MOE) approach. Essentially, your query is passed off to one of 15+ AI experts. No one knows the exact architecture (besides OpenAI, of course) but there might very well be an expert to answer your exact query.
This is helpful to keep in mind when you are in a job search, since there are a host of different experts you might reach out to along your journey: Career coach, interview coach, branding/social media expert (huge for gaming LinkedIn), and even a general motivation coach.
But it doesn’t hurt to include something like the following in your prompt:
“Pretend that you are a professional career coach who specializes in helping those in tech land their dream role.”
Or:
“You are a professional interview coach who provides critical but supportive feedback.”
By adding this level of specificity, you can get a response that is targeted to your specific case. Do you feel you tend to ramble in interview questions? You might want to point that out in your prompt, even if the model will very likely pick up on this anyway. That extra context will make it more attuned to doing so.
Is it really that good?
You might be wondering, is ChatGPT really as good as one of these career coaches? My answer: it depends.
When I was looking for a career coach, I interviewed about five or six of them, looking for the right one. While all of them had compelling marketing (otherwise I probably wouldn’t have reached out in the first place), the quality varied widely.
At the top end was the career coach I ended up choosing. They were personable, highly knowledgeable (he’d written a book on the topic) and even offered a once-a-week virtual networking session, where I swapped notes with others in a similar situation as I was in.
On the other extreme, a so-called “career coach” seemed to parrot a LinkedIn book that I’d happened to pick up on Kindle for a few dollars the week before.
ChatGPT could certainly not replace my coach, but it proved to be far more useful than other career coaches I’d interviewed, helping me fine tune my LinkedIn page and understand the deeper reasons behind what would likely work and what probably wouldn’t work.
3. Revamp your LinkedIn page
LinkedIn is the new resume. It’s often the first thing others look at (and you know what they say about making a first impression).
This realization came to me during my journey to find a role. I also realized that the LinkedIn homepage was a lot more than a resume: it was a way to put yourself out there in real (digital) time. How did you engage with others? Were you sassy or insightful, original or cliched? What articles did you post on there? Did you write any of your own?
The entire LinkedIn ecosystem, from how you engaged with others to how you presented yourself on the homepage to how you understood the underlying algorithm, was of the utmost importance.
So how can ChatGPT and other Generative AI help?
One thing you can do is take several screenshots of your LinkedIn page (“several” because you can’t fit your profile into one screenshot).
Then ask for specific advice around how your profile comes across? Do you sound professional? Are your goals and the type of role you’re hoping to land in line with what’s on your page?
If not, what are some suggestions?
At this point, you’ll likely engage in a long back and forth with ChatGPT giving it new versions of what you’ve come up with based on your suggestions.
Pro-tip: with far larger token limits (meaning the amount of text you can stuff into the input window), you can even feed ChatGPT a digital book, or at least specific chapters, depending on its length. That way the advice is tailored to that specific book. It’s like the author themselves, giving you direct feedback!
4. Let ChatGPT know who YOU are
Feeding your resume into ChatGPT is not necessarily the best idea. You are likely to get generic advice. Sure, it’ll help you catch some awkward sounding bullet points. But what it won’t do is look at your resume from a more holistic level. Does it align with the role you are looking for? Does it speak to your many strengths?
Instead of just feeding ChatGPT your resume, here’s what you can do:
Step 1: Input the job description, as well as anything else pertinent to the hiring manager (after all, they’re the ones who’ll probably be looking at your resume).
Step 2: Input your resume
Step 3: Mention any areas in your career where you’ve excelled (that may or may not be touched on in your resume) that you think will be pertinent to the role.
In the output, ChatGPT will likely give you strong holistic feedback about how you can rework your resume.
Pro-tip: Remember this is a dialogue. If something is a little off in the input or you disagree with ChatGPT/Claude/etc, let it know so it can refine its answer. (Don’t shut down the conversation). This might happen multiple times, but this iterative process will lead to the best output.
What about cover letters?
For cover letters the process is similar. Feed the LLM (large language model) information relevant to yourself and the role.
You can either ask how to structure your cover letter or you can do a “brain dump” into ChatGPT, writing about why you are a fantastic fit for the role and all your amazing accomplishments. ChatGPT excels at structure and it can package your thoughts into a nice tidy form.
Don’t, however, ask it to write a cover letter from scratch. While ethically dubious, this approach also leads to really generic output that is more likely to be forgotten by the hiring manager as soon as they read it (assuming they even read it.)
5. Take your upskilling to another level
During my job search journey, I decided to upskill in a massive way by enrolling in an intensive bootcamp for Data Science and Machine Learning. The program did offer quizzes sometimes, but otherwise there was lots and lots of reading in which there existed few ways to ensure that I was retaining what I read.
So what I did was feed articles or transcripts to videos and have ChatGPT create quizzes. I made sure to do a lot of customization, asking it to create quizzes of varying difficulty depending on how comfortable I was on the subject, as well as asking for different question formats (multiple choice to short-answer application questions), all to solidify my knowledge.
And when this whole new thing known as Generative AI stormed onto the scene with the advent of ChatGPT, I used ChatGPT itself to come up with a curriculum around what to read. I coupled this with my own curriculum, and then had it create quizzes for me (along the lines discussed in the previous steps.)
Of course, not all of us will, or even should, enroll in intensive 8-month bootcamps. But we are all typically upskilling or at least sharpening the edges of our existing skill set. For instance, as I did many a LinkedIn Learning course, I’d input transcripts into ChatGPT. Sometimes, I’d simply type into ChatGPT what I learned, and it would tell me, based on the transcript, how accurate my response was.
In all, what this process did was take me out of a passive-learning loop. I no longer could trick myself into thinking that I was learning something merely by watching 30-minutes worth of videos. The proof was in how well I did on the quizzes or knowledge checks in ChatGPT.
Pro-tip: Often, as I learned something new, ChatGPT would offer lots of minor adjustments to my understanding of a topic. This would lead to long threads. But instead of thinking, oh now I know all the stuff in the thread, I’d have ChatGPT create quizzes based off of what was covered in the thread. This gave me a great opportunity to review and shore up my weaknesses.
Conclusion
After many months, I was able to land a role in which I’d been vying with hundreds upon hundreds of other candidates. That most certainly would not have happened had I not made AI an integral part of my career journey.
But I didn’t just use AI in a straightforward manner, letting it do most of the thinking for me. That would have meant generic outputs that most hiring managers would’ve seen through. I learned to leverage ChatGPT innovatively, after much experimentation–and that made all the difference.
So, if you are currently at a career crossroads, I encourage you to apply some of the strategies and tips above. And above all, experiment with what works best for you, because at the end of the day, those who know how to wield AI tools effectively will be in a better position to land a role. All it takes is to go from number 5 in the candidate pool to number 1, and AI can be that deciding factor.
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