Use ChatGPT to Land Your Next Job!

It’s an oft hidden, but undeniable fear of many professionals: “AI is coming from my job!” While that is unlikely to happen in the near future, there is another thing that AI is coming for: the job search! Instead of postulating on how AI will eventually replace us, let’s see how ChatGPT can aid you in finding your next role.

Digesting Job Descriptions

By and far one of the most frustrating, yet critical, parts of every job search is distilling all of the jargon in a job description down into important, usable tidbits. Every job description is often filled with fluff about the company at large. Even after locating the bullet points of the actual job description, you still have to determine what the job actually does!

Luckily, ChatGPT can help with this. Simply paste the job description into ChatGPT’s input and ask (politiely) for ChatGPT to distill down. Try any of the prompts below after pasting in your job description:

• Simplify the language in this job description to layman’s terms.
• Turn this job description into five short bullet points.
• Describe a person who does the job described in this job description.
• What qualities are most important for the job description above?

Tailoring Your Résumé

After finding a job description that interests you, the next step of the job search is to cater your resume to the job description. Luckily ChatGPT can help with this too!

Important Note: With the rise of tools used to detect whether text is AI generated, it is recommended to use all of ChatGPT’s output as a starting off point for your own writing. It is highly advised to not copy and paste AI generated text directly to your résumé.

You can continue to use the job description you have provided ChatGPT to generate some example tailored resume points. Try out any of the prompts below:

• Generate three resume bullet points under 120 characters using the skills in the job description provided.
• Generate a resume tagline based on the skills in the job description provided.
• Generate a relevant job title based on the skills in the job description provided.
• Rank the skills in the job description by importance.

ChatGPT will provide a myriad of excellent starting points for your drafting and specialization session. You can also provide ChatGPT with more guidelines depending on your preferred resume methodology. Try:

• Write a resume bullet point based on the job description that starts with a relevant action verb.
• Write a resume bullet point based on the job description that contains a result from an action verb.
• Write a resume bullet point based on the job description that does not contain jargon.

Writing a Cover Letter

This one is, luckily, pretty straight forward. Simply ask ChatGPT to generate a sample cover letter based on the provided job description.

Important Note (Again): With the rise of tools used to detect whether text is AI generated, it is recommended to use all of ChatGPT’s output as a starting off point for your own writing. It is highly advised to not copy and paste AI generated text directly to your resume.

Try the following prompt:

• Generate a cover letter based on the job description provided.

Preparing for the Interview

Now that you have submitted your application, it’s time to get ready for the interview! ChatGPT can help in a couple of different ways for an interview. You can ask it general questions about interviews:

• Give me a few general tips for interviewing for a job.
• What is something I should never do in an interview?
• How do I ace an interview in {insert field of choice} field?

But ChatGPT shines when applied to much more specific instances. Continuing to use the job description we previously provided ChatGPT, we can generate sample questions and answers! Try the following prompts:

• Generate three sample interview questions based on the skills discussed in the job description.
• Generate a sample interview question based on {insert specified skill} from the job description.
• Generate responses in STAR format to the questions you just provided.

STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) is a response format that is used for successfully and succinctly answering interview questions. ChatGPT can use this as a style guide to generate responses! You can even ask ChatGPT to conduct a mock interview:

• For the duration of this conversation, please pretend to be an interviewer for the job detailed in the job description provided. You will ask me 5 questions and I will reply.

ChatGPT is a tool with nearly infinite possibilities. Often the trick is knowing how to find exactly what you need in a sea of information. But that is the beauty of a conversational artificial intelligence! If you want something, simply ask for it. If the prompts in this article didn’t quite encompass your use case, try asking ChatGPT what you would like to do.