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What Now Newsletter May 2023 - ChatGPT!

14 May 2023

Categories: Career & Jobs   career   career change   career coach   career transition   clarity   cover letter   get a job   interview preparation   interview skills   job application   job interview   job search   job seek   resume   selection criteria  
What Now Newsletter May 2023 - ChatGPT!

If you need to write a job application, or prepare for a job interview – listen up! Normally I’d advise you to have a nice conversation with a good career coach to fasttrack your job applications and let them do the hard foundation work for you. Not today, now you have a chance to have a conversation with an Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot that you can have a ‘humanlike’ conversation with and ask them. Now I’m not the expert in this tool, but I have found someone who has some good ideas, so go and have a listen to Paddy Jobsman. He’s going to tell how you can use this tool, in place of a resume writer or a person to write your job applications for you. When you’ve finished, come back here and we’ll talk a bit more…

This AI chatbot does what I, as a career coach, would usually do. You give me some information about yourself, I have a look at the job you want to apply for and then using my experience in doing this kind of work, I come up with a draft resume or written job application. But… this is not the answer to all your writing job application woes, and while it is going to come up with something that sounds good, I can almost guarantee it’s not going to be the best answer or the one that might get you the job. Let’s look at the reasons why this might happen and how you can get the best out of the tool.

  1. The most important thing to know is the better your question, and the more specific you can make it, the better the output from ChatGPT. For example, you might want to ask it the following questions and see the difference in results:
  • What are good skills to have for a job as a business analyst; VS
  • If applying for a job as a business analyst where external stakeholder engagement is a priority, what communication and interpersonal skills would be useful and write about them given that I have no prior experience as a business analyst
  1. Garbage in, garbage out. It’s one of those rules. When you feed ChatGPT your resume, and it doesn’t have much detail in it, or not the right kind of detail, then the output is not going to be great, simply because the input is not great. Make sure you now feed it a very detailed resume (not one you would ordinarily send in for a job)
  2. You have to review what is produced and not trust it to get it all right. There are going to be instances where the answers it produces are not going to be correct, or correctly phrased. This is particularly the case if your industry uses acronyms and technical jargon.
  3. And the response, no matter how good it is, how targeted it is, it will not sound like you. And if you do get an interview based on ChatGPT answers, and then present at the interview with a different level of communication skill and style of communication than what was presented in the written application, then the discord will be apparent, and may not be looked on favourably. Make sure you review what ChatGPT produces and make it sound like you! Use words you would use, change sentence structure, just feel comfortable that what is written on the page reflects you.

In the same way as you might use a career coach or a resume writer to fasttrack your skill development in writing job applications, or even to give you a good first draft of an application or help you prepare for a job interview, you can use ChatGPT. Go and have a play and have some fun!

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