A lot of things have changed since I was last part of the job hunt process, back in 2019. Resumes used to be a tailoring experience, in which one would spend hours carefully crafting and cultivating. Spending countless hours reading over the job postings and company information. Hunting for the ‘target’ words that you’d hope would catch recruiters’ eyes. It was a long and somewhat painful process, but now that’s largely been automated thanks to AI.
As I prepare to reenter the job market, I’ve quickly realized that I needed to start utilizing AI to expedite the application process. Gone are the days where I needed to carefully scan over a job posting for keywords. Thanks to AI, such as chatGPT, I can instead feed it the job posting information then ask it to give me the keywords. Drastically cutting down the time that I would have spent scanning over the job posting trying to find words that ‘jumped’ out at me. Instead, I can have a curated list of words that may help me tailor my application to the posting.
But it doesn’t end there! I’ve asked AI to then take my resume and tailor it with the words generated from the screening . While the info that is returned does need to be checked for accuracy, the generated resume gives a fantastic guideline for how to match the target company. Thus, AI has drastically changed this process from one that used to be long and tedious into something a little bit more manageable.
Obviously, AI is only going to be as good as the information provided to it. So editing and personally tailoring a resume is still very important. I made the mistake of feeding chatGPT some old resume information that I forgot was apart of my resume document. The resulting AI feedback was hot garbage. As such, it is important to note that there is a bit of a learning curve on how to best use AI. Heck, I am still learning new ways to utilize these amazing tools myself.
Though ultimately as I reflect on how AI has revamped the application process, I’m shocked at how it has effectively streamlined the resume tailoring experience. Of course, AI isn’t magic, nor is it perfect, and as such does require a good amount of oversight and editing. But if it helps me land a great job while making the application process less tedious, isn’t that worth it? At the end of the day AI is a new tool that anyone can, and probably should, take advantage of.
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