Should You Use ChatGPT for Resume Writing and Job Search?

I’m a little late coming into the ChatGPT and resume writing discussion because I wanted to read up, use it, and let it percolate in my thoughts a bit first.

Although Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been around since the 1950’s, the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022, and it’s rapid and meteoric rise in usage, have pushed the conversation about AI in job search into the forefront.

Those of us in the careers profession are suddenly talking about it constantly.

Should we advise and/or help our job-seeking clients use this new platform:

To write their resumes and other job search materials?
To prep for job interviews?
To apply for jobs online?

ChatGPT and other AI are being used today for all kinds of things like:

Planning workouts and meals
Organizing a messy computer desktop
Organizing research for a thesis
Skimming dozens of academic articles
Sorting through an archive of pictures
Learning and playing with language
Designing parts for spaceships
Creating an app and fixing bugs in code
Playing Pong and 3D games
Making a Spotify playlist

And it’s being used to help people write all kinds of content like:

Wedding speeches and vows
Online dating profiles
Homework
Email messages
An appeal on an insurance denial
Excel formulas
Getting feedback on fiction
Resumes, LinkedIn profiles, cover letters and other job search materials

What AI engineers are saying

With the proliferation and high demand for AI-based products and services these days, you’d think that AI companies would be gleeful about the billions they’re raking in, while also being grateful they face such little regulation.

Not so, according to Ezra Klein, Editor-in-chief at Vox, who has read numerous policy papers and spoken with AI engineers:

“In a young industry flooded with hype and money, person after person tells me that they are desperate to be regulated, even if it slows them down. In fact, especially if it slows them down.
What they tell me is obvious to anyone watching. Competition is forcing them to go too fast and cut too many corners. This technology is too important to be left to a race between Microsoft, Google, Meta and a few other firms. But no one company can slow down to a safe pace without risking irrelevancy. That’s where the government comes in — or so they hope.”

He prioritizes the following categories for regulation, which current proposed policies (by the U.S., Europe and China) don’t entirely encompass:

Interpretability, which may not be achievable. But without it, we will be turning more and more of our society over to algorithms we do not understand.

Security. Any firm building A.I. systems above a certain scale should be operating with hardened cybersecurity.

Evaluations and audits. Right now, the testing done to make sure large models are safe is voluntary, opaque and inconsistent. No best practices have been accepted across the industry.

Liability. The way to make A.I. systems safe is to give the companies that design the models a good reason to make them safe. Making them bear at least some liability for what their models do would encourage a lot more caution.

Humanness. A.I. systems can be tuned to return dull and caveat-filled answers, or they can be built to show off sparkling personalities and become enmeshed in the emotional lives of human beings.

Concluding on a positive note, he stresses that:

“New proposals are being released almost daily … One thing regulators shouldn’t fear is imperfect rules that slow a young industry. For once, much of that industry is desperate for someone to help slow it down.”

What is ChatGPT and how does it work?

artificial intelligence, resume writing and job search

ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) is a natural language AI chatbot developed by OpenAI, an AI research and deployment company that interacts in a human-like conversational way.

It can answer questions about most any topic and help you compose emails and other content. And it will answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.

The technology goes well beyond the data you’ll get with a Google search of keywords, leading to web pages that provide the information you seek:

“ChatGPT’s power is the ability to parse queries and produce fully-fleshed out answers and results based on most of the world’s digitally-accessible text-based information — at least information that existed as of its time of training prior to 2021.”

But, like Google and other search engines, the content ChatGPT provides is based only on what information already exists online.

ChatGPT is not a panacea

As the company website stresses, the platform does have limitations:

ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers.
ChatGPT is sensitive to tweaks to the input phrasing or attempting the same prompt multiple times. For example, given one phrasing of a question, the model can claim to not know the answer, but given a slight rephrase, can answer correctly.
The model is often excessively verbose and overuses certain phrases, such as restating that it’s a language model trained by OpenAI.
Ideally, the model would ask clarifying questions when the user provided an ambiguous query. Instead, our current models usually guess what the user intended.
While we’ve made efforts to make the model refuse inappropriate requests, it will sometimes respond to harmful instructions or exhibit biased behavior.

The dark side of this technology

With all the accolades and excitement about ChatGPT, some people have noticed serious downsides.

The technology comes with issues challenging other chatbots:

“It reflects society and all the incorrect biases society has. Computational scientist Steven T. Piantadosi, who heads the computation and language lab at UC Berkeley, has highlighted in a Twitter thread a number of issues with ChatGPT, where the AI turns up results that suggest “good scientists” are those who are white or Asian men, and that African American men’s lives should not be saved. Another query prompted ChatGPT to indulge in the idea that brain sizes differ and, as such, are more or less valuable as people.
The reason is the same that nobbles every chatbot: The data it uses to generate its responses are sourced from the internet, and folks online are plenty hostile.”

How good is ChatGPT for resume writing and job search?

Resume writer and career coach Gillian Kelly noted some of the things job seekers and hiring professionals can do with this new technology:

Review a jobseeker’s resume and provide general input on grammar, spelling, layout, readability, content, and keywords (when compared with a job advertisement). You can even ask it to pick up any red flags or weak spots that a recruiter may identify.
Help candidates identify their skills and strengths from their outlined work experience or past activities.
Suggest potential jobs or careers suited to a specified set of skills or offer similar alternative paths to a specific job.
Identify skills sought for a particular job title.
Find recruiters in a particular sector or geographical area.
Research an organisation; its employee reviews, values, competitors, or core products.
Generate conversation starters for networking.
Assist in creating a cover letter, e-note or thank you note.
Assist in salary research.
Support interview practice by prompting common questions or helping a job seeker summarise or refine their answer.
Help a jobseeker create an elevator pitch, their LinkedIn summary, and LinkedIn posts or assist with writing other online profiles or career biographies.

What keeps ChatGPT from being a great job search tool

As I noted earlier, ChatGPT works from information already existing online.

It can’t know the details and particulars of your personality and the way you operate and get things done, unless that information exists online.

It can’t provide the specifics of your unique career, or give examples of specific contributions you’ve made to past employers, with metrics.

So it can’t completely write a resume or LinkedIn profile or cover letter for you, because it won’t be able to find such specific information about you online.

And some have said that it works better for entry level candidates than executive job seekers because of their level of experience.

Overall, think of it as a starting point to mine the kind of information you’ll use in your materials.

In my research and experience, an AI tool like ChatGPT can be helpful if you’re working from job descriptions.

For instance, the software can write a cover letter using a job description. Simply cut and paste the entire description into ChatGPT and it will create an okay cover letter.

Some of the drawbacks of using ChatGPT for resume writing and job search

Don’t expect that the content provided will be entirely useful as it is. It may be fairly generic in nature, and could apply to others competing for the same jobs.

In order to differentiate yourself, you’ll need to edit, augment, personalize and customize the content they provide for your specific target employer(s) and personal brand.

That means that, at the very least, you’ll still need to do the personal branding and targeting work yourself.

The same thinking and strategies apply when using ChatGPT to write your resume, LinkedIn profile and other job search personal marketing materials.

ChatGPT can’t provide the specific information about you that will differentiate the value you offer over your competitors.

And that’s exactly what your personal marketing materials need to do.

And what if you’re networking your way into a company and don’t have a job description to feed into ChatGPT?

You can piece together as much info as possible about the job and the company, and use that in your query.

In summary, the technology may help you bring out the kind of information you need to include in your resume, etc.

But instead of piecing it together yourself and hoping you’re doing a good job, consider working with a career professional, who knows what should and shouldn’t be in your job search materials.

Recruiters and hiring professional may spot your AI-generated content

Another potential problem with using this software for resume and cover letter writing. AI-generated content tends to read like AI-generated content.

Recruiters and other hiring professionals are attuned to it, can easily spot it, and can be turned off to people who use it.

Especially at the executive level, you’ll be expected to have a good handle on written communications and be able to write a cover letter yourself, and provide a well-written resume.

Experts weigh in on ChatGPT for resume writing and job search

Executive recruiter Jack Kelly noted some statistics of interest about the platform:

✅ By January 2023, it became the fastest-growing platform with 100 million users, reaching 1 billion visits in February alone. By contrast, Twitter took five years to reach 100 million users, while Instagram took 2 ½ years after its launch, and TikTok nine months.

✅ OpenAI’s technology platform managed to score in the 90th percentile on both the college-entry SATs and the attorney bar exam.

✅ According to a February survey from ResumeBuilder.com of 1,000 current and recent job hunters, nearly half (46%) of job seekers are using the chatbot to craft their résumés or cover letters.

✅ Seventy percent of respondents saw a higher response rate from companies when using ChatGPT.

✅ Seventy-eight percent of candidates who used the chatbot scored interviews, while nearly six in 10 job hunters were hired after using the AI tool during their application process.

All that sounds great, right? But he also noted the following:

11% of job seekers were rejected once it was learned from the hiring company that the candidate used ChatGPT.

Career professionals mostly like ChatGPT for resume writing and job search

He spoke with several job search and career experts about the value of ChatGPT

Hannah Morgan, Job Search Strategist

“ChatGPT is empowering job seekers. It can provide answers to their specific questions beyond what a basic Google search will find (articles and videos). For example, ChatGPT can help develop a list of questions a job seeker can ask during an informational meeting. It can help job seekers identify alternative job titles in a new industry. It can even help them make a career shift to something totally different. Plus, it helps get rid of writer’s block. It can craft a rough draft of a cover letter, thank you note or even a follow-up email.”

Sweta Regmi, Career And Résumé Strategist / Interview and Branding Coach

“Job seekers have the power to use AI just the way employers have been using it for years for recruiting.
I tested ChatGPT as a job seeker by providing the prompt. I asked ChatGPT to identify core competencies based on the targeted role and added four job postings. Now, I have the resources with soft skills and hard skills to create a résumé. It helped me understand my strength, weakness, opportunities and threat (SWOT) to self-reflect.
As an employer, I created job descriptions to test out. It saved me time on productivity. I still have to have knowledge of HR and employment laws in my country and city. AI can only help if you have the skills or knowledge.”

Ruth Sternberg, Job Search and Résumé Writer

“When you feed it your résumé, you can ask to see jobs that seem to align with it. ChatGPT can give you a list of what’s important for a particular role, based on descriptions and other developed material, so you can compare your own job history to see if you match up. You also can ask the software to suggest ways you could improve what you’ve written based on a particular job. It can help you determine what types of jobs match a particular college major.
It also could translate résumés into other languages; add keywords from a particular industry and help you spot incongruities or flag unusual claims in your narrative to prompt a fact check.”

I’ll add a caveat to Ruth’s suggestion:

It’s not a good idea to upload your resume, as is, to this platform. We don’t know what they may do with any confidential, sensitive or identifying information about you or your career. To be safe, only upload or prompt with non-identifying info or data about yourself or your career.