Expert Advice
Like many people, I compete with robots now.
However innovative I become, whatever tricks I pull out of my bag, AI is always right there, breathing down my neck, waiting to eat my lunch.
I’m well aware that the minute people find a bit of code that generates a resume that gets them a job, I’ll be out of mine. The robot’s resume don’t even need to be as good as a human’s; it just need to be good enough to get a job.
As a long-time professional resume writer, it breaks my heart a little to say this: that people would choose a mediocre resume over an extraordinary one, as long as it gets them a job. When it comes to looking for work, being special isn’t nearly as coveted as being seen.
But AI doesn’t care about my woes, nor do job-seekers for that matter, so I’ll get on with it.
Why am I no longer worried about my livelihood?
Because my clients tell me not to be.
Just yesterday, a client came back after 5 years. He came to me with a well-written, nicely formatted 2-page resume. It had a summary section, great action verbs, relevant job titles, and more keywords than you can shake a stick at.
He’d partnered up with AI to write it:
Dear ChatGPT,
Bam! In a few minutes, he had a resume, with almost zero effort. And precisely zero investment.
Brilliant.
Except…
It didn’t work.
He got no interviews.
“It’s well written,” he said. “…way better than I could do, but…”
And then he said the thing that bottom-lines the limitations of AI as a resume-writer.
“I don’t know what’s missing,” he said.
Neither does AI.
AI is amazing, almost magical in its production, because it consumes the entirety of the Internet and then spits it back out at you in elegant prose.
But, when it comes to writing your resume, it will never have all the answers. Because the Internet doesn’t have the answers. Not these answers.
Sure, the Internet has all the keywords. The internet has all the job listings ever posted, the Internet has data on your companies, your industries, your job titles… but how much information does the Internet have on you? And how good is it?
AI can’t possibly write about you, because it doesn’t know you.
Most of what’s out there online about you, and everything you tell it to know about you, is written by you. And, see, that’s the problem.
Although we are all experts on our lives, we’re ironically pretty terrible at describing who we are and why we’re great. We’re even worse – indeed, complete failures – at remembering things we’ve forgotten and seeing into our blind spots.
Here are some prompts Chat.gpt cannot help you with:
I no longer fear chatGPT for the same reason I stopped relying on questionnaires to get information from my clients: because, by the time clients come to me, they’re stuck on a story that doesn’t work. People come to me for the same reason they go to therapy, take on a new hobby, call up a friend, listen to music, or walk in the woods. They need to get out of their own confines. They need to find a new way of thinking, a new perspective, a new language.
You can’t possibly break free if you’re pulling prompts out of your head and feeding them into a machine that only knows the Internet. You’ll just keep recreating the same story that’s not working (albeit maybe more elegantly written). Worse than that, you’re likely to drift farther and farther from the truth, that being “you.”
That’s why my client came back.
He’d asked AI to describe him – his best moments, his greatest achievements, what he was capable of, and who he’d evolved into – and AI came up short, made stuff up, stretched the truth, and missed it completely.
So he came to me.
Instead of scouring the Internet for answers, we rummaged through his last 5 years in a Q&A.
This time, I was the one with all the prompts and he was the one spitting out the data, line by line.
But it was new data, information that hadn’t seen the light of day before, perhaps ever. Things he’d forgotten about. Things he didn’t realize were important. Things he didn’t know you were allowed to say, things he didn’t think were impressive, things that were found nowhere else but inside him.
We mined it all, that gold that’s tucked away in each of us.
And (to highlight another way in which ChatGPT will forever fail against humans), we had fun while doing it.
We discovered his new story, or rather, his now story, in all of its complexity, infused with numbers and nuance, keywords and caché – a resume that reflected who he was and all that he’d become. In the end, he not only had a great resume, but he truly felt like he could back it up, like it was really him being presented and not some unmarked skeleton key.
We created a story worth reading for a person worth hiring. We connected. We rebuilt. We designed.
And it worked.
It’s a word we’ve all been using.
A supposed non-partisan way to express our disgust and fear for the way things are being run in politics, in tech, in business.
But I don’t think it’s uncertainty that irks us.
What’s worse than uncertainty?
00:06
Uncertainty.
00:07
It seems to be a word we use a lot these days.
00:11
Uncertain times.
00:13
Future is uncertain.
00:16
Everything’s uncertain without certainty, blah blah blah.
00:20
And I agree.
00:21
I think these are uncertain times.
00:24
I think most of us have no idea what’s coming down the road.
00:31
I think we know it’s going to be pretty dramatic, it’s going to be drastic, but we’re really not sure what’s going to happen, which jobs are going to be around, which ones are going to be gone, what new jobs are going to spring up, all of that uncertainty.
00:48
And you know, it’s it’s mostly an uncomfortable feeling, uncertainty.
00:54
But I do want to point out there are some people.
00:59
Who are not uncertain.
01:01
If you look at big tech, if you look at the largest corporations in any industry, they’re doing something right now.
01:15
They’re pretty sure of what they’re doing.
01:20
And the thing that bothers me, actually what what I’m getting at is they’re figuring out a way.
01:28
To use AI, everyone’s scrambling.
01:31
Everyone is scrambling, and understandably so.
01:35
It’s an extremely powerful tool, and it should be used absolutely by everybody, and certainly by big corporations.
01:44
But the thing that freaks me out is the silence.
01:50
I’ve yet to hear anyone speak out openly.
01:56
And emphatically, and in a caring way to share what they think is going to happen with the future and what they’re doing to contribute to it.
02:08
So in other words, you got big plans, you’re you’re you’re making changes.
02:13
All most of us see are lots of layoffs, layoff after layoff, or if you’re lucky enough to keep a job.
02:22
You’re probably working three or four FT ES worth of work.
02:29
So we’re seeing all this and there’s panic and everybody’s running around.
02:33
And you know what would be helpful is if the people that are impacting so many other people in so many ways were transparent.
02:44
That’s a word companies love to use.
02:47
We’re transparent.
02:48
We’re actually sharing what they’re doing.
02:51
What are their hopes?
02:52
What are they worried about?
02:53
What are their plans?
02:58
So when I think about uncertainty, that feeling is uncomfortable.
03:04
But the thing that’s worse than uncertainty, and there’s I guess a lot of things worse, but one is feeling a sense of lack of control.
03:16
And I think that’s what a lot of us are dealing with right now.
03:19
Yeah, we’re uncertain, but we also have no control over what’s going on.
03:27
And the people that do aren’t being very generous with their ideas of what the future holds.
03:38
I don’t know.
03:38
Let me know what you think and take care of each other.
03:42
It’s rough out there.
Wouldn’t you like to know where are the job creators at?
00:06
Where are the job creators at?
00:10
We’ve long been told that companies, large companies, are job creators.
00:17
Big executives of large organizations create jobs.
00:23
They’re the ones who create the jobs.
00:26
Can we lay that myth?
00:29
That lie to rest, please.
00:33
All I see right now is big companies eliminating jobs.
00:39
Job killers, job destroyers, not job creators.
00:45
And I say this only half facetiously.
00:48
I’m a I’m a business owner.
00:51
I wouldn’t call myself a job creator.
00:54
I have people that I work with, but I admit.
00:58
I’m not looking to hire 10 people when I can hire one.
01:04
My job as a as a business owner is to make sure the business keeps running.
01:08
And yeah, you can get sort of carried away with that and and try to cut corners every which way.
01:15
But the bottom line is a business is not a job creator.
01:19
A business is trying to create as few jobs as possible.
01:23
They should not get credit for creating the jobs.
01:29
So who or what should get credit?
01:34
You can make an argument for marketing.
01:37
They do their job, marketing and sales, right?
01:40
They’re bringing in the business.
01:43
But I think you got to go even farther.
01:45
You got to get to the root and the root, the job creators, the real job creators, drum roll, are consumers.
01:58
Our buyers are people that get the product.
02:02
They create the demand and that’s what makes a company hire, grow and build.
02:12
So the real credit, the real job creator for the most part is us.
02:20
And you know, most consumers are also workers.
02:22
They’re also labor all the way up the ladder, right?
02:26
We all buy stuff, but the power is really in the people in this case, in the people that buy stuff.
02:38
Can we please give credit where credit is due?
02:42
You know what I’m saying?
02:44
All right, take care, everybody.
LinkedIn is going crazy with their whole AI game. I think their intentions are good, but I’m not sure they’ve thought through the end-game: how it impacts the hiring process and hiring managers.
What happens when everyone has the same resume? What happens when everyone is the perfect candidate (at least on paper)?
—
00:01
I’ve been mucking about in LinkedIn, playing with all the A I tools they have.
00:06
That little star seems to show up just about everywhere, and so I’m playing around with the resume stuff and it seems like pretty cool ideas at first, right?
00:18
You can figure out how good of a match you are for a job, for example.
00:25
I feel like there is a shadow lurking here though, and I’m curious if people have thought about it.
00:31
Maybe I’m thinking about it wrong, but it seems like so you you put up your resume and it will tell you where the gaps are and then it will give suggestions if not actually do the writing for you, but to change like what you need to change, what you need to add.
00:47
And so I worry that people cause everybody wants the interview.
00:53
People want to have the best candidacy possible.
00:56
So what are they going to do?
00:57
They’re going to find a way to put things in their resume that may or may not be true, right?
01:04
Who’s going to really, when they get advice that they have gaps and they need to fill them, who’s going to walk away from that?
01:13
So I’m just sort of worrying that this is becoming a matchy, matchy game.
01:20
And not so much.
01:21
Hey, this is who I am.
01:24
Why don’t you look at that and figure out if I’d be a good fit?
01:28
It’s kind of more about did I check every box?
01:32
Do I have every keyword?
01:35
And I’m really curious to hear from people who have been hiring, from recruiters, from the people with the jobs.
01:41
Are you seeing a disconnect between what you get on a LinkedIn profile or a resume and what happens?
01:49
In the interview, cause I feel like that area is widening a bit.
01:55
And again, I don’t know, I’m not hiring on mass, so perhaps it’s not an issue.
02:03
I’m seeing like it might be.
02:05
Let me know what you’re thinking.
How good is an AI-produced resume?
HR and Hiring Managers already know the answer but it seems that jobseekers are still figuring it out.
A lot of folks are grabbing a template from Canva or going “high-end” with Etsy and then asking the robots to do the rest.
How effective are they?
Are AI-generated resumes good enough?
—–
00:01
It’s happening more and more.
00:03
I had yet another client show up and they had an A I generated resume.
00:10
This time it was a guy who was in the analytics industry, so I guess that’s not too surprising.
00:16
He had a resume that he created through an A I program.
00:21
And it wasn’t working.
00:23
He’d been using it for about 3 months and this seems to be a trend I’m seeing now.
00:27
People using a tool, there’s a lot out there building something, putting it to work and getting Zippo response, not including automated messages.
00:40
Of course A I can do a lot of things and perhaps one day it will be able to create.
00:47
A pretty good resume.
00:49
But even then, even when it can gather the most information from the Internet possible, which is already a heck of a lot, and even though it can compose some really good senses, it’s actually quite good at writing, at creating nice long 3-4 line statements.
01:08
But there is one place that a I cannot scavenge for information, and that is.
01:17
Your head A I can’t reach in and pull out what you don’t know, what you’ve overlooked, what you haven’t thought about.
01:26
So unless you’ve been journaling your life for the last 15 years and your career and writing down all your achievements and putting them up on a website, A I can help you with that.
01:39
So just remember, you don’t know what you don’t know.
01:43
And what you’re working with, what you’re giving A I may not be enough to impress people, to really get them to see who you are.
01:51
And that, my friends, is why people show up to me with these beautifully written A I generated resumes.
02:00
Looking for some actual results.
02:03
So we redo the resume and of course that involves talking with them in depth for an hour, even longer, to really help them figure out what they’re all about and what they’ve forgotten.
02:14
Then we build the resume off of that, and that is what makes the difference.
