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.
