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Using AI in Your Job Search

Career Corner: AI can help guide key areas of your job search, including exploring career paths, optimizing your resume, networking, and prepping for interviews.

By: Jennifer Bobrow Burns
illustration showing a person sitting at a laptop opposite a robot and surrounded by images of documents, mail, links, and people.

Imagine if you could consult a one-stop shop to address a range of career development needs – from connecting your skills and interests with specific roles to targeting your resume and preparing for interviews.

Welcome to using AI for career support and job search!

While AI does not have all the answers and you will still need to do the hard work yourself, a tool such as ChatGPT can be an excellent starting point to provide guidance in several key areas.

Personalized career path recommendations

For the most useful output, begin with the input. Provide details such as your degree(s), past job titles, and work experience. You can also share major accomplishments, career highlights, and motivators. What are you good at and what do you like doing?

After sharing that information, you can ask specific questions. The more direct you are with your prompts, the more helpful the tool will be. Prompts may include:

  • Using the information I shared about myself and my experience, recommend 10 job titles where I can use my current skills.
  • What are 10 companies in the New York City area that align with my experience as a mechanical engineer, my MBA, and my interest in sustainability?
  • I am interested in making a career pivot. Based on my information, suggest five new industries I can explore.
  • What are 10 specific job titles that match my skills and interests?

You can then dig into each of these further with questions about anything ranging from current trends and average compensation to upward mobility and work life balance.

Resume and LinkedIn optimization

Candidates are most likely to get job interviews when their resume closely aligns to the job description. AI can make it less time-consuming to personalize your materials to each role. Here are some prompts to target your resume and LinkedIn profile for specific opportunities, after you’ve pasted them into the tool:

  • What are the 10 most important skills and keywords a hiring manager will look for to fill this role? (Paste in the job description.)
  • Suggest ways to add these specific key words into my existing resume bullet points.
  • Where are the gaps between the job description and my experience?
  • Suggest ways to format my resume to optimize for applicant tracking system (ATS) compatibility.
  • Can you rewrite my LinkedIn “about” section in 300 words, emphasizing my past work experience, passion for community engagement, and interest in impact investing?

Networking prep

It’s exciting when someone accepts your networking request and you’ve scheduled an informational interview. But it’s often daunting to think about what to ask that isn’t generic and that sparks a reciprocal conversation. You can use ChatGPT to input your contact’s LinkedIn profile, and then ask for suggestions to make the most of the meeting. For example:

  • Write a LinkedIn message asking to connect, 200 characters long, personalized to this specific profile and what we have in common.
  • What are 10 questions I can ask to help me decide if I would be interested in this contact’s job?
  • Can you recommend a follow-up strategy to keep this connection warm?
  • Using my resume, can you prepare a 60-second elevator pitch I can use to begin the conversation with this specific person?

Interviews

AI can help demystify how to handle tough interview questions, especially those specific to a particular company or role. In order to prepare, input both your resume and the job description to get a sense of potential interview questions and how you might want to approach them. Useful prompts here include:

  • What are the 10 most likely interview questions based on this job description?
  • Based on my resume, generate an answer using the STAR method (situation, task, action, and result) for each of these questions.
  • Can you ask me the three most common behavioral interview questions and provide feedback on my responses?
  • Can you offer techniques to improve my communication skills and help me avoid using filler words such as “um”?
  • What are some good questions I can ask the hiring manager for this specific role?

These are just some of the many ways you can use AI for career support. However, keep in mind its limitations. You are the expert on yourself and AI is best used to generate frameworks and spark ideas, not as an actual career coach. Remember that you will need to validate and personalize all output, translating content into your own authentic language. Watch out for accuracy, bias, and confidentiality and be sure to double check any facts it provides.

In addition to ChatGPT, here are some other AI platforms to explore. Do your research to leverage the best site for your particular needs, as some offer more current data and cite sources.

Learn more about Alumni Career Resources.

About the Author

Jennifer Bobrow Burns is a managing director, Executive MBA and Alumni Career Development, at the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business.