I’m trying to keep up with AI tools, and sharing what I learn side-by-side with clients. My clients are pretty smart, but some of them are stressed and overwhelmed. In such situations, it can be tempting to look for shortcuts, or lean on “authoritative” sources. My observation is that can lead to uncritical use of AI — which leads to insipid, but apparently ‘professional’ bland-but-corporate sounding cover letters and resumes.
Here’s an excerpt from resume writer and fellow career coach Sarah Johnston, about her own experience hiring.
As part of the application, I asked applicants to share why they were interested in the role. 95% of the applicants responded with eerily similar answers. My conclusion – they used the same prompt in ChatGPT. While I didn’t explicitly discourage the use of AI, it was eye-opening to see how many applicants used it. (I have since updated the application to discourage AI-generated answers.) I get that applying to jobs is time consuming and ChatGPT and Perplexity offer short cuts—but if you do use these platforms, make sure you’re still infusing the response with your own ideas and unique voice.
This tracks with the anecdotal experiences shared by HR experts at a recent HR conference I attended. They’re seeing application volume up, which they credit to AI tools that lower the burden of applications. At the same time, the chore of filtering and evaluating candidates has just gotten harder. There is the temptation to use AI to filter (although it’s fraught with some tricky legal restrictions — of interest to law-trained nerds like me), but now you’re replacing human judgment at two steps of the process.
Figuring out how to prepare materials that can make it through a robot (or overwhelmed HR employee) screener, but sound human and REAL to the eventual human hiring manager who’ll be making the decision is an art. I’m working on prompts and iterations that I think help. But it won’t surprise anyone who’s worked with me before that the conclusion I keep coming back to is the importance of making strong, positive connections with people on the inside, who can help you decode job descriptions and understand the real, often unwritten decision factors that will make you successful in both the application and the role.
A couple, simple tricks to start with:
- After you’ve received the results from the first AI, bring it to another AI and ask that for suggestions and improvements. With those results, bring it back to the original AI to see what edits it can suggest.
- I usually add the following: “please make it sound more direct and conversational, less corporate and bland.”
- It’s helpful to tell the AI the crux of your dilemma. In this case, you want application materials that make it past a screener who may not have much more information than the job description to match, but stand out as likeable and compelling and distinctive to the eventual human reader who will be making decisions.
One client used the iteration trick, taking an important letter back and forth between Perplexity and Claude ELEVEN times before arriving at a polished letter. In this case, it was a translation into a language that the client didn’t speak — but it was good enough that the recipient commented, “Where did you learn to speak [language]? I can tell you didn’t use one of the AI translators because those are so clumsy. Your letter really stood out.”
AI is a great helper, but should not substitute your intelligence and judgment. When you’re stressed and anxious, it is even MORE important to slow down and give yourself room to be smart and decisive.
