You Can Use AI To Write Your Resume and LinkedIn – Is It A Good Idea?

iStock | Suchat longthara

Welcome to the brave new world of the upsides of artificial intelligence (AI) – the robots are on the way and they’re going to help you with your resume and LinkedIn profile! 

Is it true? Partially. It’s easy to imagine a day when AI will provide fully “ready-for-primetime” career materials. And that’s great! It’s going to help democratize the job hunt and potentially remove barriers to those who have difficulty in this area.

First, it’s important to remember that artificial intelligence is powered by human intelligence; let’s dispel the notion that you’re going to push a button and your new best friend AI is going to crank out a resume or LinkedIn profile that’s ready for prime time. AI can help you accomplish what you want but it can’t do it alone – but you must be AI’s partner and collaborator.

The trick is to remember that AI can do a lot of great things. It really can. But it is incapable of inherently knowing you. AI can’t know who you are and what you’re made of, so must take AI by the hand, so to speak, and lead it to where you want to go.

If you decide you want to use AI tools to help you with your resume and LinkedIn profile, to be successful you’ll need to consider the following:

1.     AI is a starting point and not an endpoint. As previously mentioned, AI isn’t going to spit out any document that’s ready to go. Have realistic expectations. What AI will do is give you a solid template on which you can build. In this way, it’s an accelerator. For many, the first step is the most difficult. Let AI take that step for you but know that it’s going to pass the baton to you and you must finish the race.

2.     AI is only as good as its data. The “G” in ChatGPT stands for “generative,” which means it generates an answer based on research it conducts in the blink of an eye. That means the answer is only as good as the source of its research, and AI isn’t always accurate. You have no idea what data source the AI is mining, so be sure to incorporate having to revise the ChatGPT product into your workflow.

3.     AI doesn’t have a voice. AI has a language all its own and it is distinctly not human. Yes, you can ask AI tools to crank out a paragraph in some well-known author’s style that when first read seems amazing, but after the first impression you realize it is, for lack of a better word, robotic. AI tools will even let you feed in your own writing so it can mimic “your voice.” To an extent, that works. In the end, however, it’s distinctly not human. AI may spit out the sheet music, but you’re the person who’ll be on stage singing.

4.     AI doesn’t understand keywords. AI can generate an article just like this one giving you all sorts of tips about how to use AI, but it doesn’t necessarily understand the reasoning why. For example, you can specify AI to include certain keywords in your resume that will catch the reader’s attention, but it doesn’t really know why so it can’t effectively apply them. It may or may not guess well. It requires a human touch.

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Philip Roufail contributed to this article.

Scott Singer is the President and Founder of Insider Career Strategies Resume Writing & Career Coaching, a firm dedicated to guiding job seekers and companies through the job search and hiring process. Insider Career Strategies provides resume writing, LinkedIn profile development, career coaching services, and outplacement services. You can email Scott Singer at scott.singer@insidercs.com, or via the website, www.insidercs.com.

Nail It! 10 Essential Interview Tips For C-Level Job Seekers

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When interviewing for jobs, senior executives face unique challenges. Executives call the shots. The buck stops with you. People laugh a little harder at your jokes. You have teams of people at your disposal ready to act on your commands. You are in total control.

Now you’re in an interview. You’re not calling the shots. Nobody thinks you’re funny. Beyond the offer of an obligatory cup of coffee or bottled water, nobody is going to do anything for you. You are in the hot seat. You do not control what happens in the room but you must be IN control. 

For masters of the universe, being IN control can be more difficult than it sounds. When you make the rules, it’s extra hard for you to follow rules, and in a job interview - especially a high-level one - there are rules you should follow. It is to your advantage to shift tactics.

Rule #1: Do not take the position you are in charge. You’re not. The people conducting the interview are in charge — from the admin assistant who brings you that cup of coffee to the Chairman of the Board — and you need to impress them.

Rule #2: Be cognizant of your body language. Your body language tells a story. What does your posture say? Are you sitting back casually or sitting forward in your chair? The former communicates that you are aloof, the latter engaged. Body language reveals how you perceive yourself and your position to those around you.

Rule #3: Confidence – YES. Arrogance – NO. Interviewers can perceive the difference. This isn’t the time to get smug.

Rule #4: Being mindful of the “I” and not the “we”. Give credit to others. You’re a senior executive because of your leadership skills and your achievements are accomplished by leading other people to the promised land. If you come across as a one-person show with lots of, “I did this,” and “I did that,” it may turn interviewers off.     

Rule #5: Have multiple hard copies of your resume to hand out during the interview. This may seem like a rookie mistake, but it happens more frequently than you imagine. Don’t assume the search firm did it for you or the interviewers printed them out.

Rule #6: Dress and act the part. This is a delicate balancing act. You’re a senior executive. Look sharp and polished.

Rule #7: Be prepared and don’t be defensive. It’s a job interview. You’re going to get grilled about how you lead a company and affect change. Your management style is going to be dissected. Your expertise will be questioned. When you’re not used to being professionally assessed you may feel like you’re under attack. You’re not under attack. You should expect to discuss how you do things in a calm, confident, and objective manner.

Rule #8: Remember the other candidates are senior execs as well. There are many other candidates with similar education, experience, and talents as you. You are not going to automatically get a job and if that’s your attitude you have even less of a chance. Your interviewers are looking for the right piece to complete a complex puzzle. Regardless of your qualifications, “the right fit” is an intangible that will most likely be decided in the interview room. 

Rule #9: Treat everybody in the interview process with kindness and respect, from the receptionist to the CEO. Don’t come into somebody else’s office and order people around. Don’t talk down to anyone.

Rule #10: Align with your executive search firm before your interview. Don’t leave anything to chance. In advance, have a candid discussion with your search firm about what they will be responsible for what you will handle. For example, ideally, you shouldn’t be discussing compensation in your interview. Your search firm should initiate and negotiate those terms so you should direct any questions about it to them. However, if you haven’t discussed it with them in advance and they aren’t prepared when the call comes, it reflects poorly on you.

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Philip Roufail contributed to this article.

Scott Singer is the President and Founder of Insider Career Strategies Resume Writing & Career Coaching, a firm dedicated to guiding job seekers and companies through the job search and hiring process. Insider Career Strategies provides resume writing, LinkedIn profile development, career coaching services, and outplacement services. You can email Scott Singer at scott.singer@insidercs.com, or via the website, www.insidercs.com.

Is AI Killing Your Job-Hunting Mojo? Don't Forget The Human Connection

iStockphoto.com | Tippapatt

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its potential impact on the job market, and humanity, continue to be front pages news. The prognosis oscillates between a semi-utopian world in which AI is a technological collaborator helping people produce their best work and a dystopian view in which the rise of machines dooms us all.

The reality is more nuanced, and when you’re searching for a job, you probably don’t care whether it’s AI or not preventing your resume from getting from point A, you, to point B, a recruiter or hiring manager. Applicant Tracking Systems (or ATS, the software recruiters use to collect resumes) have been around for many years and are already a universal scapegoat for job seekers frustrated by the impersonal labor-intensive process of applying for a job. It’s easy to imagine that you click “send” and your cover letter, resume, hopes, and dreams vanish into a digital abyss.

However, AI’s impact on job hunters is not as extreme as people may believe. Is AI making job recruitment more efficient for the employer at the expense of the candidate? Ask yourself why AI is being used to improve job recruitment.

The way that people find jobs today differs from yesteryear just as dramatically as cars differ from planes. The digital no man’s land is the product of a one-click-to-apply environment. You can access job openings across the world. You can post your resume on many job boards at once. Platforms like LinkedIn give you unprecedented access to company information that would once be impossible to obtain (e.g., employees and their titles). These are just a fraction of the ways the job search has changed.

The result is that employers are forced to manage a deluge of applicants for every job. The sheer volume of people sending in their resumes for jobs – often numbering in the thousands of applicants per position – is too great for overworked recruiters and hiring authorities to manage effectively. Enter ATS and AI. If you apply for a job online it will be filtered and ranked by an ATS, powered by AI or not. In the name of efficiency (and keeping their bosses off their collective backs), recruiters will usually do a quick sort of applicants, pick the five to ten top-ranked resumes, and advance them to the hiring manager, leaving hundreds, if not thousands, of applications unreviewed.

So how do you rise to the top? It's to your advantage to maximize the human aspects of your job search. Before everybody started staring at screens all day every day, everything was person to person. Let’s call it “Job Search Classic.” You can’t game the digital system, but you can own the human elements and put as much, if not more, energy into those areas as you do filling out endless online job applications.

Some quick tips to consider:

• Make sure your resume contains the essential keywords pertaining to your career path. But this, alone, isn’t enough. To get a leg up, you need to also:

• Leverage your human network in person. Spending an hour with someone face-to-face is worth more than 20 emails or texts.

• Send hand-written thank you notes to recruiters and hiring managers by snail mail after an interview.

• Network! Cultivating professional relationships increases your visibility and potential opportunities. 

• If you’re a student, take advantage of your school’s career center. It’s full of people who know lots of other people, and where employers post jobs looking specifically for individuals with a similar profile.

• Be mindful of your professional reputation. You have one whether you realize it or not, so nurture it.

• When you can help somebody else with their job search (e.g., somebody asks you for a referral), do it. What goes around comes around.

• Plan for the short-term, like meeting with professional contacts to advance your job search, and the long-term, like remembering to send “Happy Birthday” greetings to people in your network.

• Join professional organizations and volunteer.

• Go to job fairs, those booths aren’t powered by AI. People are in them and they want to talk to you. Give them a resume. Trust me, the recruiters and hiring managers wouldn’t be there unless they had a job to fill.

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Philip Roufail contributed to this article.

Scott Singer is the President and Founder of Insider Career Strategies Resume Writing & Career Coaching, a firm dedicated to guiding job seekers and companies through the job search and hiring process. Insider Career Strategies provides resume writing, LinkedIn profile development, career coaching services, and outplacement services. You can email Scott Singer at scott.singer@insidercs.com, or via the website, www.insidercs.com.