Crafting Careers: How ChatGPT Can Write Your Resume

0:00What can 160 years of experience teach you about the future? When it comes to protecting what matters, Pacific Life provides life insurance, retirement income, and employee benefits for people and businesses building a more confident tomorrow. Strategies rooted in strength and backed by experience. Ask a financial professional how Pacific Life can help you today. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska, and in New York. Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona. chat gpt has been out for a while now and people have been using it for virtually everything now one area that a lot of people ask about is using chat gpt to write resumes is it possible does it do a good job it turns out there's a bunch of new data on this as it has now been out for a while and it turns out a lot of people are using um open or open ai's chat gp to do work on their resume.

0:53So here's what people are saying. The online, a online job site said that nearly half of its 2 ,100 job seekers that they surveyed earlier this month used ChatGPT to help write the resumes. So that is pretty massive. About 50 % of people that were going through that site were using it. And they were specifically looking at people that were using it to write their resumes, their cover letters, or both. And the majority said that it helped them land the job they wanted. Now, if you really think about this, this is kind of a no-brainer for anyone that has really been through a rigorous job hunt process before.

1:26A lot of times jobs will want a custom cover letter just for an application they're doing. And, you know, some people are saying, I don't know, some people think this is controversial. In my opinion, this is no different than going to a cover letter writing agency. There's tons of those. People use them. This isn't like school where you're cheating if you didn't write your cover letter yourself. like that, you know, people want to see a certain piece of content and someone is really good at writing that content. So use that person. That's my opinion. In any case, nearly three quarters, or about 72 % of the people who used ChatGPT for this did so to write their cover letters.

2:03So that's the most popular thing is getting the cover letter written. And just over half about 50 % use it to write their resume. And now, you know, obviously, this isn't someone going and saying, hey, chat GPT, write me a resume for X, Y, and Z job position. You know, people are using chat GPT to help them write the paragraph summarizing maybe what they did at a job. I do this all the time. I'll say, you know, write me a paragraph about, you know, like for a podcast episode, I'll be like, write me a paragraph summarizing a podcast episode where I talk about X, Y, and Z. I put like three little bullet points in and it can come up with a whole paragraph.

2:35It's so much faster than sitting down and thinking about writing it yourself, how to make it look good, making sure your grammar is corrected, etc, etc. Like when you can just put three bullet points and it gives you a paragraph, it's really powerful and useful. So I see that's, that's what I'm assuming a lot of these people are using for writing their resumes. The chatbot appeared to better at grabbing the attention of prospective employers. Now this is really interesting as seven out of 10. So about 70 % who use chat GPT reported a higher response rate from companies. So that is really interesting.

3:09You know, I'll get to another article that I was reading by express.co.uk that pretty much, I think the title of the article is ChatGPT only manages to write basic CV and disastrous job seeking experiments. So, you know, obviously these guys are trying to get clicks on their article and, you know, can't blame them. That's the name of the game. But anyways, I do find it pretty interesting that a lot of these journalists currently writing about this topic right now and everything around chat GPT, they're trying to really get the most sensationalized headlines they can out there because obviously that's what gets clicks and, you know, it's ad revenue, blah, blah, blah.

3:47But at the same time, it kind of, in my opinion, draws into question the accuracy of their reporting when the purpose that they're doing is trying to just elicit a shocking result. Anyways, something that the Express did say, the Daily Telegraph did say was Tom Haynes, he's a reporter for them, and he said that if those on the hiring end of the equation were going to be lazy and used AI to generate their job descriptions, I would meet them at their level and see if I could beat them at their own game. So that was like, you know, his thing. I guess there's a report that a lot of people are using Chad Chippetee to write job descriptions.

4:23And again, like if you can put a bullet point of a bunch of things someone needs to know and, you know, Chad Chippetee can write a job description. I don't see why you wouldn't use that to save yourself some time. as someone who has personally written job descriptions and applied for job descriptions, both ends of the spectrum can be pretty tedious. In any case, to do so, what he decided to do was he started asking the chatbot what it would need in order, or he asked it what it would need in order for it to draft a resume for him. And so it gave back some bullet points that it would, you know, said he would need, said pretty much give me your contact deals, employment history, education, accolades, skills.

5:04And of course, we've mentioned this and other things. Do not give it your contact details. Real people do review these things. And for security purposes, you don't want to be giving chat GPT, any sort of personal information, contact details, etc. You can add that in after. Obviously, that's not going to take you more than two seconds. So he told it about a bunch of things, a bunch of all the jobs he's had since university pretty much and the chatbot then replied with it kind of gave him some bullet points of his skills which were useful what's really interesting so the whole purpose of this article is to say how terrible chat gpt at this chat gpt is at this whole resume writing thing he goes through the process and it writes him a resume right it gives him his bullet points and you know in all of the things that he's saying uh complaining about it he said that it gave of a far more flattering.

5:53It was far more flattering about me than I would be about myself. Okay, well, you know, that's obviously just personal branding, but there's nothing wrong about being flattering regardless as long as you're telling the truth. He noted that ChadGPT put down his experience as extensive and wrote that he was skilled and asking insightful and thought-provoking questions. I mean, come on, that's just like stuff someone could add to the resume. Like, anyways, I don't see what the big deal with that. But what he says is perhaps the biggest flaw in the AI is its failure to remember things that he had just told it an hour before despite keeping a record of the chat history.

6:28Okay, this is the silliest complaint I have ever heard. So pretty much what he's saying is he's chatting with this thing for over an hour, and even though it's keeping a chat history, and when he says chat history, he doesn't mean like the chat he's having. He means on ChatGPT, you can start a new chat and have multiple chats, and so all your history saved like in kind of that sidebar of all the chats you've had and he's complaining that it doesn't remember the data he gave it in a previous chat it's not what it's designed to do it's designed to remember the data you gave it in one chat session so if yeah anyways I think that's kind of ridiculous that's you know his the biggest shortcoming is that I mean he's he's acting like it's this intelligent thing that when you talk to it it remembers what you talk to it and it learns from everything you've ever said and it like responds obviously we know how this thing words.

7:16It's just a text prediction model where it's just predicting what the most likely next word is and just coming up with it based off of what's on the internet. So anyways, I think that's kind of funny. In any case, he thinks that ChatGPT only managed to knock out about a third of the content he needed, including a completely made up email and phone number. Like, okay, who cares but put a dummy email and phone number in there? I don't know if he actually was dumb enough to put his own email and phone number there. I don't know if he's done much research on the fact that you probably shouldn't do that.

7:48But in any case, that was one of his complaints. So that's one side of the spectrum, which in my opinion is kind of a clickbaity version where he's trying to get illicit some like shock because obviously if 50 % of people are right now are using this thing to help write the resume and like 75 % of people that are using it to write the resume are getting cover letters and that kind of stuff written. Obviously, this thing is really useful. People are using it. So I found an article on Fast Company, and they were talking about some specific tips for making this really powerful for writing your resume.

8:22So they give you three things, and then I want to give my own insights on resumes in a sec. But first, they said, number one, make it specific to you. Obviously, right? Like, you don't want this to be a bland thing. They said, number two, proofread the cover letter. Yes, obviously. If you're not proofreading it, then you probably don't deserve to have that thing be very high quality. And lastly, they said to personalize the closing statement. They said to make your cover letter stand out, personalize the closing with a statement that is friendly and professional. I don't know. I mean, they're just saying put your own spin on it.

8:54And that's what I'm also saying. You know, people are complaining like, oh, this thing only wrote me 75 percent of what I needed. Fantastic. That sounds like it saved you 75 percent of the time, like or, you know, at least half the time. And you had to spend some time prompting it. But like, yeah, I think this is a productivity tool. This isn't an all intelligent thing. In any case, I recently hired someone and I hired them based, the interview I had with them was based off of their resume. And I'll tell you what stood out to me. So this person, I was hiring them for a design job, the designer on a project that I'm currently working on.

9:28And I posted a job on LinkedIn. And LinkedIn is an amazing place if you're looking for hiring someone. In about 30 minutes, I had, I think actually in about 20 minutes, I had 30 people apply for the job. And then LinkedIn just kind of like shut down the applications because they're worried I was getting too many applications. So I look through all the applications. And it was very obvious to me, the people that were just submitting a generic application, the people that followed through on my request for sending like, I'm hiring a designer. So I said, submit your resume and a sample portfolio.

10:03So some people actually read my job listing and submitted that some people did not. So it's kind of obvious when someone's actually reading your job listing. Now, I can imagine it would have been really powerful if someone had read my job listing and then incorporated that into the resume. That would have been cool because I did end up looking at that. But something for a designer specifically I was looking at was the resumes, just like the overall design of it, was very customized. It was very unique. It was very clean. And for a design job, it had a lot of really cool design elements in it, which I know, you know, resumes can be bland.

10:33That's totally fine if you're doing a job that doesn't matter. But for something like a designer, if they go through the extra work of making the design of their resume good, it gave me more confidence to want to move through and interview them. So I do think that, yeah, Chad Chibuti can write some awesome content. And if the guy I hired had to use Chad Chibuti to write about all of his past experience, fantastic. I wouldn't have cared. That sounds great. In fact, that sounds like he learns how to use tools to save time. So I actually would consider that a plus. But overall, I think there's nothing that will compete with really customizing your resume to the job and to the type of person and the job position you're applying for.

11:12So I think that's just important to keep in mind. And in any case, I do think that ChatGPT is an incredibly powerful tool. I'm excited to see how this evolves for writing resumes in the future.