Technology changes how job seekers search, prepare and find jobs—and advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) will accelerate those changes. You’ve probably heard about one of the latest AI advances called ChatGPT. This chatbot can converse on various topics, including education, entertainment, technology, and health, and it is proving very useful in a job search. All it takes is learning how ChatGPT works.

Below are a few ways this technology can be used to find your next opportunity.

1. Researching target companies

Regarding job search, research is a critical part of the process. Using ChatGPT, you can search for information about a specific company and a specific career field. The changing nature of ChatGPT makes it better than Google for research. To find something specific on Google, you need to enter a random list of search engine-optimized words. For example, when you Google “Accounting jobs Cincinnati," you’ll get a list of open jobs. You can’t search specifically for job openings with ChatGPT, but it can tell you how to find them. ChatGPT tells you how and not what — and that’s really powerful.

2. Writing resumes and cover letters

As well as research, ChatGPT can help you with cover letters and resumes. You can use it as a guide to writing your resume or cover letter by giving it all the information you can. Our coaches at ICC also use it, but they report that it is not foolproof and often needs to be tweaked to accurately reflect and personalize the information. 

In other words, ChatGPT can give you a great template, but it can’t talk about your visceral experience. However, there are some ways to make this work for you. An executive in the marketing industry used ChatGPT to craft a cover letter paragraph by paragraph. Using the program, she’d input precise phrases about her experience. Her results were precisely what she needed when she added, “Expand this into a full cover letter paragraph" or something similar.

3. Preparing for a job interview

Let’s not forget about interviewing. It’s one of the most talked-about features in ChatGPT job search assistance, but it’s also the most tricky.

When you ask ChatGPT, “What are some tips for preparing for a job interview? It tells you to research the company, review the job description, and prepare answers to common interview questions. You could follow up by asking for some examples. It’ll say, “Tell me about yourself." What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? That’s all pretty general. 

ChatGPT can give you sample answers to any of those questions, but it’s better to ask more and more specific questions if you want to make the most of it. Give details like the job title and company you’re interviewing for and your experience level instead of just asking how to prepare for a job interview. “Interview questions for a senior software engineer" gets you questions like “What’s your experience with code review and testing?" “How do you make sure your code works?" You could even go beyond that, asking it to question you about specific programming languages and more.

In the end, however, these answers will be more beneficial for your own prep than for giving you practical answers. ChatGPT will likely rate your response as “satisfactory" and move on to the next question. Remember, this is just a text generator. There’s no way for it to know if your answer was good or not. It can only send what it finds is the most likely follow-up: “Thanks!" Ok, next question."

As a whole, ChatGPT is a valuable and promising tool that’s pretty easy to use but hard to master. It’s a good editor and brainstorming partner but can’t read your mind or think of new things. Though it can help you prepare for an interview, your passion and experience will always land you a job. After you get there, AI can’t help you. 

What are your thoughts about ChatGPT?  Have you tried it?