I Wish Every Job Seeker Would Watch This
😖 The job search process can be filled with uncertainty and conflicting advice. But we do know from Forbes and Resumebuilder that 46% of job seekers utilize #ChatGPT to assist them, and 69% of those individuals receive more interviews. To make the most of AI assistance, it’s essential to provide high-quality prompts at each stage of the job search process. One effective way to utilize ChatGPT is by enhancing your networking skills. For instance, to connect with a professional on #LinkedIn, you can use ChatGPT to analyze their profile and generate a personalized connection request. Moreover, ChatGPT can help you come up with tailored questions to ask during coffee chats, showing the professional that you’ve done your homework and are serious about learning from them. ChatGPT can also help you compose follow-up emails after an interview, emphasizing your transferable skills and mentioning specific details from the conversation to show you were paying attention. Additionally, ChatGPT can guide you through salary negotiations by simulating a realistic conversation between a job seeker and a recruiter. By practicing with AI-generated responses, you can enter the negotiation process with more confidence and poise.
An AI Prompt to Extract Keywords from a Job Description
The stupidest thing about job search is that most things are subjective. One recruiter might swear by a professional summary on resumes, and another hiring manager will reject every single candidate that has one. To take out the guesswork, we need to look at the data, and according to Forbes and resumebuilder.com, 46% of job seekers use ChatGPT in their job search process, of which 69%, heh, nice, 69% of those job seekers got more interviews compared to when they didn’t use an AI assistant, and 59% ended up with job offers.
But here’s where it gets really interesting. 77% of the success cases still had to make heavy edits to the ChatGPT outputs because they were too generic, and the remaining 23% received highly personalized results, and so they spent way less time per application and submitted more applications on average.
What caused that difference? The quality of the initial prompt. And so in this video, we’ll go over the one best prompt to use during each step of the job search process, from the networking phase, all the way to writing a thank you email and negotiating the offer. Let’s get started. Diving right into the best networking prompt to use, the goal here is to land a coffee chat with a complete stranger, working in the field you wanna be in. Step one, go to their LinkedIn, click on More, and click on Save to PDF. Then, when you open the PDF, Command and Control A to select everything, then Command and Control C to copy to your clipboard.
Step two, go to ChatGPT. I’m using the free version, by the way. You can see it’s at 3.5 there. You are an experienced career coach with over 20 years of experience. Based on the following LinkedIn profile, could you please generate a summary of this person’s career accomplishments and highlight their top three achievements? List the three achievements under separate headers. Please provide as much detail as possible, including relevant experiences, skills, and accomplishments that showcase the person’s expertise in their field. Here’s their profile, and you paste their profile.
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I’m using Jerry Lee’s profile, by the way. He has some great content on LinkedIn, so check that out. I know for a fact he gets a lot of connection requests, so this is a real-life example. Right off the bat, if you mention any of these achievements, for example, he became the first intern from his school to work at Google, you’re gonna stand out among the hundreds, if not thousands, of the more generic, hey, I like your content, I’d love to learn from you, connection requests, but we’re not done.
Now we know this, proceed to step three. I’m a job seeker, and I wish to connect with Jerry over LinkedIn. He gets a lot of connection requests, so I wanna stand out from the crowd. Based on his top three achievements, give me three practical and actionable ideas on how I can get Jerry to accept a LinkedIn request from me. Prioritize unorthodox, lesser-known advice in your answer, explain using detailed examples, let’s think step-by-step. By the way, the last few words, let’s think step-by-step, is an example of a zero-shot, chain-of-thought-prompting technique.
It’s really powerful, we should all be using it. And you get some truly amazing ideas. Where was ChatGPT when I was in college? Personalized video message. It tells us which tools to use, like Loom or Vidyard, and it’s even prepared a script for us. Worst case, you can send this as a text connection request without the video. Create a customized resource for him with specific examples, offer to help him with a challenge with specific examples. And here’s the best part, right? Even if he turns down what we’re offering, he’s gonna reply to us, and that’s the whole point. Every other message he gets is super generic, like, hey, I need help, can I get 30 minutes of your time? And no one’s gonna really respond to that.
Pro tip, if you’re in college with zero work experience and zero connections on LinkedIn, go to your alumni database, every college has one, search for alumni working in fields you wanna be in, go find them on LinkedIn, and start from step one. By the way, both OpenAI and Microsoft refused to sponsor this video for whatever reason, but it is supported by those of you who subscribe to my paid productivity newsletter. Link in the description if you wanna learn more. Once you land a coffee chat, the objective now is to show the professional you’re someone worth helping. And to impress them, you need to ask good questions during the coffee chat.
And here’s a prompt to use. You are a career coach with over 20 years of experience helping job seekers land jobs in product marketing. Obviously, replace this with the industry you’re going for. I have an upcoming coffee chat with a product marketing manager, and I’d like to understand how I can get into the field of product marketing. Based on his resume, give me a list of 10 questions I can ask during the coffee chat so he knows I’ve done my homework, and that shows I’m considerate of his time.
Prioritize unorthodox, lesser-known advice in your answer. Explain using detailed examples.
Here’s his resume. And although I said resume, I’m still pasting the publicly available LinkedIn PDF file. I use my own profile for this example, and you can immediately see most of these questions are tailored for me, making them good questions. So instead of asking me something generic like what are the biggest challenges in product marketing, you ask, hey, I noticed you manage a team of five doing this. What are the biggest challenges managing this team, and how did you overcome them? Much better. The more specific the question, the more impressed they’ll be. And ChatGPT just saved you a bunch of time, right, having to come up with these questions one by one. By the way, try deleting a sentence or two from the prompt. For example, if you delete this sentence right here, I guarantee you the quality of your output will decrease drastically. While we’re here, you also want to generate smart questions to ask at the end of the actual interview.
And the key is to ask specific questions about the role that only the interviewer can answer, and not something you can just Google, or something you can just ChatGPT. Here’s a prompt.
You are a career coach, blah, blah, blah. I have an upcoming interview with a senior public market manager at Stripe, and I want to impress the interviewer with my knowledge about the role. Based on this job description, give me a list of five questions I can ask at the end of the interview, so the interviewer sees I’m extremely proactive and enthusiastic about the role. Prioritize unorthodox, lesser-known advice in your answer.
Explain using detailed examples. Here’s the job description. I mean, at this point, I’m not even surprised at how good some of these questions are anymore. For example, this is an amazing one. Can you share an example of a marketing moment that the marketing team has created to differentiate Stripe’s offerings versus the market? If you’re in marketing, this is the type of stuff you would love to talk about, that magical moment, right, what you did to influence the market, versus a more generic question like, oh, what differentiates your product from the competition?
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You could’ve just Googled that. Moving on, here’s how to generate a high-quality thank you email in seconds. The prompt is pretty long, so I’ll just talk about the unique parts of it, and I’ll leave a link to all these prompts down in the description, so you can just copy and paste. You’re a career coach, blah, blah, blah. The interviewer gave me an example of a marketing campaign he launched that increased product adoption of Stripe’s security feature by 80%. Even though I don’t have experience in product marketing, emphasize my transferable skills as a customer success manager in the retail industry.
Do not suck up to the interviewer. Stay within 200 words. The key to a good follow-up email is to first mention something specific from the interview, and second, reiterate why your unique background makes you a good fit for that position. Customer success in retail is completely unrelated to product marketing at a tech company, but ChatGPT is able to convincingly talk about how your skills are relevant for the new role. This next prompt is my favorite by far, and it helps you negotiate your offer. Two people are having a salary negotiation. One of them is a job seeker who just got offered a product marketing manager position with $70,000 US dollars in annual salary. The other is a recruiter who’s making that offer. The job seeker has done some research and found the upper end of the salary range for similar positions to be $95,000 US dollars, and would ideally like to get closer to that number. Please play out the conversation in as realistic a way as possible.
Make sure the job seeker is polite yet firm with his ask. I’m not gonna go through the output line by line here, but the conversation ends with a recruiter saying, hey, let me get back to you, which is pretty realistic, right? So you wanna follow up with another prompt. Continue this conversation and give the job seeker advice on how to continue pushing the recruiter to reach $95,000 US dollars. The conversation continues. The recruiter makes concessions on non-salary related benefits, and ChatGPT gives additional advice on how to negotiate your salary. So what was the point of all this if every single salary negotiation is gonna be different? Well, first, the biggest mistake job seekers make is not negotiating the offer in the first place because we don’t know what to say. And ChatGPT just gave us all the right words to use to initiate that conversation. Second, negotiation doesn’t come naturally to any of us, unless you’re Chris Voss.
Everything in life is a negotiation. We’re usually very nervous about it, and this back and forth gives us a concrete idea on how the conversation might play out, and we feel more confident negotiating as a result. In case you didn’t know, this video is actually part two in my ChatGPT for Job Search series. In part one, we covered how to use ChatGpt to optimize your cover letter, resume, and prepare for interviews. So here, we cover the remaining steps, networking, copy chats, and what to do after your interview. So make sure to check out part one if you haven’t already.
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