Artificial Intelligence. It’s one of those things that endlessly fascinates us. We’re equally afraid of and excited about it.
This is, it’s already being used. You just don’t realize its extent.
Seen a robotic pet that seems to react like a real one?
Remember Kismet? It was the MIT-designed robot that in the late 1990s recognized emotions through human body language and voice tone.
Wearable fitness devices? Powered by AI.
Customer service chatbots? AI.
AI is also behind security cameras that alert us to unrecognized visitors; email services that label some messages as spam; music playlist recommendations; and purchase recommendations from online sites.
Large global corporations like Lockheed Martin have used it to set interview appointments for job candidates. It’s used on smartphones, smart home devices, and for travel and navigation. It’s behind the spellcheck function on your phone and computer.
And now: It can write your resume.
Well, sort of.
Folks have been experimenting with ChatGPT to write career documents (and other kinds of copy) since the technology was unveiled publicly in November 2022.
As you might expect, I have mixed feelings about this. I write resumes. So of course, I have a personal stake in how this story turns out.
But as a person who also has been writing professionally for nearly four decades, I am not seeing that AI can do the things that human writers do. AI can’t really think or imagine. It’s not human. it can’t feel and translate feeling or perception into words.
Sure, it looks like it can. Try it out.
If you are looking for a job, here’s what you’ll find:
Firstly, yeah. AI does write resumes!
Tools like ChatGPT can in fact write a document that looks like a resume You just have to provide one of these:
- Give it the details about your career history
- Ask, for instance, “Write a resume for sales director role.”
- Provide a job posting and ask it to write a resume for that posting.
You will receive a document that appears to be formatted like a resume.
You can do the same thing with a cover letter.
But here are the caveats:
1. The resume template has outdated elements such as an objective. (We don’t use those anymore. We opt for some type of summary that connects achievements and skills directly to industry needs.)
2. The software will include all the requirements it finds for that role and assume you meet them. It might not be true. (Have you managed a large portfolio of clients? Better read it carefully…)
3. It won’t know what to do with anything that doesn’t look “traditionally” like a skill or an achievement. If you “feed” it your notes explaining your success, you will get back the paragraphs you gave it. It doesn’t interpret and creatively rephrase.
The software has no ability to give you more than you provide. It doesn’t “think.”
Marie Zimenoff of Career Thought Leaders says using it is risky. (Check out her video.)
In summary, if you use ChatGPT to do your resume, it won’t:
- Know if you have special skills or experiences that could be relevant and help you stand out.
- Creatively leverage the variety of the language that can help give your document some sparkle.
- Dig deeply into your background to find out what really makes you stand out, and then translate that verbally and visually to appeal to a reader.
It won’t customize your materials the way you really need to customize them.
Because you need to. The goal is to show the employer that you can solve its problems—and give proof—but also to be relevant to each and every role you apply for.
Now, this might be fine with you.
But if you’re switching careers or roles or seeking a higher-level position, or if you’re competing with a lot of qualified candidates, you will likely be at a disadvantage.
I’m not alone in this assessment.
Atlantic writer Ian Bogost called out ChatGPT’s formality, wordiness, inability to truly understand the complexity of human language, and therefore, its lack of human-sounding prose.
I do see uses for this technology in a job search. It can:
1. Provide a compilation or list of expectations from job postings, all in one place.
2. Provide rough organization of your career history—an outline to give you somewhere to start.
3. Help you identify new job possibilities. When you feed it your resume, you can ask to see jobs that seem to align with it.
4. Give you a list of what’s important for a particular role, based on descriptions and other developed material, so you can compare your own job history to see if you match up. You also can ask the software to suggest ways you could improve what you’ve written based on a particular job.
5. Help you determine what types of jobs match a particular college major.
I have seen other suggestions for its use as well:
- Translate resumes into other languages.
- Add keywords from a particular industry.
- Help you spot incongruities or flag unusual claims in your narrative to prompt a fact check.
(Want to see some fun suggestions for ChatGPT you might not have considered? Check out this blog post by Mark Schaefer. )
But there’s a lot of tweaking that will have to occur before the software could, if ever, fully replace the thought process required to promote your unique qualities to an employer.
For now, it’s a better idea to work on your materials yourself; really dial back to connect what you’ve accomplished with what your target employers need.
Remember that you’re being evaluated on your own ability to come up with ideas and solve problems and your finesse in communicating those ideas.
At least right now, Artificial Intelligence can’t do that for you.
