How to Get Hired Using AI

The job market is being transformed by artificial intelligence (AI). While some people are worried about AI displacing them in the workforce, it's also creating new opportunities and reshaping how we find jobs.

AJ Eckstein ?? , a LinkedIn Top Hiring Voice and founder of The Final Round, chats with LinkedIn News Editor Andrew Seaman on the latest episode of Get Hired to explain how to use AI to land a job. The two also discuss why it’s important to tailor your resume using keywords, and how to quantify seemingly unquantifiable accomplishments on your resume.

You can listen to the episode above or on Apple Podcasts by clicking here . A transcript of the discussion is below.

TRANSCRIPT: How to Get Hired Using AI

Andrew Seaman: We've talked a lot about AI on past episodes of the podcast, but how can you use the technology to actually land a job? Well, we're talking all about it on today's episode. From LinkedIn News, this is Get Hired, a podcast for the ups and downs and the ever-changing landscape of our professional lives. I'm Andrew Seaman, LinkedIn senior managing editor for Jobs and Career Development, bringing you conversations with experts who, like me, want to see you succeed at work, at home, and everywhere in between.

If you're looking for work, you've likely encountered tools and promotions about AI technology that can get you hired. There are a lot of them. Which ones are worth your time and energy, though? Well, AJ Eckstein is joining me today to explain what he shares with his community. AJ is the founder of the Final Round, and the host of the Final Round Podcast. He offers career resources and brings his own successful experience to his lessons. Here's AJ.

AJ Eckstein: Think about AI, almost like performance enhancement shoes to make you a faster, more effective runner. It's not anything illegal, it's a technology. And even the companies that you're applying to, they're using and thinking about how can I use generative AI in their own company? So I would say it's not should you use it, how are you going to use it? Because there was a study that came out by Forbes that actually showed three really interesting statistics, that 59% of job seekers are already using ChatGPT in their job search. 69% landed in more interviews, and 49% landed in more offers. So I always say, if you're not using it, you're at a disadvantage period. And of course, there's different ways you can leverage these technologies, and I've found that, I've done research that you actually can use AI in every single step of the recruitment journey.

And I know it might sound like it is "cheating", but it really is just getting better running shoes to run faster and more effectively. But at the end of the day, better running shoes doesn't do anything if you don't put them on and run the race. So it's not going to do anything unless you know how to use them. And you also have to add that human touch. So I've found that the most successful job seekers are the ones that know how to leverage the technology, how to still fact check, and then add that human touch to make it 80% of the way there, and then they add that 20%. So you can think about AI almost like your personal assistant, your co-pilot, your own analyst to help you with research, help you with content creation. There's so many use cases. I think everybody here has obviously heard of AI and ChatGPT and maybe played around and throw a prompt in the tool. But I think very few people are responding to the own prompt and also having a large prompt that will get them a really robust output.

Andrew: And I think that is the big difference, is there's a lot of people who might fire up ChatGPT or go to Google, go to Microsoft Bing or something like that, and play around with their AI assistance, and they'll type in a simple question and they'll get a very generic answer. And honestly, if you do that, it's no better than a search engine. But if you actually take the time to learn to ask a question, you'll get something really interesting in response. So for me, I know when I first started experimenting with AI, I was asking simple questions. I'm like, ah, this is useless. And then over time, as I figured out I can actually use this as something to bounce ideas off of. I could upload maybe a transcript of conversation and say, "Okay, what do you think is the most important point in here?" And the more you figure out how to interact with it, the more you'll get from it. So for someone who maybe hasn't experimented with AI, where would you suggest they start?

AJ: So I would say that you can really think about literally every step of the job search you can use AI, but I would say there's four key areas that for me to this day, after playing around for countless hours and months, I'm still blown away by these use cases. So starting with preparing for a coffee chat. So let's say that I reach out to you on LinkedIn, Andrew, and I'm like, "Hey, love the Get Hired podcast. I'd love to either be on the show or have a couple questions for you or some feedback." And you say, "Yes, let's do it." How do you prepare for that coffee chat? Let's say it's in the LinkedIn office in New York. You're so excited, but I want to make it memorable. It's not every day that I get to sit down with Andrew. So the first thing I would do within that kind of use case is thinking about a memorable elevator pitch.

And it's not an interview. You're going to ask me, "AJ, tell me about yourself. I saw your LinkedIn, but let me hear it from you. What is your story?" So going into ChatGPT, and you can say act as an expert storyteller. Here is basically the background and the context of what's about to happen. I have a coffee chat with this person. Here's their role, copy their LinkedIn profile, a bit about themselves, help me write a memorable elevator pitch. But then you have to give it some boundaries. It's almost like playing bowling without the gutter lanes. And you do want to give some sort of criteria because if you don't, then it's an open-ended essay question versus an A, B, C, D multiple choice question. And this is some criteria you can give. I want it to be 60 to 120 seconds. I want it to be memorable.

I want it to be focused on the other person. Make sure to mention LinkedIn, make sure to mention get hired, and that's a great output for that elevator pitch. The second part within that is you want to be memorable with the questions that you ask. Because for me, one of my biggest pet peeves is I give up my time to somebody who I feel didn't research me, didn't put in the time to ask good questions, and they just say, "Oh, Andrew, well, how's podcasting and how's LinkedIn?" Not that good. But if you could add in and you could just basically download the person's LinkedIn as a PDF, copy that to ChatGPT as your resume and say, write some unique questions to ask this person with the goal to either potentially get a referral at LinkedIn, with the goal to be memorable. And those are just some things on the coffee chat side.

I'd say the second one, probably the most common one today is writing resumes and cover letters. And there's a couple of tools if you don't want to use ChatGPT, you can use tools like Teal and careerflow.ai that are amazing, amazing tools. They have free features and paid features, but I think it's not just black and white as in write me a new resume or a new cover letter or I already have one. But I always say the more inputs you give, the better the output. So you should be inputting your LinkedIn profile, what you have currently, you should input the job description and then basically say, make these match. And the goal of a good tailored resume is having enough keywords to literally basically read word for word from the job description. And also let's say that you worked a customer service job, and some jobs are just hard to quantify.

Every person, every recruiter, everyone on LinkedIn says, quantify, quantify, quantify. But how do you quantify certain roles that are unquantifiable? So having ChatGPT say, "Hey, what are some metrics I can talk about for this bullet point? Make it better. Use this framework," whatever it is, or a better hook in my cover letter. The third one, and probably my favorite one, Andrew, is on knocking out interviews. So I'm going to take you through a sequence for a second. So you have an interview coming up and we'll say with the LinkedIn example, it's a business development manager role at LinkedIn. And for the interview, you have no idea what the hiring manager is going to ask you, but you have the job description. You'll start by priming the chatbot and say, "Act as an experienced hiring manager that has 15 years of experience at LinkedIn. Here's the job description."

I want you to step one, predict what questions to ask and make sure to do a mix. We'll do five behavioral and five situational. Great. So now the output gives you five of each type of question, and that's just the first part. The second part is, okay, these are great questions. Now I want you as the chatbot to respond to your own questions that you just predicted, but don't just respond to them, tailor it to me. So here's my resume that you just created a second ago and respond to those questions. So now you have 10 questions and 10 responses. Okay, great. Now the third part, going above and beyond, I want you to score each of your responses one through 10, one being bad, 10 being perfect, and give feedback. So now you have a score, five out of 10, seven out of 10, 10 out of 10, and feedback.

And the last part is now I want you to respond one more time. And the output is going to make each response to the interview question a 10 out of 10. And you see we went through an entire sequence and now you have 10 optimized questions based on the JD and the 10 responses based on your resume. So that's as in-depth as you can go. And the last one I'll give you is you can basically turn ChatGPT into your AI negotiation coach. As we all know, when you get an offer, it's very exciting, but oftentimes there's room for negotiation. And maybe you can't negotiate salary, but there are a million other things you can negotiate. You can negotiate different types of compensation, equity. There's your start date, hybrid, in person, whatever it is. But it's very hard to practice having that conversation. It's a difficult conversation to have.

So you can play out different scenarios. You can say act as an expert negotiator. I want you to pretend that you are the recruiter. Here are all the inputs. Here's the salary that I got offered, my desired salary, the market rate, the job description, my resume, and I want you to play out different scenarios and just give me one question at a time. I will respond. And we play out different scenarios. One scenario says, yes, you got it. Great. Another scenario says, I can't do 10K more, but I can do 5K more. The next one is, I can't do a salary change, but I could do hybrid. And playing out these different scenarios. I know that's a lot, but I just want to show that you need to go more in depth and think about how you can tailor it to either the job role through the description or your resume and your story.

Andrew: We'll be right back with AJ Eckstein.?

Andrew: And we're back with the final round, AJ Eckstein. A lot of the tools out there like ChatGPT are cumulative. So when you're asking them, "Hey, can you come up with interview responses based on the resume that it created?" If you're doing this all in one form, it knows what's already in there. So for example, when I am writing an article that may not be very long, what I'll do is I'll put maybe part of a transcript in there and I'll say, what are the top three points from this interview? And it'll give me the top three that eight says, and I'll say, actually give me the top five because those aren't really great.

And then I'll go in and I'll pick the ones I want and I'll say, pick out two quotes to go with each of these points that are really great and really descriptive, and it'll give me those quotes in there. So it basically keeps going back and says, okay. And it's almost using its memory to say, okay, from what you just told me, here's what I could bring down. So obviously it's good to sort of work in that space.

AJ: And one other thing that you just touched on, Andrew, is that you made it seem like it's a conversation, which it is a conversation. I think most people and the biggest mistake I see working with job seekers is they give a prompt, they get the output, and then they say, oh, maybe this part's good, this part's bad, and that's it. But for the parts that are good and the parts that are bad, respond to it. Tell the chatbot what you like, what you don't like, what you want to see. Maybe you ask for a better hook for your cover letter and then give you one but you don't love it. Say, I want five more hooks, I want 10 more hooks. Don't just give me five questions. I want 10 questions.

But then have it be bold in the first question. I mean, you have to share what you want. The chatbot can't just guess. And if it's a bad guess, it's going to be a bad response. So I think people don't have a conversational approach where it should be conversational and you should refine the prompt. It shouldn't just be one perfect prompt and one perfect output.

Andrew: And also the idea of the output, because I think a lot of people will forget this step, which is what it gives you is not necessarily going to be perfect, and you shouldn't just copy and paste it into the application or the applicant tracking system wherever you're applying, because it could be incorrect. It may sound completely different than you. So a person really needs to actually interrogate what it has just spit out too.

AJ: 1000%. And I wanted to touch on this one as well, Andrew, is that the goal of a chatbot is to please you and serve you. And you can think of it like a master. The chatbot's goal is to give you the best possible output. The problem is that these chatbots, not just ChatGPT, but it could be Claude, it could be Bard, whatever it is, since their goal is to please you, they might make up false information, which is called the hallucination. And that is why it's so important to fact check and add that human touch. And there's three ways that you can really ensure that hallucinations don't happen. So the first one is by limiting the possible outcomes. And this goes back to the analogy of a type of exam. And you can either have multiple choice where it's a finite number of possibilities, or an open-ended essay question.

Most people write prompts with the second one of just open-ended. And of course, if you give an open-ended opportunity, the response is going to be very open-ended. But if you say that here are the possible outcomes and you're limiting them, there's only so many ways that it can go. The second one is if you use the act as a blank and you give it and assign it some type of role, you can say, "Act as Gary V, act as marketing, act as a recruiter with tenures of experience, act as Andrew Seaman on the Get Hired podcast," you're using this to prime the chatbot to act as a certain type of role or act as an expert content creator, helping you write a LinkedIn post.

And the third one is ensuring that you say what you want and what you don't want. And a great example is if you're a job seeker, say that I am a senior in college, I am looking for an entry level full-time job. I do not want an internship. I do not want a job that requires three plus years of experience. I do want a job that has zero to two years of experience. So the more that you refine the output, prevent hallucinations, the better the output will be.

Andrew: You also need to fact check basically what it is spitting out, because like you said, it might hallucinate. And basically what the AI is doing is saying, "I don't know what's here, so I'm just going to fill it in with something." And the one time I wanted to see how far I could push it, and it gave me citations, but none of them were real. They got the name of reports right, but they got the year wrong and all this other stuff.

AJ: I'm almost happy that the chatbot does that because it requires you to give that human touch. It requires you to go in, and you should always fact check it, right? Because you just never know what might come from it. And even in a lot of the prompts that I write, I will say very boldly, do not make up information. But of course, that's not bulletproof. You still have to fact check. You still have to check that even the questions that you asked to ask Andrew during the coffee chat, you still have to make sure, oh, well, it says he worked at Nvidia, but no, he didn't on LinkedIn. You have to just double check certain things. And I think that will help you get the best responses to using your job search.

Andrew: And you also shouldn't use it to necessarily show that you have skills that you don't, because at the end of the day, you're going to have to be doing the actual work. So if you go in there and you say, "Oh, I know how to do X, Y, and Z," and you play it up because maybe you had a chatbot or AI help you with your application, that is not going to end well for you because you're going to get in that job and you're not going to be able to do it because maybe ChatGPT or an AI bot can help you here and there, but eventually that luck is going to run out, right?

AJ: 100%. And I guess going more specifically into resumes on the same point that you just said, one of my favorite quotes from a recruiter that I interviewed on The Final Round Podcast, Farah Sharghi, she was a recruiter at TikTok, New York Times, Google, et cetera, some amazing companies. She said that just because you have advanced in Excel or SQL or any technical skills in your skill section of your resume, doesn't mean that that's going to fly. Because then they try to back that up. Is it in your experiences section? If there's nowhere on your resume that says, okay, well what did you do with that coding language, it looks like it's made up.

So I think what's helpful to use these AI tools to identify what maybe you're missing between your resume and matching with the job description, and it could say, oh, you're 80% of the way there, but you're missing X, Y, Z skill, then it's up to you to say, okay, well, how can I upskill? Maybe I take an online course to become adept in X, Y, Z skill. And I think that's another way that you can use these tools to benefit your career journey.

Andrew: Definitely. And I think the other thing to talk about with this is just using AI in your job search, playing around with it here and there, will keep you ahead of the curve for right now in terms of skills, right?

AJ: 1000%. And I think the saying goes that AI will not take your job, but someone who knows how to use it will. And if you're a manager and you have two employees, employee A and employee B, and employee A is focused on the future, they're focused on upskilling, taking online courses, reading about the news and AI, playing around, testing things, breaking things, and almost doing 1.5 or two roles in one, the manager's going to put more investment and resources into that employee versus employee B, who's looking at the past, stuck in their old ways, not looking at leveraging this technology to make them more productive and do more at work.

So I think it's really a conversation around not if, but when and how you're going to use it, and you can use it in any aspect of your job, but just thinking about what are those use cases for your specific role and having a conversation with your team or your manager to say, okay, well, what are things that can be outsourced? And I love using AI for things like research, content creation, and I write so many things, whether it's a newsletter, LinkedIn post, even writing questions for a podcast episode. And instead of staring on a blank page, having ChatGPT get you at least some words on the page, just start sparking that inspiration.

Andrew: I think that's really great advice. And what's really wonderful too is that if you want to learn a little bit about prompt engineering, which is how you ask an AI questions, there are a ton of online courses out there and the information is readily available because so many people are experimenting with AI and they're basically passing on their learnings.

AJ: Yes. And I actually have a free five-day email crash course. It's just landajobwithAI.com . And then I also built an online course on top of that that talks about how to use AI in every single step of the recruitment journey at our website, thefinalround.com . And I realized that there are so many posts out there about different things, here's how to use AI to build a resume, here's how to use AI to write a LinkedIn post. But nobody was kind of condensing everything into one online course. And I've had such great success with my LinkedIn learning courses, and I really do respect my audience, but it's something I'm really excited about because we've gotten such good feedback from. So it's something where I would encourage people to go in, try to break things, test things, go take courses, read up on news. I mean, I'm reading AI newsletters every single day to just be ahead of the curve because it is the future and you don't want to be left behind.

Andrew: Fantastic. Well, thanks so much, AJ.

AJ: Absolute pleasure. Thank you, Andrew.

Andrew: That was AJ Eckstein, who's the founder of The Final Round.

Andrew: Remember, it's up to you to put our advice into practice. Still, you always have a community backing you up, and cheering you on. Connect with me and the Get Hired community on LinkedIn to continue the conversation. Also, if you'd like this episode, please take a moment to leave us a rating on Apple Podcasts. It helps people like you find the show. And don't forget to click that follow, subscribe, or whatever other button you find to get our podcast delivered to you every Wednesday, because we'll be continuing these conversations on the next episode right here, wherever you like to listen. Get Hired is a production of LinkedIn News. This episode was produced by Alexis Ramdaou. Rafa Farihah is our associate producer. Assaf Gidron engineered our show. Joe DiGiorgi mixed our show. Dave Pond is head of news production. Enrique Montalvo is our executive producer. Courtney Coupe is the head of original programming for LinkedIn. Dan Roth is the editor-in-chief of LinkedIn. And I'm Andrew Seaman. Until next time, stay well, and best of luck.