Top Recommended AI Tools for Job Seekers

It's here! The new Coffee & Careers newsletter. In this first edition, I will go over the information and tools I suggested in the July session, The Importance of AI In Today's Job Market. we discussed how people could use artificial intelligence in their job search. As with every session, the goal was to provide people at all levels with the tools to take the next step in their career journeys.

You can view the full recording here:

Back in the day, like many things, most of a job hunt was done manually. People mailed or faxed their resumes. Our conversation about AI, ChatGPT, and algorithms would have been completely nonsensical 40 years ago. With modern day job boards and resources, it’s much easier to find open roles as a job seeker. But the other side of this improvement was the problem of employers getting more applications than was possible to consider. Enter the ATS (Applicant Tracking System – uses algorithms to assign rankings to candidates to help recruiters see the most qualified candidates first).

??Ideal uses AI and ML to identify commonalities—like skills or experiences—between a company's highest-performing and/or longest-tenured employees. Then, it looks for those same skills/experiences in candidate resumes to provide a quality ranking that goes beyond the simple keyword matching of applicant tracking systems.

?? HireVue lets employers pre-screen candidates with automated video interviews. It also has an assessment that has candidates play short games and answer a series of questions. Then, HireVue uses AI and ML to analyze language patterns, detect emotions, and measure cognitive abilities, helping employers determine which candidates are most likely to succeed in the role long-term.

Start With Your Foundations

Job seekers must understand the technologies recruiters and HR departments use in their hiring processes to avoid being eliminated by an algorithm without ever being considered by a human. If you know the new rules of recruitment, you'll be better positioned to make it past the tech layers and get your resume in front of a real person.

First – submit a general application to companies you are interested in to get your resume in the database. Engage with the company by following them on social media, particularly LinkedIn.

Second – customize your resume based on the job description of the position you want. Have a professional summary that can be easily adjusted and updated as needed. Use the exact title of the job you are applying for at the top of your resume.

??Use Niche Job Boards

• Problogger or BloggingPro for writing jobs
• GrowthHackers or Credo for marketing jobs
• CrunchBoard, Dice, or Stack Overflow for tech jobs
• Behance or Dribble for designers

Third – create a bookmarks folder of the career pages you are interested in and set a reminder in your favorite system to prompt you weekly to check them for updates. Did you know that if you right-click any bookmarks folder in Chrome, you can open all the bookmarked pages in a single click?

AI Tools to Boost Your Resume

AI resume writers can use a job title to create relevant bullet points. People can generate as many as they like and choose those most relevant to their actual work experience. The tools can also write a resume summary, education, skills, and other sections. ?

?? Talentprise lets users answer questions on job preferences (location, willingness to relocate, remote vs. in-office, and availability to start) and fill out a ‘biography,’ that covers resume line items like work experience, skills, and education. The user then completes an assessment that measures personality and work traits, values, and motivation and creates a holistic profile that is intelligently optimized.

?? Pyjama Jobs uses AI to match you with remote jobs for which you're already an ideal candidate.

?? Fortay has a quiz to help you find companies that are a good culture fit.

?? Sonara collects job listings from across the web and sends hundreds of applications, automatically fills out questionnaires, generates cover letters, and keeps track of everything throughout the process.

?? Massive helps auto-apply to tech industry jobs, scraping data from venture capital databases, like Pitchbook and Crunchbase, to match applicants with jobs, and writes cover letters for them.

?? SimplifyJobs and LazyApply fill out hundreds of applications for you with a few clicks.

?? Lavendar AI is an AI email and personalization tool that offers a free subscription for job seekers.

?? Interview Warmup and tools like it simulate a real interview and give you personalized feedback based on your responses. They can help you figure out where you need to improve, like body language, tone of voice, or specific interview questions you struggled with.

?? Payscale uses AI to analyze data from thousands of job listings and salary surveys to provide you with an estimate of what you should earn based on details like the job title and your experience, education, and location.

Add the Human Touch

Once you’ve used the AI tools in your toolkit to build your job seeker profile from start to finish, you absolutely must review the information to be authentic to your unique personality. Being true to yourself in your search will help you find the right opportunity that will last.

• Check any content you intend to share that is created by ChatGPT and similar applications.
• Do not input confidential information into any AI generative platform.
• Use Grammarly to protect yourself from plagiarism.
• Check your facts and watch out for “hallucinations” – it will confidently tell you something wrong.
• Remember PERSONALIZATION at all times when using AI tools.

All materials need to speak to who you are and be an honest reflection of your real self. AI can help you move more quickly in your job search, but make sure the results represent you, the human. Make things different and better than the generated version. Not just a little different, noticeably different. Other applicants will be using AI too, so if you don’t humanize your application materials, then you won’t be able to cut through the noise.

When you use AI to create your job search content (or any content for that matter), remember this – you must take the output and expand upon it to make it authentic to you and your true experiences.