Coffee & Career Hour
A genuine & informative podcast on all things career - hosted by two career counselors and friends. From practical strategies to motivational & reflective content, this podcast is here to empower and guide you to find meaningful work, make informed career decisions, and reach your full potential. So, grab a cup of coffee and join in for some career talk.
Coffee & Career Hour
Using AI for Your Job Search
The episode delves into how AI is revolutionizing the job search process and the evolving landscape of career development tools. We discuss the significance of using AI effectively to craft resumes, prepare for interviews, and tailor cover letters without losing personal authenticity. Artificial intelligence is not just an emerging trend—it's a game-changer.
Join us as we recount our experiences with AI and how we've evolved in our approach and usage in every day life. We tackle our initial skepticism surrounding AI’s role in skill development and demonstrate its practical benefits. You'll hear about AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini, which are transforming the conventional processes of resume and cover letter creation. As the job market evolves, employers are also advancing their methods to detect AI-generated content. This episode sheds light on the importance of having foundational knowledge to effectively prompt these tools, ensuring that AI assistance aligns with your personal touch and authenticity.
The episode underscores the significance of training AI tools to reflect genuine personal experiences in job applications. Whether you’re a job seeker or a coach, our insights aim to equip you with the knowledge to incorporate AI into your career journey, embracing its potential for personal growth and professional success.
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The game has changed, like if you were job searching five years ago and you're about to job search now. It is a totally different playing field because people are using AI to help with their resumes, to prepare for interviews and write those cover letters. And we've seen cover letters written by AI where we're like whoa, that doesn't even sound like a real person, but employers know that people are using it and employers are starting to come up with tools to assess whether it was written using AI right. So you're in a different playing field. If you are job searching now and as opposed to like a few years ago, you are listening to Coffee and Career Hour, we are your hosts. I'm Armina and I'm MJ, two career counselors and friends chatting about all things life and career.
Speaker 2:So grab a cup of coffee and join us Hi everybody, welcome back.
Speaker 1:Happy February. Wow, it's Happy February, wow, it's already February.
Speaker 2:I said this in my last Instagram post, but January felt like 10 years and February feels like it's flying by.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's been a very interesting start to the year. All of our LA listeners will understand. We're happy that things are kind of shifting back to normal, quote unquote. And we're here and we're excited to talk about our next topic.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think, when it comes to this next topic, there are so many resources and tools out there for job seekers, people who are just trying to get ahead of the game, and this tool really has enhanced a lot of people's mobility in the workforce.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh. Yes, and if you haven't guessed already, we are going to be talking about AI, artificial intelligence, today.
Speaker 2:Which, armanay, can you describe a little bit to our readers how you have switched to what you call the dark side?
Speaker 1:Yes, I have switched to the dark side. Actually, I love the robots. Now, I figured you got to love them, otherwise they're going to come for us. I got to have a good relationship.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they're going to come for your job.
Speaker 1:Seriously Well, mj, I went to a conference back in December. I posted about this on my Instagram. I went to the M-PACE conference and it was very technology focused. It's a career development organization and the conference was about career development topics, but technology was embedded in many sessions. So I learned a lot about how AI can be used in our line of work as career counselors, as higher education professionals, and how it actually can be really beneficial. And also I realized that you really do have to have the knowledge. You cannot replace your knowledge, because I think that's what I was resisting earlier on with AI was that it's you know. People can easily come up with products and papers and do things without having the knowledge, and I was hesitant towards that. But I realized that you actually have to have the knowledge, because this thing cannot replace that. You actually have to teach it what it is that you need from it and then it can help you be more efficient yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:I think efficiency is key. A lot of people tend to see the negative side and the impact and, ironically, I was listening to a podcast, a couple uh, I think it was this morning actually, and it was. It was talking about how these AI it's expanding the way it's expanding in the world, where it started off as a chatbot, right, and even before that it was like your messages, predicting the couple words after you type or in your email if you ever use Outlook, like if you type I hope you, and then it can finish in gray to say you're doing welllook. Like it can like if you say you know, if you type I hope you, and then it can finish like in gray to say like you're doing well or something like that. That's AI. Yeah, it's learning our patterns or the way like different configurations work in different apps that we use. Right, that's artificial intelligence. But it's grown to where we can have a communication, a conversation with this. You know chat bot, bot and I choose to name mine so they seem more friendly. I actually even gave it pronouns the other day. I was calling it like him and he did this and I don't know why. Mine's a male, but yeah, I don't know that's weird, but anyway, long story short.
Speaker 2:I was listening to this podcast, a hard fork by the new york times, and they were talking about how like it can progress and be like a, like a salesperson. It can do these basic job functions and it's wild that it's expanded to the fact where it can take over like a new browser, do like DoorDash. It was one of the recent episodes and I'm like where did we go from? Like two years ago, like this was very new, people were using it for homework, people were using it for job search, people were using it for um email negotiation, like all the things that we see. And then now it's like actually moving towards, like well, it can do this, it can be a customer sales representative, like all these different things yeah, no, it's insane how fast it's also evolving.
Speaker 1:Yes, and you know it's already been multiple iterations ever since chat gpt itself came out and we learned about it. What I feel like that was like a year ago maybe and it's already at like level the third or fourth variation, right and so it's evolving really fast. Um, and I feel like we can resist it all we want it's here. It's like the future is here, right, and we either have to embrace it and actually use it to our benefit and advantage or we're gonna fall behind. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:I 100% agree, which is why I'm completely and utterly shocked that, like it's something that you use for the good right, it's for your own efficiency, for our own learning too, because it does help us expand in different ways we didn't think about before, but it just creates and makes things so much easier in our everyday life. You and I were talking about like email responses, right, or like quick um responses to questions that people have all the time that I I know I'm just so tired I don't want to type it out or do whatever.
Speaker 2:I use it a lot to like help me brainstorm, so I like to pitch it ideas and then say what do you think about this? How would this work? Give me an activity, what would that look like for this type of setting? And bounce off a lot, a lot on it. And I do what you do by saying please and thank you, and I talk to it like it's a human.
Speaker 1:Yeah, me too. That's so funny because I literally was using it today at work and I was sharing my screen and our other colleague, she saw me type in please, and she's like that's so funny. You're saying please to the AI. I'm like, yeah, I feel Some type of weird energy around just like saying do this? Yeah, right. But then the funniest part is it actually responds back. When I say thank you, it'll be like you're very welcome.
Speaker 1:Is there anything else? Yeah, and it's like you're starting to engage in conversation, right, it can be scary, like thinking about going down that loophole in the future and like how that can actually evolve. It can be a scary space, but I think that you know, as long as you're not allowing it to take over, take over your mind and like understanding what's real and what's not. I think that using it to your advantage is actually smart to do these days, because the world is moving fast and everybody has so many things we're juggling on our plates, right, so why not utilize this super advanced technology to help us do the things that we need to do better?
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah, I was, um, I've been talking to you about a trip I've been thinking about and I asked it the other day. I was like so I'm planning to go here. Here are my thoughts. This is what it's for, like what are locations? What would you recommend? An ideal one to two week plan? Like I want walking tours, I want to do tourist things, but I also want to relax, and it was like very comprehensive the amount of information. I um, I like to use the ai, so chat gpt is, like, I think, the, the most known um, depending on what version you have. There's the paid version, which is the 4.0, and then there's like I think, 3.0 or 3.5, where it's not, you know it can't search the internet. So I use ai as co-pilot from microsoft to Google Gemini that can search the Internet, so I can get links and resources and be able to see where the information is coming from.
Speaker 2:So I do dictate like facts from fiction, on the AI too. So it's what you're talking about using every day Like that was really cool for me to see too.
Speaker 1:Amazing. No, I love that you're doing that and that actually, each AI out there now has different capabilities, absolutely, and so you can pick and choose, I guess, which one works best for you. But today we also found out that there is AI tools that could analyze a whole big document. Like, we plugged in 360 pages of a document into it and it turned into a 80 minute podcast episode isn't that insane.
Speaker 1:I didn't know. Apparently you knew about it. I had no idea that it's to that level, right, that um, it could even create a podcast episode. So I thought that was. You know. It's already like going to the next level, and who knows what else it can do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's funny because you know, I want to say like a year and a half ago we were really against it. We were really against it. I was. I was against it because for what we do, it's very practical and it's it annoyed me in the beginning that like people could just use this thing and it like my thing. With career development and all the aspects that we do, there's skills you need to learn for life. If you have something else, just do it for you. You're not going to learn right. It's the same thing like how I think about parenting if you clean up your kids toys, they're not going to learn to be organized. So that's how, like ai works for me and in this way where we're like resume stuff and interviewing and it can't do it for you and you have to learn these skills because they're life skills.
Speaker 1:Right. That's why I was against it. But I think I realized that it won't replace the skills, because in order for it to actually work appropriately and be effective in what you're using it for, you actually have to have the knowledge. Yes, to feed it the information so it can give you what you're looking for. So if there's knowledge gap there, then the ai cannot tell you what you're asking it to do yeah, yeah, and I that's where I was really annoyed with it in the beginning.
Speaker 2:and you're right, you have to be like a great, you have to give it a great prompt, you have to let it get to know you and your style and what you're looking for, because it cannot reach your mind. There have been times where I'm like, okay, help me outline this or this, this and that, and it doesn't give me what I want. Or I'm like no, it's not what I'm looking for. And the poor thing I say the poor thing because I now personify it It'll be like I'm sorry, I should have known that.
Speaker 1:And I'm like no, you shouldn't have, because.
Speaker 2:I'm assuming that you're thinking the way I'm thinking and I have to give you a great detail. And then it makes me be like, well, I should have just done it myself, because the amount of time I'm using it to feed it prompts. But like it's the efficiency. It's the efficiency. And when you think about something like job search or preparing for that, application cycles, for all the different opportunities, it makes things so much easier.
Speaker 1:It definitely does. So let's talk about that. Mj like job search. So for our listeners anybody who's out there currently job searching or just thinking about going through that process the game has changed, like if you were job searching five years ago and you're about to job search now. It is a totally different playing field Because people are using AI to help with their resumes, to prepare for interviews and write those cover letters, and we've seen cover letters written by AI where we're like well, that doesn't even sound like a real person, but employers know that people are using it and employers are starting to come up with tools to assess whether it was written using AI right. So you're in a different playing field if you are job searching now and as opposed to like a few years ago.
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Speaker 1:Absolutely Happy holidays everyone, and thank you for listening to the Coffee and Career Hour podcast.
Speaker 2:Now let's get back to our episode and I'll add on to what you said earlier if you, if you're not jumping on now and playing with it, testing it, you don't have to use it 110, but keeping up with it, you're falling behind because what the job, what the jobs and the tasks are like, you have to be able to know how to use it with what you're doing, because you don't want to be the person that's falling behind, because then now you have a huge skills gap. So so, yes, you're right, in the last three years even it's changed so much. Like before, there used to be, you know, like a platform called a job scan. It would be able to take the job description you're looking for, pull out keywords. Now you can feed it and it would have like a limit of five. I think that was its like limit or something.
Speaker 2:Five or ten, I don't really. I don't really remember. I can give this thing to chat GPT or Google Gemini and say here's the link to the job description here's the post, here's my resume and am I analyze if I'd be a great fit or not?
Speaker 1:yeah, I. When I learned about that at the conference, I was. I think that was one of the reasons why it sold me, because it's so impactful, like imagine how much more prepared you would be for this job interview, where, when you can upload your resume and then the AI can analyze and highlight key skills that you have and then how it matches the job description. I mean, that's what you're supposed to be proving in the interview is that you can do this job and your qualifications match what they're looking for Right. So AI is helping you do that, but it's not replacing your knowledge. You already have the experiences and the skills on your resume. You did those things. You might not know how to articulate it best, and it's making you more efficient in figuring out how to articulate the skills that you have right. That's why I think it's amazing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely One of my favorite features ways to use it with students and to teach them like even clients too, when they're preparing for interviews and saying you know, here's the job description, here's the resume, you know what are 10 first round behavioral interviews? What are 10 technical interview questions? What are director level questions that they would have for this candidate? And here's the resume. Can you pose some good points on how to respond? And it's great when doing a mock interview. It's very efficient and I think it's very to the point. Before I think you would agree with me we would have like our 20 most common interview questions and you and I you know we can always in any career counselor can always come up with like a good few, like targeted, but you really don't know and you never really know in an interview.
Speaker 2:But this is one step closer to getting very targeted, aimed questions right to the job description, targeting the person's experiences, and it does what we teach them to do. Use your resume as key skills and examples on how you would respond to this in an interview.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. It gives you language right to use and it actually makes you think about your experiences in a different way than maybe you couldn't see. That, right, you couldn't see that just analyzing your resume yourself. So I think it can be useful in that sense.
Speaker 1:I also, at the conference, remember some of the counselors talking about there was a whole session actually on this where the counselor used it to help target her counseling approach and her sessions with particular student populations that she didn't know as much about because she wasn't part of that identity group, right.
Speaker 1:And so she's working with these student populations and, yeah, you can be an amazing counselor and have your basic, your actually your foundational counseling skills, but then there are very specific nuances, like this counselor was working with student veterans. She's not a veteran herself. There's so many policies and procedures around being a veteran and what benefits they're able to receive, right. So the AI allowed her to take her sessions to a whole nother level because she had all these additional resources and policies that she could provide to her students and she would actually use it in the sessions with the student, right, it didn't mean that it's replacing her knowledge base or giving her additional knowledge that she didn't have it just she was already a great counselor, but now she has tools at the tip of her fingertips right, it's enhancing her, her career, her career counseling capability.
Speaker 2:Question to you was she using a chatbot that could search the interview Like how did she detect if these policies and things were like factual and like real, and what to use and how to use it?
Speaker 1:I believe they built that chatbot.
Speaker 2:yeah, Gotcha.
Speaker 1:They built that, so she had to do the research and have all the information as well on their end and then feed it to the chatbot Gotcha, and then it helped her be efficient in her sessions. Okay.
Speaker 2:Cool.
Speaker 2:And from a practitioner's point of view and I know we're speaking to job seekers, but I'm I, after this recording, I'm like I have a few ideas now for our own practice, yeah, um, but we could talk about that later but from a job seekers point of view, you, what you can take away from what Armin is sharing about the stories you have to train these bots.
Speaker 2:You have to train the way to tell them, like, who they are and who you want them to be. If you want it to be an expert recruiter who has, like you know, phenomenal resume writing skills and is a person who can write killer cover letters and all these things, you have to tell it that it will not assume, that it will not assume those roles of how you want it to be treat, of how you want it to respond to you, and you need to to let it. You need it to be trained, yeah, and that's really important when you're job seeking, because one of the things with it is you can use it, it's great, but you also have to give it your own taste and flavor.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it needs to be good.
Speaker 1:It does. Yeah, I mean, it's not 100% perfect. Sometimes it'll use use words that people don't use in regular day-to-day. You're like, okay, this is definitely written by AI, so you do have to vet through it and make sure it sounds like you and it's still very authentic to your voice, and that especially when it comes to cover letters. Right, it's so easy to have the robot write your cover letter.
Speaker 1:I know that a lot of the clients we work with they don't want to write cover letters. Right, it's so consuming. You have to tailor it to the job and you have to figure out which skills to highlight and research their mission statement and embed it into your cover letter. It's actually pretty time consuming for a job that you don't know if you're even going to get an interview for. But as career counselors, we always talk about quality over quantity. Right, it's better to apply to less positions but put more thought and intentionality into your applications than it is to apply to hundreds of positions with the same resume and cover letter. But now that we have this AI tool, you can use it to help you build a cover letter that is the best representation of you, with the knowledge and skills that you have and that you're feeding into the, into the ai right, yeah, and then edit it to make sure it sounds like you and it's authentic, your voice 100 and again emphasizing that point of editing and reading through it.
Speaker 2:You know, the thing you don't want to happen is and this could happen with any like resume writer or cover letter writer. You know, let's say you do that service, you give me my documents, I submit them, get called into an interview. I never, I've never, read them before. I don't know what the hell they're talking about. They're asking me these things on my resume, on my cover letter. It's the same thing with an ai oh, totally, because guess what?
Speaker 1:let's say, you do have the ai write it for you. It doesn't sound like you at all. You don't even review or edit it and it's this like super fancy, phenomenal document. You submit it, you get an interview. You're gonna go to the interview and you're not gonna represent yourself the same way you were represented in your documents. They're gonna see through that right and now employers even can vet through and like they're paying more attention to like hey, does this sound like it was written by a person? Or? Or an AI?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the thing you got to pay attention to is the way in which it frames different. It can misconstrue a lot of and make assumptions. Yeah, so you want to pay attention to how it's writing things, or what's it saying, because a lot of it can be false. Right to how it's writing things or what's it saying, because a lot of it can be false, right. It can say, for example, for my job, my titles, our titles, are assistant directors. Like what if in one of the bullet points it says you know, direct team of eight counselors? And that's totally false and I don't catch that. They're like, oh, you've supervised like eight people. Like what the heck? No, you know. And those are things you have to really pay attention to and how it's describing your skill set at the things that you do. Um, and again, most importantly, targeted to the position you're applying for yeah.
Speaker 1:So it can be a very useful tool in helping with highlighting your key skills on your resume match to the job description. It can help you brainstorm and develop a really great cover letter and it can help you prepare for interviews.
Speaker 2:100 it is really good in all these different aspects and I think something, too, is like your linkedin profile um, how to develop that, how to write your summary I know it's supposed to be personal and it can be, but can help you there. How to write these descriptions, how. I know it's supposed to be personal and it can be, but it can help you there. How to write these descriptions, how, what to add. What are things that employers are looking for? Key skills that you should be targeting, industry trends and updates that you're noticing so much information that it can give you. That's only going to enhance your experience and hopefully get you one step closer to obtaining a job.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Amazing tools that are at our fingertips. In a future episode we will talk more specifically about prompts that you can actually put. We'll develop prompts for you all and kind of give you examples of, if you're asking about a cover letter or an interview or so forth, what you can actually say to help you get the most that you can get out of AI.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. In that future episode we'll give you all you need to know.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoy our show, we ask that you write a review on Apple Podcasts to help us reach more people looking to level up their career.
Speaker 2:Want to connect with us, be sure to follow our Instagram and websites.
Speaker 1:Follow Career Rise on Instagram for career advice and motivation to help you stay up to date on all things career. Be sure to also visit my website, careerriseorg, to book a session with me and access free resources. My goal is to help you clarify your goals, make a plan and feel confident in your career journey.
Speaker 2:Follow Career Confident Latina for your weekly dose of career advice and my journey as a first-gen Latina counselor. You can also send me a message on mjcareerconfidencecom if you want to book a career counseling session. I want to help grow your confidence as you reach your career dreams.