AI in Job Search

AI serves as a powerful personal assistant in your job search. It refines résumés and cover letters, tailoring them to specific roles with precise wording and optimized formatting. By analysing job descriptions, AI ensures that your application highlights the most relevant skills and experiences. It also enhances clarity, grammar, and tone, making your writing more polished and professional.

Generative AI can suggest engaging ways to showcase achievements, helping you stand out. It streamlines the writing process, reducing time spent on tedious edits and rewrites. While AI provides structure and efficiency, adding a personal touch ensures authenticity.

The most common generative AI chatbots are ChatGPT (OpenAI), Gemini (Google), CoPilot (Microsoft), and Claude (Anthropic). There are also specialised tools tailored for certain tasks. You can test out different AI-tools to see which ones you prefer and what the key differences are.

What AI does well:

• Efficiency: AI streamlines the application process by automatically tailoring resumes and cover letters to match job postings, saving time and improving relevance.
• Consistency and proofreading: AI ensures that your material is polished, with proper grammar, spelling, and phrasing, maintaining a professional standard.
• Role-playing: AI can adopt the role of people from the “real world”. You can use AI as a sparring partner in preparation for a job interview or ask the AI to act as a counsellor to evaluate your application material.

What to look out for:

• Personality: AI-generated material may feel impersonal, missing the human touch that is often crucial for connecting with employers. Adding personal elements is essential.
• Bias: AI is only as good as the data it is trained on. This sometimes results in the AI enforcing stereotypes or showcasing bias in its answers. Be watchful of these factors when reviewing answers.
• Over-reliance: Depending too much on AI can weaken essential writing, communication, and customisation skills. It is key that you maintain your ability to think and create independently.

General tips for using AI:

• Review: Always review AI-generated material to ensure it reflects your desired intention. You want the material to both fit in with your potential employer’s tone-of-voice, as well as match your own personal style.
• Personalise: Use AI as a starting point and add personal details and examples. Ensure that the final result represents you, not just the AI.
• Iterate: Engage in a dialogue with the AI tool, providing new information or requesting specific changes to make the output more personal and relevant.
• Don’t get attached: Use AI as a helping hand and maintain your own skills in crafting a good CV and cover letter. Focus on improving your efficiency and proficiency, rather than relying solely on AI.

The golden rule of prompting is to be as specific as possible. It is essential to provide the AI tool with as much information as possible. The more precise you can be, the better answers you will receive.

A decent starting point could be:

Prompt: “Write a cover letter for [job title], emphasizing [specific skills].”

You should then move on to being even more specific and highlight certain achievements or skills that you have. Or you can focus on particular tasks that you can contribute to in your new role. An example could be:

Prompt: "Write a cover letter in a professional style for [position title], highlighting my [relevant skills]. Include my education in [education] and emphasise my passion for [industry/field] and how I can add value to the company through [specific knowledge/skill]"

Now, to make it even better, the best thing you can do is to upload relevant files for the AI to read through. This includes:

• Job posting
• Your existing CV
• Previous applications you have written
• Your thesis, past exam papers, or similar material
• Other files you find relevant

Remember not to upload any sensitive personal data when supplying the AI with information. Read more here.

When using AI, it is important to keep reviewing and requesting in a form of dialogue with the AI. When receiving an answer, you should always ask yourself if you can be even more specific. A few ways of doing this could be to:

• Provide context to the AI: What you struggle with, what you have already tried, and so on.
• Instruct the AI to adopt a specific role, so you can focus on the perspective you require. For instance, you could instruct the AI to “act as an HR manager in a medium-sized corporation, whose job functions include recruiting new employees to the company”.
• Clearly define the desired language style (e.g., professional, casual, humorous, etc.) and the preferred format for the response (e.g., bullet points, desired length, a table, etc.).
• Write your prompts in English, as this is the language with which the AI is most familiar, having been trained on data in English. This will typically result in more accurate responses. The AI tool can also help you translate afterwards.
•  Ask the AI if it needs any information or context that might help ensure a satisfactory response.