Welcome to the Just Get Hired Newsletter!

It feels like all anyone can talk about these days is AI. AI this, AI that. There’s not doubt our lives are going to fundamentally change from AI in the coming years. But for now, the question is: how can AI help YOU — and specifically, help you in your job search.

In today’s issue, I’ll be going through when you should (or can) be using AI to help your job search and when you should steer clear.

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Let’s get into it.

AI in your job search

Chances are, if you’ve been looking for a job, you’ve heard about using AI in your job search.

Full transparency, AI is a cornerstone of the work we do at Ramped. It’s incorporated into our job search platform, and we’re incorporating AI into all of the new features we’re working on.

But the reality is that AI is still in it’s early stages. And using it / applying it without the right strategy could be more hurtful than helpful in your job search.

Below, I’ll go through where (and how) you should be using AI to make your job search faster and more impactful, and where you should avoid using AI.

Where you SHOULD be using AI

Job research / career exploration

The first thing I recommend anyone do at the start of their job search is to evaluate what they’re looking for next in their career AND what roles / jobs are out there that are a good fit for their experience, skills, and goals.

Most people simply look at the job they’ve been doing and choose to apply to similar roles. While this is fine most of the time (especially if you’re in need of an immediate new job for reasons), it ignores a few important things:

1. Potential changes in your interests (it’s good to check in and see if you still enjoy what you’re doing / where your career is headed)

2. Potential new roles that have emerged (maybe there are new, similar roles that have become popular or in demand that you should apply for)

3. Potential undervaluation of your worth in the market (maybe you should be applying for senior roles)

4. Market changes (maybe the job market is worse than it has been, like right now, and you need to re-assess which roles you can get hired for)

The best way to explore this is through personal introspection and conversations with close mentors / friends, but AI can be very helpful.

Using a tool like Ramped’s “Find your next job” tool, you can learn about roles that fit your interests.

Similarly, you can use ChatGPT to evaluate what roles would be a good fit based on your resume and interests.

Drafting / optimizing your resume and cover letters

When it comes to resumes, AI can be extremely helpful for things like writing summary sections and bullet points. I wouldn’t recommend plugging your information into any sort of “auto resume generator” and simply taking the result, but it can give you great drafts of sentences to work with.

From experience, I know by the time you get to your 10+ experience bullet points it can be challenging to come up with different ways to say similar things. THAT’S the type of thing AI is perfect to help with.

You can use Ramped’s AI resume builder to do just that (it also puts your resume information into an ATS-friendly format).

For cover letters, the name of the game is efficiency. Frankly, many recruiters / hiring managers I’ve talked to have indicated that cover letters are used like “tiebreakers” or “quickly scanned” vs. highly critical to your application.

So most of the time what you want is to be able to create a personalized, “good enough” cover letter without taking a ton of time.

That’s where a tool like Ramped’s cover letter writer can come in. Use it to quickly draft cover letters for any role based on your experience. Then you can spend 5-10 minutes editing it to your liking.

Conducting company research

I always say that company research is highly underrated. Building a strong understand of a company you’re applying to is critical for the following reasons:

1. It helps you customize your resume / cover letter appropriately based on company values and goals

2. It helps you properly understand the type of ecosystem you’ll be stepping into

3. It helps you prepare for interviews and be able to ask good questions in those interviews

For those reasons and more, conducting company research is highly important. Unfortunately, most company’s websites read like a marketing site about their products / services vs. a wikipedia site about the company.

That’s where a tool like Ramped’s company research tool can come in. It can quickly summarize key information about companies like their size, products / services, revenue, value propositions, and more.

Similarly, you could ask a tool like ChatGPT to answer questions about a company.

Preparing for interviews

If you research companies using AI like I recommended above, it’s a great start for interview preparation.

But AI can continue to assist you with interview prep (if used effectively).

In this scenario, you’re looking for the AI to help evaluate what questions might be asked or what you might expect in an interview and prepare accordingly.

You can used Ramped’s interview prep tool to get debriefed on expected interview structure and questions.

If you can, you should try to get actual insider information from someone who works at the company, but if you don’t have that available, this is a great way to start without needing anyone else’s help.

Where you SHOULD avoid using AI

Copy / pasting ANY content it generates

As someone that works at a company that utilizes AI frequently, I can tell you that you should basically NEVER simply copy and paste AI outputs.

You’ll notice in basically every example above, I’m recommending you use AI to brainstorm, draft, and accelerate your workflow — not to replace you doing the actual work yourself.

What this means is for your resume, cover letters, ANYTHING, you need to be proofreading and editing the outputs.

Not only because AI content often is easy to identify, but also because it can’t possibly know you as well as you know you.

Networking (on Linkedin / email)

Here’s the deal: networking (as a tool in your job search) really just boils down to building relationships effectively.

And while AI is very effective at navigating specific instructions, research, and more, it still has a ways to go to navigate the experience of building real human connection.

Specifically, I would caution you from using AI to send automated messages to people on Linkedin, writing automated content for posting on Linkedin, or sending automated emails to people you’re trying to build relationships with.

The main reason is that those messages are often obviously AI generated, and get things wrong a lot of the time. But a secondary reason is simply, it’s defeating the whole purpose of building the relationship.

Sending communication to recruiters / hiring managers

Everything from the networking section above applies here.

However, I do think this is an area that will progress faster towards AI being useful than true networking.

We’re actually working on some tools that will help candidates find information about recruiters / hiring managers and quickly draft notes to them about your application.

Because in these cases you’re not really trying to network, but simply add another touchpoint beyond your application to stand out from the crowd.

But for now, I would recommend if you do outreach to recruiters / hiring managers (this includes at time of application submission or later for things like thank you notes), keep that “in-house” and manage those messages yourself.

If you’re not utilizing AI in your job search, you’re likely missing out on key efficiencies and time saving. But for now, we human’s still have an edge in some key areas of your job search.

Speaking of, I write every word of this newsletter every week — no AI here. If you get value out of my content, you can help by sharing the link below and getting credit for referrals :)

I appreciate you in advance!

-Ben