Layoffs suck: Find your next job 2–3x faster with AI
Dive into my personal experience helping six friends get new jobs after experiencing layoffs. These strategies will help you get in the door, ace the interviews, and even negotiate a higher salary!
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I’ll admit, I was starting to feel a little more confident in the job market/economy over the past few months with tech layoffs slowing, and less bad news in terms of macro indicators.
But more recently, it feels like we’re entering another cycle. Add that to worker insecurity around potential impacts of AI tech on existing jobs, and it’s not a super fun time to rely on a company for income.
My experience using AI tools to help people find work
Now, first of all, I’ll say that I’ve been fortunate and have not personally experienced recent joblessness. My experience here has been helping others who have.
About a year ago, I got in really deep on emerging AI tools, and started to learn everything I possibly could. As layoffs in late 2022 and early 2023, a number of people close to me were impacted by workforce reductions.
In the beginning, we went to work playing around with AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Bard to research, write, analyze and strategize for the job searches. Eventually that turned into a more defined framework with specific strategies and tools.
In total, I’ve use this strategy directly with 6 different people to help them land their next roles.
If you’ve been effected by layoffs or are just searching for a new opportunity, I can confidently say that these strategies can help 2x or even 3x your job search productivity.
Read on to find out how.
The best AI job search tools
You’re likely going to be focused heavily on large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, ClaudeAI, and Bard for these strategies.
We’ll also talk about a couple of platforms like HireEZ that have been built specifically for job searching.
Here’s the general framework.
- Brainstorm
- Search
- Analyze
- Tailor
- Outreach
- Communicate
Different stages in the framework require different tools. We’ll get into those now.
Brainstorming you achievements, goals, and aspirations
If you’ve recently found yourself in a job search, I’ve found platforms like ChatGPT and Claude to be a lifesaver in this department.
In this context, these tools can act like a personal career coach, or therapist, and help you post-mortem your last job, compare that to your goals and aspirations, and hone on the things that you really want out of your next opportunity.
Try this: feed the text from your resume into ChatGPT or Claude AI. Ask the tool to analyze what roles or career paths your experience is best suited for.
You can follow that up by straight up talking to the AI like you would a friend. What do you actually want to do? What are your passions? What are things you’ve experienced in your career that you want to avoid next time?
This is a highly underrated strategy, especially given the amount of people that just generally unhappy in their current jobs or career paths.
Even if you’re employed, I would still recommend builting a GPT powered career coach.
Searching for applicable roles
Now that we have some ideas about what roles we want (for this example, I’m looking for outdoor products companies with Product, Sales, and Marketing roles) let’s head over to Google Bard.
Bard is great for this, because it’s connected to the internet and can quickly guide us in the right direction around industry specific job boards or associates that we’ll want to know about here.
In this case, there’s an entire Outdoor Industry Association (OIA) job board dedicated to jobs in the outdoor space.
Analyze the specific skills required for roles that you like
This is my favorite step, and it’s one of the biggest value adders in AI enabled job searching.
First, find a job posting that you like and intend to apply for:
Feed this into the LLM or chat interface, and ask the model to extract key requirements and compare that to your resume to find applicable skills and gaps.
This is highly valuable, because it not only tells you how to double down on your strengths for the role, but blindspots or gaps you have.
Now, some of these gaps might be “resume only” — you just didn’t highlight it on your resume.
For example, I have tons of outdoor experience, but of course I wouldn’t have much reason to include that on a professional resume that’s really focused on AI and machine learning. That’s a resume only gap that I can just fill by tailoring my resume.
I don’t have much licensing agreement management experience though, so that’s a gap I’m going to need to research and close.
Tailor your resume to match specific requirements of job postings
This is where it gets fun! For purposes of this tutorial, let’s assume we have 4–5 job postings that we love, we’re qualified for, and we want to pursue.
Our resumes on the other hand, aren’t tailored or ready to submit for the postings.
Let’s ask Claude to re-write the bullet points to tailor it for the fishing products company job posting.
One big note of caution here: in this case, Claude only knows what I have on my current resume, and I gave very limited context on how to rewrite the resume.
That means we might get stuff that’s made up by the model to fulfill the prompt even if it isn’t true.
It’s really, really important to review the output and make sure that you do, in fact, have the experiences that the model is suggesting you include on your resume.
That said, if the bullets come back perfect, simply copy and paste back into your resume, and you have a job tailored resume that’s ready to submit!
Try this: to expand the context of your experiences, education, and job history and better inform the LLM, try feeding it the entirety of your LinkedIn profile. This way, every job, skill, school, certificate, etc will be included into the pool of potential skills or experience needed to tailor your resume for the job posting.
Tailoring your resume is incredibly important, especially in todays job market. Whatever you do, don’t skip this step.
Outreach and applications to targeted job postings (the not AI part)
Now, this is a part where you really probably shouldn’t be using AI too much.
In general, hiring managers are your best audience here, and hiring managers are human.
Nobody wants to read AI generated CV’s and I’m not going to tell you to do that — in fact, we tried that through this process, and it didn’t help at all anyway.
AI generated content is quite easy to spot in this context, and AI tools are also being used to filter AI generated job applications.
There have been TONS of stories about people literally spinning a job description into a CV and shipping it off to recruiters only to be chastised later on Yahoo News.
Don’t do that.
Instead, take all of that time that you saved previously by leveraging the AI for what it’s really good at — research, analysis, connecting data, suggesting NLP friendly formats, etc — and use that time to write real human messages to your potential new boss, coworker, or friends.
Try this: LinkedIn messages are great for this, especially when the hiring manager is listed on the job posting. Take the time to DM or inMail a thoughtful message to the people connected to the job posting, explaining why you’re reaching out and how you can help them. This will pay dividends.
Ace the interview: prep, rehearse, and negotiate with ChatGPT
Congratulations! You landed the interviews.
Also, I know you were wondering where ChatGPT would come in.
Frankly, ChatGPT could be used for any of the previous steps as well as an alternative to Claude. All of the models we’ve talked about here (Claude, Bard, ChatGPT) are competent enough to massively help you complete these tasks.
But, I love ChatGPT for this step, because it’s creative, and really good at style transfer.
I can create a role play robot with very specific features to help me close my interview blindspots and prep.
After you have some analysis on the gaps and interview questions, you can actually role play the interview:
Frankly this is an interview process game changer. I used to look up relevant interview questions, which was fine, but now you can have real-time tailored conversations with a rock solid AI model that is incredibly good at emulating the real-life persona.
This is next level interview training.
But that’s not all in this stage.
ChatGPT is also highly effective at reviewing contracts — hell, it passed the Bar exam with shocking numbers.
Are you negotiating? You have a new secret weapon for identifying the real and implied value of your skills to help you get the salary you want.
I’ve seen this work several times now, and I will absolutely be using these tools in my next salary negotiation to build compelling arguments to get more money.
Final words and next steps
It’s a scary job market out there right now and not a lot of people feel overly secure in their jobs.
That’s why it’s so imortant today to be prepared for anything that might come. AI tools make it much easier to be prepared if you need to unexpectedly jump into a job search.
Start building your backup plan today — you’ll thank yourself later on if the unexpected strikes, and it just might help you find the next chapter a whole lot faster.
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