Leveraging AI: Using ChatGPT to Write Your Resume

I see so many videos on social media where people are stating they have applied to thousands of jobs and cannot land an interview. There's a process to this and one key element is writing your resume, let me help you write and format your resume, so it doesn't get caught by the company's automated resume filtering.

How do we avoid ATS (Applicant Tracking Software), the software used to filter you out? The easiest way is to make your resume friendly for a computer to read, but close enough to natural language/writing style that a hiring manager or recruiter will not think you are a bot. Luckily applicants have a wide variety of tools at their disposal nowadays thanks to AI large language models like ChatGPT.

Gather Your Resume Content

You already have all of your personal data (start dates, company names, etc.) What you probably don't have is great descriptions of what the responsibilities of your role are (a lot of companies avoid posting these because you would be able to refer to them when asking for an internal promotion.)

Resume Content Consists of 4 Parts

• Contact Information

• An Objective or Summary

• Experience/Work History

• Education/Qualifications

That's it. Keep it simple, more flair just distracts from you and improves your chances of being filtered out by ATS.

How to Leverage ChatGPT

You might not know this, but you can ask ChatGPT to perform tasks for you - but you can also personalize that experience by asking ChatGPT to ask you clarifying questions.

You can see below I prompted ChatGPT with a question (because AI is going to remember if you shouted at it and didn't ask nicely when SkyNet takes over.)

Can you write a resume for me that is focused on a specific role? What criteria would you require to perform the task?

ChatGPT responded and said it can do that, it just needs me to provide it with the filler information:

1. Contact Information

2. Objective or Summary

3. Professional Experience

4. Education

5. Skills

6. Certifications

7. Achievements

8. References

9. Additional Information

This is way more than the content types for your resume than required... As we answer these questions for ChatGPT, they will use all of the information to craft the resume. The more information you can feed it, the better the response will be.

TIP: When ChatGPT responds to you, you can continue to ask it questions to help you with each section. If my 'Objective or Summary' is weak or I am having trouble writing it, I can ask ChatGPT to provide an example:

Experience

The experience section can be a bit tricky, but it is the most important section. Most resumes that have a poorly written or weak experience section are filtered out by the ATS. There are some rules we are going to want to follow when writing this section and leveraging ChatGPT's help:

• Quantify your impact made! This is the single most important thing you can do; past performance is an indicator of future success. How do you measure performance, with words? No, you measure performance with numbers!

BAD EXAMPLE: I managed a team to excellence.

GOOD EXAMPLE: I managed a team of 8 engineers to successfully deliver to organizationally defined SLAs, improving time-to-repair metrics by 18% year over year.

• Leave out any emotion, systems reading resumes don't care about how you made people feel, and hiring managers are doing hundreds of resume reviews - give them the facts and save the good feels for the interview.

TIP: Remember, if we are not sure how to write an experience section we can ask ChatGPT for an example!

1. Ask ChatGPT to write an experience section.

2. Use the job posting responsibilities to feed ChatGPT more information. Copy the entire job posting and use it in your ChatGPT prompt.

3. Ask ChatGPT to ask you clarifying questions to refine the output.

4. Repeat this for each role you previously worked that you want to include in your resume.

See below for my actual prompts to ChatGPT

The Output:

• Led vision, strategy, and outcomes for an intent-based connectivity platform and traffic observability, aligning with BogusCompanyName's core tenets.

• Cultivated a high-performing team, guiding them through the resolution of 2300+ bugs, and enhancing service stability.

• Managed hardware installation amid COVID challenges, achieving 32% growth in infrastructure footprint, hiring and onboarding 5 engineers, and decommissioning 500 servers.

• Recruited and onboarded 5 engineers in 6 months, including a Python specialist and a hardware platforms expert.

• Successfully aligned with hardware and logistics teams, and partnered with infosec, ensuring timely project delivery without issues.

• Emphasized diversity, contributing to an inclusive and empathetic work environment.

That looks pretty clean, but we may need to massage the data and add keywords from the job posting that ChatGPT might have missed. So... just ask it to.

We have almost 50 keywords ChatGPT found in this job posting, review them and remove ones you don't want, then feed the keywords into your experience.

Now we have something we can use on our resume, it's clean, quantified, and relates directly to the skills Netflix is looking for to fill their engineering manager position. Also, it has all the right keywords to push it through the ATS without issue.

Here's our final experience output:

• Led vision and strategy for BogusCompanyName Inc.'s Cloud Infrastructure, aligning with core tenets.

• Cultivated a high-performing team, resolving 2300+ bugs and achieving 32% infrastructure growth.

• Managed hardware installation amid COVID challenges, hiring and onboarding 5 engineers, and decommissioning 500 servers.

• Recruited diverse talent, including a Python specialist and hardware platforms expert, emphasizing inclusivity.

• Collaborated with hardware, logistics, and infosec teams for timely project delivery without issues.

• Proven track record of data-driven decisions, rapid iteration, and thriving in ambiguous situations.

• Emphasized the single responsibility principle, fostering a culture of inclusion, diversity, and effective communication.

Repeat this for each role you previously worked that you want to include in your resume.

TIP: If you have multiple roles you are applying for, you can ask ChatGPT to do things like take multiple job postings and distill 100 common keywords across them all. Then use these keywords as your enhancement list. This will diversify your resume and save you from modifying your resume for each position you apply to.

Education/Qualifications

This section is pretty straightforward, just list any education, certifications, or training you have completed. The key is to make sure they relate to the role you are applying for and add value to your resume.

Create the Resume

There are so many tools available to create a resume, in the past, I have used resume.io (get 5% off with this link) because it is super quick to fill out and then you can select between different templates. Keep the template simple and clean-looking, resume filtering software doesn't care about flair.