Want to spruce up your resume? Generative AI can help.
“It’s just too easy to use tools like ChatGPT or Grammarly … to help you not only with punctuation and grammar but also brevity,” former Google recruiter Nolan Church previously told Make It. And there are ways AI can help you strengthen your LinkedIn profile as well.
If you have the premium version of LinkedIn, there’s actually a built-in AI tool to help you create your profile. But if you don’t have that version or simply want to use other tools, here’s what experts recommend.
‘Provide me with two to three sample professional summaries’
One way to use generative AI to optimize your profile is for your professional summary, or the “about” section.
Take your resume and plug it into the generative AI tool of your choice, then do the same with some examples of emails, posts or even an article you’ve written to give it a sense of your voice. Your prompt should then be something like, “provide me with two to three sample professional summaries that leverage my resume and my writing samples to capture my personality,” says Amanda Augustine, career expert at TopResume.
Augustine will then take the different versions, pull out the pieces she likes and create a conglomerate summary that sounds best.
You could also use generative AI tools to optimize your profile for keywords. Plug in your resume, say you’re going to use it to create your LinkedIn profile, then ask, for whatever your role or industry is, “Are there any keyword optimizations you would recommend?” she says.
Augustine’s favorite way to use the tool is to edit her work.
Whatever written component you want to tweak in your LinkedIn profile, put it in the genAI tool and say something like, “Can you suggest some edits to fix my grammar?” says Augustine, “or I need to cut about 30 words from this, can you make some suggestions?”
‘You’re going to have to double check’ whatever it suggests
One key thing to remember: “You want to make sure that anything AI-generated must sound authentically you,” says career coach Phoebe Gavin.
These tools make mistakes and get things wrong all the time, whether it’s in the industry-specific keywords they suggest or in the summing up of your experience. “You’re going to have to double check that whatever it suggests is actually an accurate representation of your skills and your background,” says Augustine.
The other thing that’s important to remember when using these tools is you’re not the only one doing it, so make sure it really sounds unique and like you.
“You don’t want to be the 50th Jennifer who has a very similar paragraph describing your passion for something,” says Augustine, “because it’s not going to sound very passionate or very authentic.”
Want to up your AI skills and be more productive? Take CNBC’s online course How to Use AI to Be More Successful at Work. Expert instructors will teach you how to get started, practical uses, tips for effective prompt-writing, and mistakes to avoid.
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