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The Job Insiders Blog Pro Tips for Job Seekers
What if you could get the best of Career Coach GPT… right inside ChatGPT?
I trained ChatGPT on my best-selling AI for job search book. And now you can get coaching based directly on the book's best practices.
How will AI affect your career? From job-searching today to the skills you'll need down the road???
Join me and the amazing Anita Brick, Director of Career Advancement Programs at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, for a deep dive on all these questions and more…
To set your students and team up for immediate success, here are the four messages I recommend you share at the beginning of the year:
To prevent any confusion about where you stand, it’s best to come right out and say it as soon as students matriculate:
Taking such a clear stance from Day 1 not only helps with alignment, it also makes it clear to students that you’re aligned with them (since they’re likely using these tools already). Which will only enhance their qualitative perceptions of your department on those end-of-program surveys!
However, as we all know from Spider-Man, with great power comes great responsibility!
As such, it’s important that you pair the first message with a clear statement around accountability:
As powerful as these tools are, you are still responsible for any content they produce. Just because a resume bullet or cover letter paragraph was shaped by ChatGPT doesn’t absolve you of ownership over those documents. And because every application you submit is both a representation of you and our institution, we ask that you please sign our AI Honor Code before accessing our jobs database:
I promise to use AI tools in accordance with our institution’s best practices, including:
Now, I know it may feel like overkill to have your students sign an AI Honor Code - or to tie it back to job access - but my belief is that, by doing so, you’ll accomplish two important goals:
Having sent clear signals about both the upside and downside of these new tools, you’re now ready to begin the AI journey with your students.
And so rather than turn them loose to figure out AI on their own, I recommend integrating it into your early engagement in two important ways:
Career Orientation
Just like you have an orientation session dedicated to resumes, networking, and LinkedIn, it makes sense to kick off the year with an AI overview.
But rather than make it a dry recitation of AI facts (“This is how an LLM works…”), I suggest turning it into an interactive workshop like so:
1:1 Coaching Sessions
Once you’ve provided these high-level guidelines, you should encourage your coaches to incorporate them into even their earliest meetings with students.
Depending on where your incoming students are in their job search journeys, you could have coaches do any of the following:
But no matter which stage a student is at, having effective AI usage modeled for them from the very beginning will go a long way to helping them carry that skill throughout their job search and into their careers!
With a clear foundation in place, it’s now time to get the big boosts in efficiency that make AI so tantalizing.
And that means guiding students on where (and where not!) to use these tools.
Now, since AI is clearly so good at basic writing and pattern-matching, here are the kinds of tasks where I’d encourage its use:
On the other hand, because it’s so poor at interpersonal tasks, here’s what I’d leave to your coaches:
And it turns out that this is great news for both your students and coaches because:
Now, if you only follow the steps above, you’ll still easily be in the top decile of all career centers in the world in terms of AI leadership.
However, if you’re not content with just leading your students here but you actually want to lead the whole world, I’ve got one little bonus tip for you:
Consider creating your very own AI tool!
Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Jeremy, are you crazy? I had never even used a single AI tool when I started this guide and now you want me to make my own?”
But here’s the really crazy thing: You absolutely can.
How do I know?
Because I did! And just to be clear, I’m not a programmer. But with a few simple off-the-shelf tools, you can build your very own AI. And in doing so, you can combine all the power of ChatGPT with all the expertise that you and your team have built up to create a truly unique model that’s custom-fit for your institution.
Here’s how:
While this is fully optional, I’ll just note that I’m happy to work pro bono with any universities interested in trying this technique out. That’s because, like Ethan Mollick at Wharton, I firmly believe that what AI needs most now isn’t more technology, but more human expertise. And I’d love to help you encode your expertise into the next generation of powerful career tools! ⚡️
PS: Feel free to share with your colleagues! And if you ever want me to lead an AI training for your students or colleagues this year, just say the word.
Early on, many of my career center partners had hoped that their institutional leaderships would fill the decision-making vacuum created by ChatGPT and its Large Language Model (LLM) peers. Caught between professors bemoaning the end of essay assignments and students adopting it overnight, career centers really could have used some urgent clarity about the right way to approach these new tools.
But let’s be real.
Academia is great at many things - driving foundational R&D, protecting intellectual freedom, opening doors to opportunity - but speed has never been one of them. It wasn’t the case when I was a career coach at the University of Michigan and I’ve yet to hear from any of my 100+ partners that it’s so at their institution… 🙂
So rather than sit on the sidelines and wait for a white knight to arrive (only to turn out that you’re really waiting for Godot), career leaders have to lead.
And we all know there are two ways to lead: From the front or from the back.
Now, I understand why it might be tempting to take a reactive, wait-and-see approach here:
But as tempting as it might be to lead from the back, let me share four even more powerful reasons why you shouldn’t be afraid to lead from the front:
Two realities co-exist for your students today:
So just like you wouldn’t let students build a resume without a template, instruction, and feedback, why would you let students wander in the wilderness when you now know that there’s a better way?
Even if you were to leave your students to their own devices with AI, you’d still have consequences to face - namely because every time a student applies to one of your employer partners, they not only carry their personal brand but your institution’s as well.
And so imagine yourself in my shoes as a hiring manager. I’m starting to see job applications every week that we’re clearly written with the most rudimentary of ChatGPT prompts (“Write me a cover letter for a job at Khan Academy”). They’re generic, they’re boring, and frankly, they drain any interest I might have had in those candidates.
Now imagine that I start to notice a trend across these applications (or even use ChatGPT’s Advanced Data Analysis tool to identify the trend for me): Hey, hold on a second… they’re all coming from… wait for it… your institution.
How excited do you think I am to advocate for a continued partnership? Especially when candidates from peer schools are knocking my socks off with highly tailored, engaging applications - whether written with great prompts or not.
So for the sake of your institution, your reputation, and your partnerships, you’ve got to get ahead of this thing.
But wait, there’s more: It’s not just that employers hate bad AI applications.
It’s that they actually crave good AI skills.
Because again, think about what it feels like to be the boss at any of your employer partners. You’re living in a world where your own boss expects you to get more done with fewer resources (sounds like the career center world too, right? ;).
And so now you, too, have a choice:
I think you know what most bosses are choosing - in fact 91% now say they want their employees to have AI skills. And that’s exactly what I’ve told my own team at Khan Academy: If you’re not using AI, you’re wasting our scarce nonprofit resources and limiting the number of kids we could serve.
So to help your partners and better prepare your students to succeed in their roles, AI expertise is important in general, not just for job searching.
Finally, let’s get right down to it: For better or worse, we career coaches serve at the pleasure of our students.
And that means we get evaluated on two metrics:
So AI lets you pursue your own twin stars:
The bottom line is that whether it’s for your students’ careers or your own, it’s critical that you lead from the front here.
PS: Feel free to share with your colleagues! And if you ever want me to lead an AI training for your students or colleagues this year, just say the word.