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#JobSearch : How AI Can Supercharge Your Job Search. How to Leverage AI in your Job Search. A MUSt REad!

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When I was working in college career services, I noticed nearly all of the students I advised fell into one of two camps: They were either completely overwhelmed by all the necessary tasks of their job search, or they simplified the process so much they created major gaps in their own process.

Over time, I developed a four-step model to address their gaps and “chunk” the job search process into something more manageable. The four steps are very straightforward: Resume, Research, Network, Search. (Note: I’m not sharing the steps for a successful interview or negotiation; we’re only focused on the search process for now).

 

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What Skill Sets Do You Have to be ‘Sharpened‘?

 

 

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From my experience having worked at four different institutions and having advised thousands of students, the majority often do Step 1 (prep a resume and cover letter) — but then skip straight to Step 4 (start searching and applying like crazy). Inevitably, they all report that they weren’t hearing back and weren’t having much luck. That’s because they don’t spend enough time on Step 2 (research) and Step 3 (networking). Thorough and adequate prep in Step 2 and 3 will ensure greater success in any internship or job search process.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this approach lately as generative AI has emerged and many have begun utilizing ChatGPT and other similar tools to manage aspects of their job search. Are the four steps still necessary? I would argue, yes. The four steps remain the same, but the tools you’ll use to optimize each step are now more powerful. My advice to early career job seekers is to pair both human and AI guidance to power up their job searches.

 

Here’s how students can incorporate AI into each of the four steps to maximize their results:

Step 1: Develop Your Resume And Online Profile

The first step in any job search is to prepare your resume and online profile (on Handshake or LinkedIn) and pull together the core components of your cover letter. These documents should list relevant education and employment history as well as your skills, abilities, and interests.

It doesn’t matter if you want to start with gen AI or start with a live human in this step. In the end, you’ll want to utilize both. Gen AI is great at providing you a basic template and giving you sample bullets based on your roles or experiences. It can edit bullets or improve sentence structure in your cover letter drafts. It can also review your resume, profile, or cover letter against job descriptions or roles to provide you with greater insight on whether your skills or experiences might match and if you need to emphasize other areas more strongly in your application materials. If you’re having trouble getting started, gen AI tools are good for unblocking.

Now career advisors or mentors can support this process by helping you clarify your interests, target industries or roles, and synthesize which skills you’ve gained through different school experiences. Using a live human to gain this insight will make it easier for you to craft strong AI prompts which can refine the content on your resume, profile, or cover letter and to make those materials your own.

Step 2: Do The Research

This second step is all about understanding the macro (industry trends, emerging issues and jargon) — and the micro (specific news about the company you’re applying to and the responsibilities of the role you’re seeking).

This step is prime for gen AI to serve as an aggregator. On the macro side, it can help with research like figuring out how an industry is typically structured, what roles exist, what they do, industry jargon, and what are the emerging trends in the space. AI can suggest blogs, publications, podcasts, and other resources you should follow within your industry area to ensure you’re well plugged in and up-to-date on the latest issues. At the micro level, AI can help you dig into the roles you’re interested in and further explain what you might be responsible for or what you should emphasize from your own experience to be a strong fit. It can also help you generate a list of employers who exist in your geographic location and a list of competitors to help you broaden your research.

On the human side, you can take advantage of career events, panels, and programs put on by your school’s career center to hear directly from alumni and employers. After all the research you’ve conducted using gen AI, you’ll be ready to ask more in-depth questions using industry jargon and showcasing the new knowledge you’ve acquired.

Step 3: Network, Network, Network

Networking is a critical piece of the career search process. Use gen AI to help you refine the questions you might ask in an informational interview. Upload the information or notes you’ve taken from your research to help develop strong prompts and informed questions for your conversations. You can also use AI to ask for suggestions of platforms to use when trying to identify peers, alumni, and employers in your field.

At the end of the day though, networking is ultimately about making human connections. It’s about building relationships and taking an interest in someone else. Take the time to meet with alumni, peers, and professionals in the industry or roles you’re most interested in. Ask them about industry trends they’re following, about typical hiring timelines and processes, and allow those conversations to add to the research you’ve already done.

Remember that you can network with anyone. Peers from college, your fellow interns or coworkers from an internship or part-time job, your professors or family friends—all these individuals may be helpful or know someone who could be. Asking questions and being ready to share your own interests or goals could result in great connections. Step 2 and 3 really feed each other and as a result, will help you refine your materials in step 1 and make you far more informed on how to approach step 4.

Step 4: Search For Jobs

Once you’ve done the steps above, you’re ready to start searching for jobs. Once again, the human and AI connections that assisted you with profile-building, researching and networking come together in this final step.

Different job platforms, like Handshake, now utilize gen AI to help you identify open positions in the locations or industries you’re most interested in. And in some cases, can auto populate your information and application materials to make the applying part that much faster.

But remember to use your human connections as sounding boards and sources of encouragement and support. The job search can be taxing and having people to talk to as you go through the process is always helpful.

While the human element remains a foundational piece of any successful job search, it’s increasingly clear that new gen AI-driven guidance can supercharge any process.

 

Forbes.com | December 20, 2023 | Christine Y. Cruzvergara

#CareerAdvice : #ResumeWriting – How to Write a #Resume That Will Impress a Bot ( #AI )…Great REad!

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Getting hired used to mean writing a resume that stood out to the HR manager or recruiter assigned to thumb through them. Today, the gatekeeper is a machine as AI revolutionizes the hiring process. That means the way you write your resume has changed, too.

“AI is handling processes that used to take an enormous amount of time away from engaging with the talent pool,” says Jon Christiansen, PhD, chief intelligence officer of the marketing research firm Sparks Research. “HR managers don’t have to sift through hundreds of resumes, and they can get into their real expertise of recruiting and placing the right talent.”

While this is good news for the HR department, it adds a new challenge for candidates, says Arran Stewart chief visionary officer and co-founder of Job.com, a recruiting platform.

“AI has made the resume writing process far more competitive as it now requires emphasis on personalizing the document for the job in question rather than submitting a generic resume for a myriad of vacancies,” he says. “Where recruiters and hiring managers are able to read between the lines and find the relevance of any skill or accomplishment on your resume to the open positions they have, AI is only concerned with how closely your resume matches with the skills it’s been asked to look for in the job you applied to.”

Get past the bot and in front of the HR manager by doing these six things:

1. WRITE A NEW RESUME FOR EVERY JOB

The ability to blast out one version of a resume and get nibbles is over. Now you have to write a resume that speaks to the job description.

“The job description contains several clues about what the machine is looking for,” says Christiansen. “It’s saying, ‘Here are the knowledge skills I’m looking for, and here’s background I’m looking for.’ Look at the tags, keywords, and streams of text; that’s where you should get started.”

Apply the language to the resume you submit to the job in question, says Stewart. “AI is looking for singular relevance to the role they’re searching for, so including job-specific language is a must if you want to make it to the shortlist,” he says. “It might be slightly more work, but no different than say having different cover letters ready for each position.”

 

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What Skill Sets do You have to be ‘Sharpened’ ?

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2. USE EASY TO UNDERSTAND JOB TITLES

Some companies like to assign creative job titles, like Branding Guru or Planning Expert, but including them on your resume might get you passed over by the machine.

“It’s cool for culture, but that’s not the tags the machine is looking for,” says Christiansen. “If the job description says they’re looking for a marketing manager or product manger, that’s the tag it’s going to look for.”

Christiansen suggests going to the Bureau of Labor Statistics or O-NETand searching standard job titles. “If you can’t find your job title, it’s probably not going to be picked up and tagged during the machine screening,” he says.

Also consider the job progression, adds Stewart. “AI isn’t at the point of a mass scale predictive, so if you’re applying for a job that is senior to your current role as a logical next step in your career, AI won’t make the connection that it is the logical next step,” he says. “If your experience and skills make you seem underqualified, you should write in aspirational terms about your skills and accomplishments. That way the system views you as ready to take on the added challenge.”

3. RESIST THE URGE TO BE CREATIVE

Machines don’t judge you by the font you choose. If you have a font that can’t be read by most word processors, you might get spit out.

“Any font that isn’t within the Microsoft Word platform might not be able to be read,” says Christiansen. “Sometimes using a PDF format might work, but it’s not worth the risk.”

And don’t add graphics. Tables or images might look good, but again, the bot might not be able to recognize it.

“It might look like wasted space to a machine,” says Christiansen.

4. BE PRECISE

Including a long history of experience is no longer necessary, so try to keep your list of experience within the last five years, says Stewart.

“A full 20 years of work history dilutes the experience concentration weighing your resume, which will result in you being removed from shortlists,” he says. “When writing your resume remember the two Rs: keep it relevant and recent.”

5. CHECK YOUR SPELLING

You never want your resume to include spelling or grammatical errors, but a human might have been more forgiving than a machine.

“AI not only sorts through irrelevant applicants, in some cases it highlights the lazy ones as well,” says Stewart. “It’s still important to be sure your information is still meeting the usual standards of excellence expected for professional documents.”

6. INCLUDE A COVER LETTER

While a resume should be written to match the job and advance you past the bot, the cover letter is your chance to shine, says Christiansen.

“It’s an opportunity to speak like a human,” he says. “You can speak directly to the hiring manager, make yourself sound like a human and talk uniquely about the experiences you mentioned that spoke to the job description.”

Christiansen recommends writing three or four paragraphs about how you could fit that team, company and job. “Get into the why,” he says. “A cover letter may be an old practice, but I don’t see them go away. A good hiring manager wants to hear you in that.”

Taking these six steps involve more work on the part of the candidate, but skipping them might be a bigger risk.

“If you send out a generalized resume, it’s a case of garbage in/garbage out,” he says. “You want to get a match because you fit the job. If you’re getting calls from a generalized resume it’s because those companies want warm bodies, whether or not they fit the job. Is that where you want to work?”

 

FastCompany.com |April 1, 2019 | BY STEPHANIE VOZZA  4 MINUTE READ

#CareerAdvice : #FutureSkillSets – The Future of Work Has Arrived — Here’s How to Beat the Competition.

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Between artificial intelligence, big data, machine learning, the Internet of Things and more, many of today’s most cutting-edge technological advances are iterating at a dizzying pace. Add to that fears of automation and an upcoming recession, and employees are facing serious pressure to stay relevant in an ever-changing work environment. But what exactly is on the horizon, and how can you prepare for it now?

To find out, we turned to the winners of Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work in 2019, some of the most innovative organizations out there today. Here’s what they said employees need to know — master these skills now, and you’re guaranteed to stand out above the rest.

Sharpen Your Data Skills

At this point, “data” has become a ubiquitous buzzword in the business world — but for good reason. Technological advances over the past couple of decades have provided companies with an unprecedented level of information, and even the most traditional companies are embracing it in order to make more strategic decisions.

“I’m seeing a few key trends continue and emerge as we look ahead to the new year, including the importance of being data-led. As a team, we’re leveraging our data to field new ideas and innovation and inform decisions,” said Rick Jensen, Senior Vice President, People & Places at Intuit.

“Developing digital skills is more important than ever,” agreed Kevin Peesker, Microsoft Canada President. “I am not speaking about coders or programmers — the shift is every role being impacted by digital, and possessing an awareness of technical and data-infused possibility will be fundamental to making an impact.”

Data proficiency means more than just glancing at numbers and drawing a conclusion, though. Matin Movassate, CEO of data analytics firm Heap, points out that today’s employees need to be able to determine whether or not their data is reliable.

“This grand, AI-driven future can’t happen without a complete, trustworthy dataset,” Movassate said. “So if prospective data engineers, data analysts, data scientists and business intelligence leaders can maintain a maniacal focus on the completeness and quality of their data, they’ll be well-prepared for anything the future has in store.”

Small Company, Big Impact: How Heap Is Preparing (& Hiring) for the Future

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What Skill Sets do You have to be ‘Sharpened’ ?

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Commit to Continuous Learning

Data interpretation/analysis is certainly one skill that will be essential to the future, but with how rapidly technology is evolving, today’s workers need to stay abreast of as many cutting-edge areas as possible. After all, any one of them could completely rewrite the rules of work.

“If you think about certain roles today — cognitive data scientist, machine learning engineer — many of those roles didn’t exist 10 years ago and not only did they not exist, we hadn’t even imagined what they could be. We believe it will be the same in 10 years from now,” Peesker said.

A few trends to stay on top of in particular include “SaaS, cloud computing, mobile, user experience, AI and machine learning,” shared Aron Ain, CEO of HR technology company Kronos Incorporated.

“New ways of working will include more design thinking and working in an agile environment. The rapid development and creative application of new technologies will be applied across the business spectrum, from blockchain to supply chain,” added Manny Maceda, Worldwide Managing Partner at Bain & Company. “Job seekers can prepare by committing to ongoing, self-directed learning.”

Not sure where to start? Subscribing to publications that delve into these topics is always a good idea — a quick Google search should yield plenty of results — as is exploring relevant courses on online platforms like Coursera, edX and Udacity.

Demonstrate Adaptability

With all of the rapid innovation occurring today, it’s critical that workers are able to keep up the pace when the inevitable changes occur.

“Technology is changing at a breathtaking pace, both with the products we develop and offer, as well as the products we use to run our business. We remain deeply focused on embracing new technology, innovating in all areas, breaking what is not broken to make it better, [fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][learning] from our competitors as a means to improve and on and on,” Ain said. “We’re not only going to be part of the future of work — we’re focused on helping to shape it.”

This breakneck speed isn’t just limited to technology companies, though. Other industries, like aviation, have adopted a nimble mindset as well.

“To be successful in [the aviation] industry, one must be agile and able to manage large volumes of change,” explained Greg Muccio, Director of People at Southwest Airlines. “There are many variables that are outside of our control that impact our operations, so there is more pressure to adapt. Change is constant in the airline industry.”

Put Customers First

It might seem counterintuitive, but as technology continues to revolutionize the way we work, a human-centered approach becomes increasingly important. That’s why Intuit puts such an emphasis on what they call “customer obsession.”

“Intuit was customer-obsessed before it was popular, but we’re continuing to hire for, and teach, capabilities that fall in love with the customer problem — not the solution. We want and need all of our employees to really fall in love with the problem in order to best solve it,” Jensen shared. “Diversity of thought, background and craft will help us move the needle on solving problems for our customers quickly.”

Human connection is especially crucial in industries like healthcare, where positive patient-provider relationships are key to favorable outcomes.

“At the end of the day, healthcare candidates must be able to stay connected to the human side of research and patient care. Approaching patients with care and compassion are traits that technology can never replace,” said Dana Bottenfield, VP of Human Resources at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

How to Negotiate Your Salary As A Customer Service Representative

Build Strong Relationships With Colleagues

A people-centric approach isn’t just for those outside of your organization, however.

“Successful job seekers need to have a balance of strong subject matter expertise with a focus on getting results through teamwork,” Bottenfield explained.

“Job seekers need to be comfortable working collaboratively with a broader range of people — data scientists, software developers and design thinkers — to deliver results,” Maceda elaborated. “The new norm is being able to work in new ways and with a more diverse set of talent.”

And as companies grow larger and more complex, maintaining this connection — no matter your location — is imperative.

“As companies continue to move to platforms with more interdependencies across the entire organization, top talent needs the ability to work seamlessly across the organization,” Jensen added.

The key to doing that? Trust, Ain said.

“Technologies like our own are empowering employees to work their way, from anytime, anywhere. Trust is a two-way street, one that’s earned through transparency, reliability, communication and performance. This world of flexibility can be wonderful — and trust is key to making it work.”

GlassDoor.com | January 9, 2019 | Posted by 

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