Many executives and professionals believe they can do everything with AI. While AI can be a great tool to help with a wide variety of things, YOU are still a vital part of the process. In this episode, you will learn more about AI job search tips and utilizing programs to be more effective.
Our host and CEO Porschia, alongside our guest, Max Chan, will also share their insight on the overall value of using AI for your career, and why prompting is important.
They also discuss common challenges people have with AI and how to overcome them. The conversation also includes more detail on what AI tools can be the most beneficial.
Max Chan is a Career Coach, Podcaster and Founder of Chan With A Plan. He has helped over 100 professionals get their dream job through a comprehensive job search strategy consisting of a combination of resume writing, cover letter writing, LinkedIn profile optimization, networking and interview coaching.
What you’ll learn:
- The importance of AI and it’s value in the job search
- AI job search tips to help with specific tasks and projects
- How to create effective prompts for AI software
- The biggest mistakes executives and professionals make with AI
- Insight on some of the best AI tools and software
As a thank you for listening to this episode of the Career 101 Podcast, we are sharing our FREE master class Career 911: Solving the Top 5 Challenges Executives and Professionals Have! It is a training based on solving the common problems our clients have experienced to reach their goals. You can get access to the master class here!
Resources:
- Chan with a Plan on YouTube
- Episode Transcript
Porschia: [00:00:00] Today we are talking about AI job search tips with Max Chan. Max Chan is a career coach, podcaster, and founder of Chan with a Plan. He has helped over 100 professionals get their dream job through a comprehensive job search strategy consisting of a combination of resume writing, cover letter writing, LinkedIn profile optimization, networking, and interview coaching.
Hi Max, how are you today?
Max: Good, [00:01:00] Portia. Great to be here.
Porschia: Great. I am excited to have you with us to discuss using AI in your job search, because AI, as we all know, is a super hot topic right now. But first we want to know a little more about you. So tell me about seven year old Max.
Max: Seven year old Max was in a small town in Oakville where born and raised likes collect Pokemon cards.
Pokemon cards was a big thing back in the day in the nineties. So like collecting Pokemon cards, watching Saturday morning cartoons just, the usual kid stuff that you enjoy again in the nineties.
Porschia: Yeah, I loved Pokemon too. The cards and all that good stuff.
Max: Yeah, for sure.
Yeah. And a big, I’m able to leave fan and still to still a fan to this day.
Porschia: Okay. All right. Get the hockey in. So what did you want to be when you grew up, Max?
Max: When [00:02:00] I a police officer was what I wanted to be when I grew up. That’s the The first job that I thought of which is no surprise.
Like when you’re young in elementary school, teachers would ask you, Oh, what do you want to be? When you grow up as usually the common ones, right? Like the police officer, fireman, doctor, astronaut. So I just picked the police officer.
Porschia: All right. So now we know something more about you, Max, you’re into law and order and all that good stuff following.
Max: Exactly. There’s actually a reiterate iteration of law and order for Toronto that got released about a few weeks ago. So
Porschia: yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Max: Cool.
Porschia: We’ll have to check that out. So what was your first job, Max?
Max: My first job was flipping burgers at a fast food restaurant called Harvey’s.
It’s big in Canada. I don’t think there’s any in the U. S. But yeah, Harvey’s Fast Food. Again I flip burgers. I make the fries. So I worked there for a couple years. And then once I went to university, I quit that job. And I did some grocery. So like a stock person at a grocery store. www.
larryweaver. com
Porschia: Very cool. So my [00:03:00] first job was at Wendy’s. I was with you. I was doing fries and taking orders and working in the drive through window and in the cashier. So I totally understand the fast food burger life as a teenager. So tell us about some highlights or pivotal moments in your career before you started your business.
Max: I think the first pivotal moment in my career was trying to get that first job out of university college. It was definitely a struggle for me. It took about 11 months. It’s all like this. My story is all over my website in terms of how I got started. But yeah, it took 11 months. But I also work with a career coach.
So I’m a career coach myself, and I do see the value in it. So that career coach really helped me get interviews with her resume, but also helped me with interview prep as well. So that will help me really. Learn speed up the learning curve in terms of getting that first job. It is very difficult.
Especially when you have no experience. I just had a couple internships on [00:04:00] my resume, but nothing too granular so I was getting interviews, but I was lacking experience. So again That long job search really taught me the art of being persistent and constantly improving your strategy if things don’t work out.
So that was one of the big pivotal moments in my career starting out as a grad to navigate the job search and corporate waters.
Porschia: Yeah you got started with that early. So that’s great, Max. So what was that first kind of job out of college? What were you doing?
Max: I was a digital marketing assistant.
So this is how bad inflation has caught up has been I started my career in 2013. I started at 30, 000, but now that’s not even minimum wage, right? So that’s how like much inflation has creeped up. It’s, I think it’s a bit higher now, but 30K is not even minimum wage in Canada now. Things have changed for sure.
Porschia: Yeah. Yeah. So what would you say was, your biggest career challenge before starting your own business? [00:05:00]
Max: I think definitely trying to pivot from a small agency to industry like a big corporate company. I think it’s a lot easier to get into big corporate out of university if you like play your cards, cause a lot of big companies do have those graduate programs to help you get in the door quickly. However, like if you don’t get in through that door, it becomes a lot more difficult. Yeah. Yeah. Because what tends to happen is if you only have small business experience, they tend to not want to hire you.
They want to hire someone that has the same scope of experience. So if you work at one large company, it’s tends to be easy for you to contribute, pivot to another large company. But going from a small to large is, was definitely a big career challenge. So again since I understand the value of career coaches, I hired another career coach to help me with that transition.
And I got that job through networking. So the first job. Getting into digital marketing was through applying online with an optimized resume. But the second pivot that I made into large corporate was through networking. So I understand the value of both sides of the spectrum in terms of applying online and networking.
So that was my second biggest challenge from a career pivot before starting [00:06:00] my business.
Porschia: Yeah, you’re right. Networking is really important. So I heard that, you had worked with some career coaches. What motivated you to become a coach?
Max: I saw the I saw the value in career coaching because unfortunately, University, your parents even employment agencies by the government.
They don’t really give you a updated advice. It’s usually very outdated stuff. I’m sure the outdated stuff is still say add references upon request or add an objective statement. I very pass a advice and with things evolving so quickly now, especially with AI, which we’ll get into you can’t really use like advice from even a few years ago.
So I understand like the value of a career coach. My first career coach I worked with, she had about like 20, 25 years of HR experience before she did her own consulting. So she definitely helped me speed up the learning curve. And then on the other career coach, she was also like a recruiter for big companies as well and had a strong track record.
So ultimately, I think if you really want to speed up your [00:07:00] process having a well, credible, qualified career coach will definitely help you get to where you want to go faster.
Porschia: Yeah I obviously agree with that, Max. So I really want to dig in today. So that our audience can learn some best practices on using AI in their job search.
But first I want to ask you, why do you think using AI is important? The
Max: the saying goes either you adapt or you die, right? Now I’m not saying. You make the resume completely AI AI should give you the foundation, but you still should have creative thinking to help make it yours. Cause I’ve heard stories from recruiters on LinkedIn about how they know what a chat GBT resume looks like.
It’s just the way that they phrase their wording and the wording format. So I, again, don’t recommend you just copy and paste the resume that chat, chat, GBT, it gives you and then send it but it should be a good Creative foundation to get you started. So going back to [00:08:00] the importance of AI, again, like there’s always you always have to optimize your resume for each application.
And if you mainly do it every single time, it’s going to be very inefficient. But with using AI, it will definitely speed up. More of the manual work faster. So one example would be, you would say this is my resume. This is a job I’m applying for. What can I do to improve it? Then chat, GPT will give you some recommendations.
So now you know exactly what to focus on compared to trying to manually guess it on your own. So the power of AI is not supposed to be done for you, but it’s supposed to give you, A launching pad to help optimize your resume faster. So you can customize your applications a lot quicker, making your job search more efficient, getting you more interviews.
Porschia: Yeah, I love that idea of using AI as a launching pad. Like you said I think a lot of people just Assumed, especially when it was I won’t say just coming out because AI has been out, but when chat GPT was [00:09:00] becoming really popular, I think a lot of people assumed that AI would do all the work for them, if that makes sense.
And yeah, I agree. It can be a great starting point, but it’s still can’t just replace. That’s the customization that you can put into a document and understanding your background and all of that to your point about the resume. Max, we’ve already started talking about AI and I realized that I’m speaking from, the perspective of people who know what it is.
But I’m sure you come across people like this and I do as well. Not everyone knows about artificial intelligence or AI. So how would you explain AI to executives and professionals who don’t really understand it?
Max: So AI is basically, again, like the different AI models, like chap GPT is one of them. I think.
Another one’s called Bard from Google. It’s. What it is it’s a combination of like machine learning data [00:10:00] points and modeling. And what happens is it creates a model. And then what you would do is you would input commands to it, and then it will spit out information based off the model and the data that it has to help you generate a response.
So AI is basically a good example would be like the manufacturing space, right? Like before it was all manual labor, but now you have machines to automate different processes. It’s similar in that scope where instead of you doing everything by hand AI can help assist you in different ways to help get you the result faster.
Porschia: So from your perspective, what are some of the best tasks or projects to use AI for?
Max: So from a career coaching job search perspective, In terms of the AI at least for ChatGPT, definitely helping you with the documentation. So helping you craft good bullet points for your resume, help you craft a good tailored cover letter help you craft a good LinkedIn profile what to write in your messages when you’re going to do some outreach and also [00:11:00] with interview prep.
So again, ChatGPT is very text based. There’s obviously other AI tools for imagery and video but from a job search perspective, your main foundational documents are all text based. So for now as a professional, if you’re in your job search, a chat GPT or text based AI tool would be the right approach to help improve your job search prospects.
Porschia: Yeah. I agree. So tell us more because you touched on interviewing. I know some things that I’ve suggested clients use AI for when it comes to certain aspects, but how could someone use it for interviewing, which is not as text based, right? As the resume or LinkedIn.
Max: So you use AI tools to help craft a sample answer.
So what I’d like to do in terms of prompting is, and then before we dive deeper into the interview stuff your chatbot, your AI tool is only as good as the prompts you [00:12:00] give it. So if you give very generic prompts, give you generic results. If you give a very, Detail prompt is going to give you more accurate results.
And then if you add like data points, custom data points from your own perspective, it’ll improve the accuracy even more. But going back to your actual original question in terms of how to use it for interview prep what I like to use what I like to do is. A couple of things. The first is I would say this is a job ad I’m interviewing for his position.
Please provide 50 interview questions categorized by technical and behavioral. So you, you want the technical side because. In an interview as a technical interview, for example, product management, they want to know like your technical process and your skills there. You also want to have a category of questions for behavioral because they also want to know your soft skills, how you communicate with others, conflict management leadership, et cetera.
So using the job ad to create a interview questions is a great help because then you have a good idea of what they’re going to ask you. The second part of using AI for interview prep [00:13:00] is. Taking one of those sample questions and then create an answer to that. So the steps I would do is this is the interview question that I need help with based on the star format, which is situation task action result.
The other alternative is the car format challenge action result regardless of which one you use, you would say Please use the star format to answer this question using this bullet point for my resume. So whatever accomplishment you want to highlight you would put it in. So a bullet point example could be improve operational efficiency by 20 percent by implementing this software tool.
And then you hit enter. And then it’ll give you a sample answer that you can follow and it will actually break down the answer into those four parts. It’ll tell you the situation tell you the task of what to say there, tell you the action and then tell you the result. And then you can refine it as you go.
Again, I do recommend you not try to memorize, but it gives you word for word because again it will sound a bit robotic cause it, again it spits out how, like how the general [00:14:00] person would talk, but, You might not talk like that. So try to add in your own words to make it a bit more conversational and your style of communication, but it will give you as we already said, a launching pad to help give you an interview answer that helps you stand out.
Porschia: Yeah, I like that. And also to your point about, Putting it in your own words, using your own tone, your own language. You also want to add in, real things that you have done from your past and [00:15:00] incorporate like your own information into that as well. I think sometimes people just go from one extreme to the other where they think, Oh I’ve just got to literally read or literally memorize.
And to your point, you really want to make that response your own. And use that as like a template or a starting point. So thank you for, touching on prompting because that’s where I want to go next. So a lot of people know, but some might not the prompt that you provide to chat GPT or other AI software makes a big difference in the quality of the response that you receive.
So how do you recommend people create effective prompts for AI software?
Max: Yeah. So what I would do is. So this is what I would do in terms of writing a bullet, like writing bullet points for role. So the first prop is describe what you’re looking for. So you would say Hey, I’m looking to improve the bullet points for my role for my resume [00:16:00] here.
And these are, and then just list the example of the bullet points. Or if you don’t have any bullet points at all, you could say, I’m looking to create some bullet points for this role, these are some of my accomplishments whatever it may be. You just have to give a foundational point with some data points that they can leverage.
Because if you just say read me some bullet points for a digital marketer role, but no additional data points of your own accomplishments, it’s going to really, it’s just going to spill generic stuff. And then everybody’s going to catch on that. You just put in the chat GBT and hoping something comes out and then you apply with it.
So again giving instructions with some data points to reference as a first step. Second step is. Highlighting how you want to write the bullet points in the format. So you can again, use the same like car format please write the bullet points in car format, challenge action result. And then the next, the last step would be these are some example bullet points using the car for it that you can reference.
So now it has three things that you provide the instructions of what you’re looking for. The format you’re looking for, and then some examples that they can leverage to make the bullet points. Similar to that format that you shared. So that would be [00:17:00] the formula on writing a good prompt where again, provide instructions provide like a formula, a specific format that you want them to follow.
And then the third would be some actual examples that they can reference. So that’s what I would do there. And then it will spit you out. Some bullet points. And then based on that, you can refine it. You say, these are great, but can you please incorporate like XYZ or incorporate this keyword? Again, it’s a reiterative exercise.
So it’s not always going to give you the perfect result the first time. So you may have to fine tune it with a few additional prompts after. I
Porschia: love that. I love all of that, Max. And I like how you touched on giving examples. I think a lot of people miss that part. So they just, provide the instructions and they might provide a format.
I find a lot of people aren’t even providing a format, but they’re getting step one. And you gave us four steps, right? The instruction, the format of the [00:18:00] formula, examples, and then refining through that re editor of process. So I love that those are some, I think, tangible ways that people can think about prompting to get the kind of results that they want and refine them and really make them their own.
What are some of the biggest mistakes you’ve seen professionals and executives make when it comes to using AI in their job search?
Max: I think just copy and pasting what AI gives you without like fine tuning at all. I think that’s the most common thing. And then the other thing is not using your own words.
Cause again, like a lot of like LinkedIn content creators or recruiters will. Can pinpoint if it’s just completely chat GVT or it’s actually your own voice, right? So as I already said, from the beginning of our conversation, the chat GVT or whatever you actually use, the initial content that it gives you should be a foundation or a launching pad to help you refine it on your own, but it should not be like the main thing that you just copy and paste.
So that’s the biggest mistake where [00:19:00] people will just copy and paste what chat GVT gives them and not really reread it. Or format it correctly and then send it off. And that’s not going to get the result you’re looking for, especially with more people knowing what chat GPT is and more tools that are going to figure out if you’re using AI or not in your resume.
Porschia: And I love that point because I have heard and I don’t know the specifics. I want to know if you’ve heard about this as well. I have heard that there are programs that can like decode if something is written with chat GPT. Tell us more about those.
Max: Yeah. So one of them I think is called GPT zero where you basically Kate take the content that you get.
So let’s say you’re a recruiter. You get a resume and you’ve read and you feel it. It’s funky the way it’s worded. So what you do is you can copy and paste parts of the content of the resume into the tool. And then it will say based off our analysis, this looks 99% AI generated, or it says It looks about 3 percent generated by [00:20:00] AI, but overall it is a human written, right?
So there are those detection tools that again, no detection tools are perfect, but if a tool says a 99% AI generated, then it’s probably a good indicator that is AI generated, but it’s more, if it’s more like 50, 50 type of thing, then you’ll have to use your judgment at that point.
Porschia: Yeah, that’s great.
So if anyone thought they were just going to have chat GPT barred or some other AI platform, just tell you what to do. Please don’t do that because people can and will know and to Max’s point, recruiters who look at hundreds of resumes, a week, know this sort of thing. So I want to know just what are some other tips that you can share to help people use AI in their job search?
Max: There’s a lot of YouTube videos out there that you could say resume chat, GBT advice. So there’s a lot of free tutorials that you can leverage to teach you how to [00:21:00] write proper prompts teach you like how to refine your prompts to improve the output of the tool. As I always say, it’s never the tool.
It’s the person behind it. That’s the problem. So again, like going through YouTube videos on how to write proper prompts, even I think even open AI has A link or a page on the website that highlights like how to write prompts effectively. So I think that’s a good foundation that you can go with in regards to using the tool properly to make it more effective for your job search.
Porschia: I love that. So you’ve mentioned a few tools in your opinion. What are some of the other, best AI tools or resources that people can use?
Max: Yeah, so again ChattGVT is obviously the most popular one. There are other ones as well. In all honesty, if you just Google resume AI tools in Google search, you’re probably going to find a good amount that you can play with.
Unfortunately, a lot of these I think you do have to pay to export the results [00:22:00] compared to using ChattGVT, which is free. But a simple Google search of resume AI tools can give you a bunch of results that you can try and test.
Porschia: Yeah something I heard, and I don’t know if you’ve heard this or you have any thoughts, but I think I saw this on LinkedIn a couple of months ago, and someone was saying they were marketers, and they had tested content written by chat GPT and bard.
And put it in front of people. And they were saying that more people preferred the Bard written content than the chat GPT written content. Have you heard that? Or do you have any thoughts on chat GPT versus Bard?
Max: No, unfortunately I haven’t really heard much of it. I tend to just stay with what I know is a chat GPT.
Cause like I built tools using the chat GPT engine and the the program that I use doesn’t have the Bard format. So for me, going back to even for a professional job search, like again, there’s so many tools out there. Like it, it doesn’t make sense for you to like constantly test and do different things.
Like a common thing a [00:23:00] lot of people do is like information overload where the struggle in the job search. And then they talk to three or four career coaches, ask for advice on the resume and they all say different things. Ultimately you, you have to, At yourself, like out of all the advice here what should I go with?
And just stick with that. Because again you can’t expect any of these pieces of advice to give you results overnight. You just have to believe in yourself, based off the credibility of these people the track record, what’s the best advice that they’ve given me and let me action this for 30 days to see what happens.
Because like people tend to want to take advice here. Try a couple of times doesn’t work. Let’s go somewhere else to do this and do that. And then it’s a ever ending cycle of trying a whole bunch of things and nothing working out because it’s not giving me enough time to refine it on their own approach.
Because the thing is like with a career coach creating content, giving advice. They’re trying to cater to a general audience. So you have to take that advice and try to tail it to your own personal career, and then that’s how it works. But everybody takes it at face value and makes the change of base off that face value, and they don’t get the results that way, because again, they only try it a [00:24:00] few times or not.
Solely refining that foundational advice to something that makes sense for them.
Porschia: That is something that I want to echo a million times, Max, because I talk a lot about creating a customized job search strategy, right? So not just something that you Googled or that you found on chat GPT, or you heard.
Just this general strategy that someone talked about, but really creating one that is based on where you are in your career, the jobs that you’re targeting, the industries that you’re targeting, maybe even the geographical area that you’re in. And then also what you like doing, right? Some people don’t like doing certain things.
Maybe you can create a job search strategy that minimizes or eliminates that. those things. So thank you for mentioning that. I think my last question about tools is about to your point about the paid versus free. So there’s a free version of chat GPT and then there’s the paid version of chat GPT.
What are [00:25:00] your thoughts on kind of the differences between those levels?
Max: So I’ve used paid chat GBT for since forever. And in my opinion, it is the better route. Again, I’m not sure how much has changed, but when it was free, it was just chat GBT 3. 5 and the results are not good for me.
Chat GPT four it’s more of a fine model, a better data points. Also with the paid version, you’re always a priority. So you tend to get results faster. I remember for chat GPT it’s a lot, it’s a bit slower and the free version. Also there’s a certain cap of how many times you use it for free before you have to pay.
For me paying the 20 a month, I’ve never had that issue where it says, Oh, you’re out of so you have to wait a few hours to refresh. I’ve never had that issue. So again if you’re just doing it for yourself, just to write your resume a few times, then the free version makes sense, or just buy it for a month and cancel it.
But again, like if you’re using it for, Your business are using it for like your career journey. Then I would recommend the paid version just because it’s going to be faster and more [00:26:00] accurate in terms of giving you results. And I think there’s other features too. I think you can access the chat GPT store.
You can make your own GPTs to possibly sell or market your business. So there is a lot more options if you go the paid route.
Porschia: Thank you for letting us know that. So tell us more about Chan with a plan.
Max: So Chan with a plan is a career coaching business that helps, as you said hundreds of professionals get their dream job.
So we do a variety of career coaching writing services. Such as resume writing, cover letter writing, LinkedIn optimization interview coaching, networking strategy, all that stuff. We have recently released some AI tools that again, use chat, GVT we help speed up the process because as we mentioned throughout the whole conversation, you have to create prompts, but for my tools that I created, the prompts are already built on the backend.
All you have to do is just answer a few questions and then it’ll spit out some answers for you some content that you can leverage. So that saves that extra step for some of that, this, Doesn’t care about wanting to get into prompting and just wants the result. We basically help you skip [00:27:00] that step with the tools.
So in summary, we offer career coaching services to do all the like manual writing of those job search documents and interview coaching. But we also have a do it yourself solution. If you just want to use some AI tools to help refine the resume and job search documents on your own.
Porschia: That is great.
That is great. So we’ll be providing a link to your website and other social channels in our show notes so people can find you online. But what is the best way for someone to get in touch with you?
Max: I think the quickest way would be either connect with me on LinkedIn and send me a DM. You can say heard you on Portia’s podcast.
And then I’ll know exactly what you’re talking about. So that’s one way I connect and DM me. The second is just go to my website and book a call there. And again in the show notes, there’ll be a place so you can take a look at the tools if you’re interested in purchasing those.
But again best way to contact me is connect with me on LinkedIn DM me or go to my website and schedule [00:28:00] a call there.
Porschia: Great. So now, Max, I want to ask you our final question that we ask all of our guests. How do you think executives or professionals can get a positive edge in their career?
Max: Never never stop learning always look to evolve. And build up your skillset. I’ve worked with some clients that have been out of the job search for ages. They got recently laid off and they haven’t had to search for a job in 10 years. And now they’re completely out of the loop on how the job market has changed.
So if you’re, again, even if you don’t plan to leave your job anytime soon, like staying on the pulse of like new tools and new trends in the job market will definitely help you adapt to that faster. So when the situation does happen where you need to look for a new job, you understand how the job market works now.
So you have better success there. So I think that would be one of the most critical things that a professional can do to help them navigate the very competitive job market waters.
Porschia: Yeah. Max, [00:29:00] you have shared a lot of tips with us today, and I’m sure our listeners can use them to be more confident in their careers.
We appreciate you being with us.
