Leveraging AI in Your Job Search
On July 8, 2025, Jeremy Schifeling outlined the numerous benefits AI tools can offer job seekers who hope to refine their job searches, make new connections, or fine tune their resumes. This session was the second in our Searching for Opportunities in and beyond a Transformed Industry series, highlighting best practices to adopt in our job searches. Laura Sheehan, Walsh School of Foreign Service, moderated this discussion.
During his presentation, Schifeling enumerated the best ways to prompt AI tools using specific key words and commands to ensure that the program delivers the best information. He also outlined common applications, such as Chat GPT , Yoodli , and CareerBot 3000 , that provide helpful capabilities to job seekers. Finally, he cautioned session participants about the common pitfalls to which users may fall victim, and spotlighted AI’s greatest benefit: the ability for users to craft language tailored for specific job opportunities and recruiters.
Without doubt, AI tools’ effectiveness depends on how we wield them, and they can be intimidating to use. Yet, for Schifeling, these AI-powered capabilities should not be discounted. They carry immense opportunities for job seekers who can leverage their power for success on the job market.
Some of the most notable advantages include:
- Identifying opportunities using key words and past position titles.
- Drafting questions and outreach for new connections.
- Creating draft resumes that highlight your skills and experience.
During the initial stages of job searching, prompting AI tools to identify organizations that may be hiring, conduct operations in a space with which you are familiar, or maintain offices close to where you live can be an invaluable way to find your next potential employer quickly. Within a few minutes, in fact, you can find 5-10 organizations of interest and guide your job-seeking activities more effectively.
When looking for potential contacts at these institutions of interest, AI tools can not only help you draft outreach emails, but (perhaps more important) they can also generate questions to ask the contact or recruiter to ensure you’re getting the information you need (e.g., How does the organization’s work line up with my background? Does this work align with my values? In what ways can I showcase my experience with the greatest impact?).
Finally, as you complete an application, AI tools can create draft resumes that highlight users’ skills and experience effectively – and in a way that can get through AI-powered resume screening programs. This advantage is likely the biggest advantage to using AI-powered tools in your job search. If you can employ the proper prompting language while using these AI tools to beat the Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), and prepare your best interview plan of attack, you will position yourself for success.
Many of these benefits depend on our ability to prompt these AI tools to comb through our resumes, LinkedIn profiles, cover letters, and more to shape and focus our job search – and these tasks require careful prompting.
When prompting AI tools, Schifeling stressed the importance of asking AI programs simple queries and specifying your strengths, background, and goals clearly and succinctly. Doing so allows the user to access accurate and relevant information.
Of course, it is vital to also use discretion when leveraging AI tools. For example, relying on AI to write cover letters or resumes from scratch is not advised, as the language AI models use will read as clunky. They ma may even present untrue or incorrect information! Indeed, coming across as neither competent nor even human(!) would be far from ideal for any job application.
For Schifeling, it is critical to remember that AI “hallucinates” and will make up language and experiences out of whole cloth if you give it the leeway to do so. Thus, it is crucial to prompt it correctly and review what it produces diligently. AI requires the human eye to ensure it operates properly and produces appropriate outputs.
Despite these potential pitfalls, AI provides numerous potential benefits to job seekers. Practicing with prompts, drafting, and reviewing AI outputs can help us job search more effectively and, ideally, achieve better results as well!
Ultimately, AI’s best uses are in sparking our creativity to express our background and experiences in new ways, and in crystallizing our thinking about new job opportunities or industries. Indeed, the job search landscape has changed dramatically, and AI is at the center of this transformation. As such, these AI programs are here to stay, and it would be prudent for us to embrace these technologies. Provided we use these tools wisely, AI can be a boon for job seekers.
As Schifeling advised attendees: “Use AI for what is good for: analyzing keywords, sifting through large troves of data, and figuring out what’s missing [from our resumes].” When we tell our story, we must use our own voices. Otherwise, Schifeling warns, “we simply become another commodity or another faker who is kicked out of the process.”
Other Previous Sessions
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