Fasten your seat belts. The job market is in for a bumpy ride. Make that a very bumpy ride.
A Career Coach’s Perspective
I’ve been an independent career coach and job market observer for 28 years and have coached thousands of people through some seriously dire times, including the devastating Great Recession of 2008-2009, the paralyzing pandemic of 2020, and beyond. We are headed into another, I hate to say, perhaps not as severe, but that’s not out of the realm of possibility, either.
Update Your Résumé — Now
That means you’re increasingly likely to be in a job search before long, not what you were envisioning when, just a couple of short months ago, the job market and overall economy were in the best shape in which they’ve ever been. The cold, hard truth is that it didn’t take long for that to change, and if you don’t buy that from me, take it from 18 Nobel laureates in economics. Truth is truth.
So if you haven’t updated your résumé within the last six months — the absolute longest you should ever go without a tune up — do it now without further delay.
Your Résumé and AI
As with anything else, we’ve been conditioned to go straight to AI for all our worldly needs, so I did too, for the purpose of seeing what kind of advice you’ll get on the matter. The trouble with advice is that most of it isn’t any good and this is especially the case in today’s AI world. I queried ChatGPT four different ways, and while getting dazzled by its pace and scope, I was more than underwhelmed by the poor advice. It was, at best, robotic, not in the least thoughtful, and certainly not new. Offering little or no value, here’s what AI tried to pass off as such — straight from the horse’s mouth — along with comments from yours truly.
AI on How AI Is Screening Résumés
AOI lists ATSs (Applicant Tracking Systems), filtering for keywords, ranking candidates, and actually writing summaries for the readers. This is “changing” things? Perhaps if you’ve been living under a rock. And writing a summary? What’s your résumé doing without one to begin with? AI also touts bias mitigation (although that goes both ways) and interviews via chatbots. Change? Yes. Progress? Um….
AI on How AI Is Writing Résumés
An array of tools can auto-generate bullet points, optimize to match up with certain jobs, and reformat to be more ATS-friendly. That’s nothing you can’t do on your own. And, says AI, instead of your one résumé for every job, AI can do the heavy lifting. One résumé, 10 tailored versions in minutes. Boy, is there going to be a lot of fiction or at least dramatization written here. And besides, creating multiple versions is about the worst advice you can get. What will you do when two or more versions that are flying around the internet both land on one interviewer’s desk? Think that hasn’t happened?
AI on Résumé Tips
Use keywords, stay with simple formatting, quantify your accomplishments, and include a skills section. I checked the first business résumé I ever wrote — 1973 — and all those tips showed up. This is not an AI thing. And it’s not new by a long shot.
The AI Résumé Fallacy
AI touts all its bells and whistles, which are evidently impressive, and if you believe that’s what gets your resume into the right hands, good luck. At a certain point, your résumé goes to someone who can see past key words and optimizations that show up on everyone’s résumé because they’re all using the same AI tools, too. Now you’ve got to tell your story to someone who can discern what’s going on, someone to whom it matters And take a guess: AI can’t do that.
The sum and substance of all this is that I’m not telling you to skip it; I’m telling you you’ve got to do much more than that and much better than that.
Content still matters. The message still matters. Good writing still matters. Style still matters. This will never change.
Career Coach Eli Amdur provides top-notch one-on-one coaching in job search, résumés, interviewing, career planning and executive development. Reach him at [email protected] or (201) 357-5844.
