If you're looking for a new job, a great resume can get your foot in the door. Unlike a cover letter, which has to be tweaked for every new position, your resume needs to be updated only every year or two to showcase your skills, experience, education, honors and references.
With the state of the job market; mass layoffs; and the shift to the gig economy, investing time now to create an epic resume will pay off. Your resume is the first touch-point you have with a prospective employer, but if staring at a blank page and trying to write about yourself is discouraging, then let artificial intelligence do the legwork.
ChatGPT, the breakout generative AI tool, can help you with the best practices of resume writing and speed up the process. If there's one thing AI is good at, it's synthesizing, structuring and summarizing information. And once you have your resume, you can use it to create a custom cover letter.
You can use a free version of ChatGPT or pay $20 per month for added features like the most recent models, priority access during peak usage, and image generation.
If you're struggling to condense career highlights over decades into two pages, read on.
Creating a resume from scratch
Set yourself up for success by doing some preparation. ChatGPT needs context, otherwise it'll spit out generic content that's sometimes even wrong. I started by researching reporter resume templates and jotted down notes about past experience, education and accomplishments.
Then to find out what ChatGPT needs, just ask. "Can you write me a resume?" was my first prompt, and ChatGPT conveniently told me all the information to input so it could get to work.
I replied with all my information, outlined like this, and attached my preferred format:
Here is my professional summary: [paste]
Here is my work experience: [paste]
Here are my major clients: [paste]
Here is my education: [paste]
Please generate a list of skills based on my experience and format my resume like the example below: [paste template]
ChatGPT does a great job of organizing information into a cohesive format, but I wanted to change it so it flowed a little better (it put my education before my experience, making it look at first glance like I didn't have any experience).
Please reorganize the following sections in this order:
- Contact Details
- Summary
- Experience
- Major Clients
- Skills
- Education
Looking good.
Keep your info less sensitive
You'll see that I didn't give the chatbot my contact details to add to the resume. I prefer to keep my sensitive information out of the model to avoid any future data breaches or unnecessary risk, so I'll add my email, phone number and address myself in the final version.
When reviewing ChatGPT's draft, I noticed two issues:
- My 10 years as a full-time freelancer needed to be fleshed out, by adding noteworthy projects and long contracts.
- The skills list was way too long.
Back in ChatGPT I wrote the following:
Please add two contract roles under Freelance Reporter and Writer in the experience section.
Freelance Reporter at NerdWallet, August 2022 - present. Tasks: Writing personal finance advice articles, providing insights and strategies to educate and empower everyday consumers in Australia. Topics include credit cards, travel points, frequent flyer programs, BNPL, credit scores, money management, and more.
Freelance Reporter at Decential, September 2022 - present. Tasks: Reporting on the people, projects and protocols in the world of web3. Cover news, interview founders, write deep dive features and commentary, and cover in-person events and conferences.
Then, instead of reducing the skills list, I asked that it be arranged in two columns. The chatbot put the info into a table, which I didn't like, so I asked that it be removed.
ChatGPT still had a hard time with it. I asked it again to present the info in two columns, with a space in between but without a table or borders. You can highlight a section and reply specifically there.
But it still didn't work, so I stopped wasting time and did it myself directly in the document.
Final tweaks
Before I made my final tweaks, I asked ChatGPT to provide a short list of suggestions for how to improve my resume. It gave me some solid advice -- like highlighting achievements, quantifying results, tailoring my resume to a specific job, adding keywords and making my professional summary more concise -- but take it with a grain of salt.
For example, my professional summary shows my narrative abilities and doesn't take up much real estate. I did, however, add a section for notable projects.
Though some advice was relevant, like adding metrics to achievements and starting each bullet point with a strong action verb, the others weren't necessary. For instance, I didn't want to make my profile more concise, because that's where I show off my narrative ability for writing jobs. When using artificial intelligence, always trust your human instinct.
Last, I wanted to get it down from four pages to three, so I arranged my major clients into two columns and reduced the skills list. You can see the final version of my AI-created resume below.
Once ChatGPT is done with the nitty gritty, you can add the finishing touches yourself. I'll drop in my logo and byline hyperlinks, then it's good to go!
For more AI tips, check out how to use Midjourney to create custom wedding invitations and how to use AI-powered Grammarly to do all of your editing. For news and hands-on reviews of gen AI tools ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and more, check out CNET's AI Atlas hub.
ChatGPT's final resume for me:
