As a curiosity yesterday I tried to do different things with ChatGPT to see if it had gotten any better. It had improved in some ways from when I last tested it 6 months ago.
This time when I fed it my old resume job description points it resulted in summary that was easier for non technical people to understand. I asked it to create a job description that was recruiter-facing so that it wouldn’t use any jargon that only hiring managers/IT experts might know.
I then wrote articles yesterday how I used it to manipulate the background of my profile photo. I asked it to use my resume summary of core skills to create a tagcloud and to format it to the size of the LinkedIn background photo space. It had some trouble with that and I had to tell it several times to get the right size.
I updated my resume so that it matched my new LinkedIn profile in Word and that was easy to do. Just copy and paste.
Then I changed the tagline at the top of my profile instead of just my top 5 skills, I specifically used the core skills that ChatGPT identified from my resume so that they could easily see that I had the skills.
Now many of these additional words were things that recruiters/hiring managers asked about when they contacted me. You can’t assume that a recruiter understands that being an MCSA means that you have used Active Directory and set it up, and so when you talk about Azure AD in your resume they don’t understand it means Entra. One of the downsides of MS changing words is that people who aren’t technical are confused and make it hard to identify your skills.
Now ChatGPT wasn’t perfect. It identified some skills that I didn’t want to advertise and while I am not ashamed of them, no one seems to care that I have them. For example I saved many companies I worked for tens of thousands of dollars by rethinking their process. I am not bragging here, it is just surprising that cost savings doesn’t seem to be a skill valued in IT people. Normally when I talk with clients I ask them what their priorities are, and if they don’t have any I suggest security, reliability, ease of use and cost savings as good targets. Almost everyone agrees that they are the goals they want.
So you have to edit some of the things that ChatGPT gives you. I deleted entire sections because no one really cares. It had a breakdown of responsibilities from my oldest job on my resume and after 6 years those skills are less valued in the market. I was thinking of dropping that job actually because right now my resume is at 3 pages and ideally I want to keep it to 2.
The challenge of course is that recruiters ask to see 5 years of experience especially if the job asks for 10 or more years and they don’t want to look at the LinkedIn profile. Yet I also have been told in the past that 1-2 pages is ideal. It is impossible to even summarize what I have done and whatever you leave out, it is the same as if you never did it.
Good luck on updating your LinkedIn Profile and resume.