ChatGPT & Job-Seeking — a Prequel
Part 1 of this series, describes the genesis of this unexpected journey into how ChatGPT can be applied to the job seeking process.
Please see the Story Index for the other yarns in this series.
First things First
Before we start digging into ChatGPT-specific use cases, it’s worth ensuring we’re all on the same page about the Job-seeking landscape: what should be in a CV, what aspects of Project Management do you want to highlight, and what’s your job-seeking strategy? Or, if we’re not on the same page, at least you know what page I’m on.
I don’t want to boil the ocean, but what I will outline in these posts is predicated on my views on what a CV should be and how it is used. Again, I’ll stress that I’m not an HR or recruitment person. I’m laying out my perspective based on decades of hiring, firing and looking for work.
In future posts, I’ll refer back to these concepts at different points, so it’s handy to consolidate them here.
Project Management Capability
When job-seeking, what aspect of your project management capability are you looking to communicate in your CV? I see two extremes in a spectrum, illustrated by the below:
My perspective is perhaps a little black and white, but you can imagine a spectrum between these two extremes, with different mixes of process and enablement focus.
Where do you fit on that spectrum? What attributes and capabilities do you value, and how do you surface these strengths?
It’s partly your decision and partly an understanding of what the hiring folks are looking for. You’ll get the latter information from the job advertisement, which hopefully includes a detailed (and accurate) Job Description.
I value an Enablement focus, and when hiring, I look for attributes that indicate a candidate’s Agency: their ability to make decisions and take ownership. You can read more about this in this article (look for the “Principle of Reflective Agency”. Also, several of my Axioms of Project Management refer to Agency and its importance for project managers. Check out Axioms #14–17 and # 26 in Adam On: Projects (Volume 1).
Value
It might sound a bit odd, but there’s a strong argument for using the same conceptual model in personal marketing content as I do for projects. For years, I’ve endeavoured to infuse this model into my projects with varying success. But whether other people see this or not, it’s a framework I overlay into every activity I perform during my project management roles.
The “Program Logic Model” (“PLM”) is a conceptual framework developed to force the project owners to identify the causal relationship between the things that they want to do (tasks etc.) and the customer value that the program will ultimately enable. The Program Logic Model framework, as defined by the Kellog Foundation is illustrated below:
It’s important to note that this isn’t a flow diagram. The arrows above in the diagram don’t show the flow of deliverables, but the causal relationship between one level and the next.
More information is available here and in Axioms # 18 and # 34 of Adam On: Projects (Volume 1).
Why is this Relevant?
I’ve included this material because it relates to the very common problems I see in many project manager CVs and how we might provide some structure to guide how we fix those problems.
It’s my observation that on the “Process vs Enablement” spectrum described above, many project managers, especially those early in their careers, are jammed heavily into the “Process” end of the spectrum.
And this shows in their CVs, which frequently include the following problems:
- Very task and technical-oriented — the CVs are chock full of what they did, the techniques they used and the technologies they applied, but not very clear on what they achieved or what benefit accrued from their activities.
- Lots of noise words —including project management jargon and buzzwords that bloat the CV content. Phrases like “worked collaboratively”, “acted decisively”, “made a strategic decision”, or “Driving team success” and many more. Some resumes are chock-a-block full of these statements.
- Non-discriminating narrative — explaining basic tasks and activities that anyone would do (or say they were doing) if they were involved in pretty much any project. Such things as “organising meetings”, “liaising with stakeholders” (collaboratively or otherwise), or “proactively solving problems”.
Where CVs mention value and enablement at all, it’s frequently buried at the end of a statement of activities and techniques. As in, “I did all this great stuff, and then this too, and this technique, and used this technology, and oh, by the way, the client made a billion bucks out of it.” Readers tend to scan documents and often don’t finish sentences if they don’t see anything interesting. In journalist writing, this is called “burying the lead” and it doesn’t do anyone any favours.
Job-seeking Strategies
You’ve got several options here, including both tactical and strategic:
Tactical:
- Reactive: Responding to job ads. This is the most tactical and reactive approach, but it involves a huge proportion of job seekers’ activities and concerns.
- Proactive: Push out your availability to contacts, use social media, and narrow cast your job-seeking mode, e.g., flagging your availability on social networks and job sites.
Strategic:
- Leveraging your network: By developing and maintaining a healthy professional network, you can leverage this in your job-seeking. What differentiates this from the tactical “Proactive” approach is that you’re regularly in contact with the network, so the relationships are relatively fresh, and they probably already know about your situation as a result.
- Strategic Targeting: This simple (but difficult) strategy is laid out in the book “What Color is Your Parachute?”, one of the few career books I’ve ever read (maybe the only one). You find companies you would like to work for and develop your relationship with them until you get an interview. In today’s dynamic world, I would add “people” to “organisations” but keep the strategy the same. Find people you believe it would be great to work for and get in front of them to pitch your value.
Perhaps there are others, or you might break the strategies down differently, but regardless of the strategy mix, it’s clear to me that the form and content of your CV and related content should vary to match the strategy.
On the “related content,” you’ll probably be aware of the myriad of requirements for different descriptions of you and your background that you need these days. From one-liner profile taglines to short profiles and longer personal blurbs (50, 100, 200 words and more), you have many demands to describe yourself in different ways.
For some time now, I’ve maintained a document containing my various personal and professional blurbs, which I update as new requirements emerge and/or I have a better idea of how to say it. ChatGPT has been helpful in this process, but we’ll cover that later.
My CV
When I read the LinkedIn post that triggered this journey, it resonated strongly because I began looking for a new assignment pre-Christmas 2023. I started thinking about my job-seeking processes and how I’d pretty much kept the same CV format forever, just adding to it as my experience rolled on or I received feedback that helped the overall quality of the product. I inherited it from some recruiter years ago and never felt the need to switch.
The only real surgery I’d ever done was in response to my bouts with possible ageism, documented here.
I only had one major activity to present my experience differently when I developed my “Data-Driven CV”, which calculated all my projects, roles and employment quantitatively. If you’re interested, you can read about this in two LinkedIn posts: Part 1 and Part 2.
For the last decade or so, I have mainly found jobs by leveraging my network, so I haven’t tested my CV in the heat of tactical job applications. It was just something you had to work through. Several times, people asked me to “tweak” the work experience to highlight aspects relevant to a particular role, but they weren’t mission-critical.
Although I write cover letters occasionally, they aren’t a specialty, and I don’t put much effort into them. I have no objective evidence that they make any difference to my success rate. As a hiring manager, I rarely saw the cover letters when recruiting agencies sent through candidates, and if they did come through, I never read them. When I write cover letters, they don’t say much more than, “I’m your guy”.
The Bottom Line
This yarn’s purpose isn’t to advise you on what to do. My history and strategies aren’t for everyone, and I can see there are a bunch of areas I could improve on—even rookie mistakes.
I wanted to achieve three things:
- To lay out my thinking and perspective on the job-seeking landscape so you know where I was coming from when I get specific on implementing ChatGPT support.
- Define some terms and concepts I’ll refer to frequently in my upcoming use-case analysis.
- Stimulate you to think about job-seeking aspects in preparation for focusing on your own strategies and processes.
It’s a tough market at the moment, and we all need every bit of help to improve our chances of getting good roles. I wish you all the best in your quest.
Stay tuned for the next post, where we start getting down to it.
Please see the Story Index for the other yarns in this series.
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As well as writing about projects of all kinds, I’m writing a couple of books on ChatGPT:
- Adam On: Advanced ChatGPT Application Primer (leanpub.com)
- Adam on: ChatGPT — The AI Appliance (leanpub.com)
You can check out other books on my Leanpub profile page: Adam Russell (leanpub.com)
Or you can check out my Amazon Author Page
If you want to get notified as my work progresses, sign up to this mailing list, or check out the other ways to engage with Adam here: Adam on: Projects — Master Index. (Check out the bottom of the index page).
