Click here to access the ready-to-use ChatGPT prompt for refining student resume summaries; you can also check our 5-pointer-summary of the entire article here.
As a career services professional reviewing countless resumes, one of the most challenging tasks is to help your students optimize and tailor their summary/objective sections...
...That you accomplish with amazing dexterity, if we can say so.
While you might brush it off as something to do next Wednesday afternoon, it doesn’t diminish the fact that it is, truly, a daunting undertaking to take every student’s unique background & aspirations, and then turn it into crisp statements that must appeal to employers.
Well, it was, until ChatGPT entered the picture.
A brainchild of OpenAI, ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a chatbot based on a large language model (LLM) that leverages natural language processing (NLP) to generate humanlike conversational responses to any input you provide.
All you need to do is enter your query - aka ‘prompt’ - in a clear and detailed fashion.
Intrigued? Let’s dive in!
Crafting ChatGPT Prompts for Career Services
One of the biggest ways in which ChatGPT differs from traditional search engines like Google: conversational queries.
You don't have to settle for the first response you get. If you don’t like it, spell out your grievances and explain what it needs to do differently in the next prompt.
Let’s look at some examples:
Say a student’s original resume summary statement is as vague as a whisper in a crowded room:
“Seeking an opportunity to utilize my customer service and communication skills.”
Now, we ask ChatGPT to refine it with an equally generic, vague prompt:
“Make this objective statement better.”
It's like asking a pilot to fly without coordinates. Vague prompts lead to vague responses.
And yes, even though ChatGPT will generate some output, maybe even a satisfactory one, it won’t be a great one. It won’t be the best you can get out of it.
So, rather than going back and forth with feedback & responses, writing a detailed prompt in one go will help you get the most out of ChatGPT.
Here’s a sample prompt that you can use in ChatGPT:
"Imagine you are a seasoned [resume reviewer] with 10+ years of experience. Your task is to refine a summary/objective statement of an [undergraduate marketing student with a major in brand management], aiming for the role of a [customer success associate in the hospitality industry based in the US' Midwest region]. Provide suggestions for improvement and ways to make the objective/summary statement more impactful for both human eyes and ATS/recruitment software so that it's in line with the target job profile. If you require more information to perform this task better, please ask me as many questions as you need. Here’s the student’s resume summary/objective statement: [“Seeking an opportunity to utilize my customer service and communication skills.”]
This prompt acts as a detailed treasure map for ChatGPT, specifying its tasks and approach. Here's why it works:
- Assigning a persona (resume reviewer in this case) aligns expectations
- Defining certain parameters will lead to a more nuanced output
- Providing the student's goals and background ensures tailored response
- Encouraging ChatGPT to ask questions fosters a conversation, enhancing its ability to personalize resume statements effectively.
Note: You can repurpose the prompt here as per your need by switching up the texts in brackets.
Also Read: Career Centers ChatGPT-fied: Our ongoing series to help career services professionals use AI to drive operational and student success.
GPT 4: Leveling Up
ChatGPT's latest offering, ChatGPT Plus, based on the GPT 4 language model, has 10 times the parameters of its predecessor - a staggering 1.7 trillion - thereby ensuring heightened accuracy and coherence.
This paid version introduces multimodal capabilities, voice interactions via Whisper, access to real-time data through 'Browse with Bing', and support for countless third-party plugins.
Concerned about privacy? OpenAI allows users to disable chat history and control usage of their data, thus ensuring confidentiality.
While the fundamental guidelines for crafting an effective GPT-4 prompt remain consistent with GPT-3.5, you can make a few adjustments like:
- Uploading the student's resume and providing link(s) to target job roles
- Asking ChatGPT to check real-time data and current industry standards while reworking summary/objective statements
Summary
Here's a gist of everything we discussed above so you can get started:
- ChatGPT is a Large Language Model (LLM) based on the GPT-3 language model developed by OpenAI.
- Unlike Google, you can converse with ChatGPT till it gives you the desired output. The queries used to engage here are called 'prompts'.
- Encourage ChatGPT to ask questions and assign it a persona to generate more nuanced and personalized output.
- ChatGPT Plus is a paid offering based on the GPT-4 language model with multi-modal capabilities, more accurate output, access to real-time data, etc.
- Use this prompt as reference to refine resume summary statements for your students.
How to get even more out of ChatGPT?
As you embrace ChatGPT into your workflow, it's important to recognize AI as an ally rather than an enemy. Its role is not to supplant human connections but to act as a dependable aid, enhancing human capabilities and helping both you and your students put your best foot forward.
Sure, we discussed how you can use ChatGPT to help your students tailor their resume summary sections.
But that's not what it was built for.
What if there was a platform dedicated to career services, built solely to address the requirements of career centers and students...but which is also powered by ChatGPT?
Hiration has always been at the forefront of technology and is the world's first ChatGPT-powered career platform, with separate modules for career centers and students. It allows the latter to work on their interview preparation, resume optimization, LinkedIn profiles, and cover letters...while giving you a separate platform to monitor and control the entire process.
With the added magic of ChatGPT's API that allows us to integrate it to our platform, we additionally solve for:
- data privacy and security, as we comply with FERPA, GDPR, and CCPA;
- hallucinations in the output, as we empower your team to control how students are using ChatGPT in their job search.
Don't believe us? Schedule a free demo as per your convenience to witness the magic yourself!
Step into the future with confidence!
Embrace the AI revolution with ChatGPT - your passport to a new era of success and innovation benefitting not just your students but also your teams and processes.
Let's transform potential into triumph, together!
