Another item I thought might be really helpful to show you is how you can actually ask ChatGPT questions on how to improve and optimize your resume. So once again, this is going to be kind of a live test here, but we’re going to keep it in the same thread, the same chat. You can see we’re here in resume template creation, which is what we’ve been using since the beginning. So you’ll stay in your same conversation, just ask ChatGPT, ‘What do I need to do with my resume to optimize it for ATS?’ And so, this is where ChatGPT is just an unbelievable tool for helping you learn while you’re doing this process. What’s really amazing here is that you don’t even have to go to the search engine that you use or Google to look up information on this. You can purely just ask it a question, and it is pulling from, like I said, millions of different data points online to give you examples here.
This is a great lesson to include in this course. Using the simple and clean format is great. This can be confusing to ATS systems if you include images, graphics, special characters, things like that. Use standard section headings so that the formatting of that makes your job title stand out, how many years you were there, things like that, including relevant keywords. So, like I emphasized before, this is a big one, using relevant keywords from your job descriptions throughout your resume. That’ll help you get picked up by these ATS systems and hopefully move you to the next round and interview. Bullet points are huge here. Writing bullet points is just a great way to highlight all your successes, wins, roles that you had, projects you completed, what your day-to-day, your week-to-week look like, your responsibilities at your company.
Once again, here we’re going to avoid complicated things like using tables, columns, or text boxes. That makes it really tough for these ATS to scan. And then another thing too is just making sure that you keep your resume as a plain text file or PDF file, just because the ATS systems can have trouble reading other formats and things like that. So, this will really help you get picked up by these applicant tracking systems. You can also ask other questions like, ‘What’s the best way to optimize my cover letter for ATS systems?’ Another thing to keep in mind about ATS is it doesn’t just scan your resume for keywords and all these valuable data bits that companies want to see in your resume. They also do this for your cover letter too. So, it’ll probably give us some similar feedback, but you can use this information to create your ideal cover letter or multiple versions of your cover letter, which I recommend and which we’ll get into here in a little bit. So just keep that in mind as you do this. I would go ahead and run your own prompts. You can even ask ChatGPT things like, ‘What’s the best order for the sections of my resume?’ And it can give you an idea here. So, contact information, professional summary, work experience, education, skills, certifications, awards, interests, and hobbies. This is perfect. It even leaves a note here, ‘Remember to tailor your resume to the job you’re applying for, including relevant keywords and highlighting achievements that are most relevant to the position.’ What’s really amazing is you’re not only learning how to use ChatGPT to write your resume for you and cover letter in this course, you can actually use ChatGPT as a learning tool to help you get better at resume writing too. And then use this information with ChatGPT to create the best iterations and versions of your resume. So go ahead and test some of these prompts, use it as a tool for learning while you’re doing this process, ask it questions if you’re curious about anything as it goes, and let me know what you think.
