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Episode 37: How to use AI to get a job
At the end of the day which tool you use is less relevant. It’s more important that you focus on the right input and be specific about the outputs.
Farhan Manjiyani
October 07, 2024
👋 Yo! Welcome to the next episode of How to Negotiate, where you learn how to grow your career and income with better negotiation strategy in less than 5 minutes.
There’s all this talk about AI. This isn’t new - it’s been going on for years, but now it’s hitting the masses. Apple is selling the iPhone 16 on AI features. < >
It may seem hype, but AI tools are the real deal. For the first time, you don’t need a technical background / partner to use AI to assist or even completely automate tasks. I find it especially useful in job hunting - where it can very quickly get lonely and you can start doubting yourself.
At the end of the day which tool you use is less relevant. It’s more important that you focus on the right input and be specific about the outputs. Here are 3 ways to incorporate AI tools into your job search.
Craft tailored outbound
To be clear, AI doesn’t replace the thoughtfulness needed to crack converting cold messages. Treat AI as you would a friend with infinite knowledge about the topic or task you’re focused on.
While your friend has access to a ton of knowledge, quality inputs get you quality outputs.
Instead of asking “write me a cold email to this person about ABC topic” you need to specify a bit more what format to output/what you are hoping to convince them of/tone etc.
Here are a few examples to make your prompts and outputs much more usable straight from AI tools:
Make research faster to interview prep
AI tools can rapidly expedite your understanding of the company & space you’re trying to enter.
Here’s the prompt I used to prepare for my role at Grafana:
What would have taken hours of reading blogs, podcasts and trying to get in touch with people now takes 10-15 minutes. Here’s my list of areas to research:
Company (using above prompt)
Customers (I ask for top 5 pains and gains by summarizing the case studies on the website)
Competitors (repeat above prompt for top 2-3 competitors and see where the overlap in the talk track is vs. what is unique about each competitor)
Product (use the ‘explain like I’m five’ prompt to get a one-line summary of what their product does)
Create partners to practice interviews
Practice makes perfect when it comes to interviewing, but finding a partner with the right background knowledge is sometimes hard. AI can help now.
My favorite prompt:
Act as a [role of the person I’m interviewing with] for an interview for [role I’m interviewing for] and run a mock interview with me.
Ask me questions you think [person I am interviewing with] would ask based on our backgrounds.
Here is my linkedin profile <link> and the linkedin profile of my interviewer <link>.
Based on my answers, ask follow up questions. Let’s run it back twice - once with easy questions and once with harder questions where you deeply question all my answers.
After each interview, summarize what I did well and where I need to improve.
Repeat this interview technique until you feel confident in your interview. To keep yourself sharp, I recommend prompting how challenging each interview round should be. You can also have each interview focus on qualitative vs. quantitative data from you.
Summarizing what you did well and where you need to improve will tell you what to focus on in the next interview. If you get stuck, ask for a sample interview answer that you can tailor and make your own.
As always, feedback is a gift and I welcome any/all feedback on this episode. See ya next week 👋 !
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