I've always said that finding a great job is a full-time job. (Okay, I've said that maybe once before. Sue me.) But let's be honest—combing through job postings, finding ones you actually like, then tailoring your resume and cover letter is long and arduous work.
What if you could cut down the time it takes to find and apply for your next product management job by, say, 90%?
Thanks to our friend ChatGPT, you'll have hiring managers eating out of your hand in 10 percent of the time. Here are the prompts I've used to help my friends and colleagues land their next product job.
How to Use ChatGPT as Your Job Hunting Co-Pilot
I'm sure by now you thought you'd scrolled through every ChatGPT prompt for product managers ever made—but I bet you didn't know it could also help you find your dream job!
Here's how to do it.
Step 1: Do a Braindump of Your Employment History and Skills
If you want ChatGPT to help you find the perfect PM gig, you should first help it learn about you—your experience, skills, achievements, etc.
So, your first step would be to do a “braindump” in a new document—write down everything you remember about yourself as a PM. It will include information about the companies you have worked at, the products you have managed, your skills, achievements, and just everything that comes to your mind.
Here’s what it might look like.
Save your time, and don’t worry about organizing the information here. ChatGPT is really good at parsing and making sense of messy information. Instead, focus on dumping as much information about yourself as you can.
Step 2: Ask Chat GPT to Filter the Jobs That Fit You The Best
Now that you have written down all the essential information about yourself, let’s feed it to ChatGPT and ask to use them as criteria for filtering job announcements for you.
Prompt 1
Here is information about me. Please keep this information in mind and use it as criteria to filter job postings that fit my experience/skills the best.
I will share the job postings with you shortly.
**START Information About Me**
{your_brain_dump_here}
**END Information About Me**
You can ignore the response that ChatGPT has given you now, as it will simply acknowledge that it has remembered your information.
Now, let’s feed it a large list of ~20 job postings with descriptions and ask ChatGPT to point out the ones where your skills match the requirements.
Prompt 2
Here are 20 Job Postings. Please:
- Read their descriptions and job requirements
- Compare the requirements of each with the information about me.
- Group the postings into three categories
- Highly Relevant: Job postings where requirements fully match my information, experience, and skills.
- Partially Relevant: Job postings where requirements partially match my information, experience, and skills.
- Not Relevant: Job postings where requirements do not match my information, experience, and skills.
**START Job Postings**
{your_job_postings_copied_and_pasted_here}
**END Job Postings**
Get ready—the response you'll get is pretty impressive. ChatGPT not only groups the postings into different categories by relevance, but it also tells you the rationale behind its decision.
Congratulations, you have just saved a ton of time by delegating to ChatGPT the tedious process of reading lots of job descriptions, evaluating each one, and picking the ones that match your profile!
Now, let’s pick these shortlisted jobs and start tailoring our resume to each one.
How to Use ChatGPT to Craft a Perfect Resume
A good product manager resume is one that is tailored to the specific job application/position/company.
Avoid the shotgun approach. Take your time to understand the needs of each company and adjust your resume to highlight the skills and experiences that are relevant to each individual job posting.
Normally, this process would take a ton of time. So, let’s delegate it to ChatGPT too!
Step 1: Generate a Resume Template Based on Your Braindump
This step applies only to cases when you don’t have a resume yet. I mean, you cannot customize a resume to a specific job if you don’t have a resume, amirite?
Before asking ChatGPT to create our resume template, we will first need to give it clear requirements regarding the format and structure. Let’s not sweat it too much—we can ask the AI to create these requirements for us.
Prompt 3
Please list the structural and content requirements for a great Senior Product Manager resume.
With these requirements in hand, we can ask ChatGPT to transform our braindump into a usable resume draft. For that, we will first need to share these requirements with the model.
I will feed them to ChatGPT and ask it to create a resume following these requirements. So, make sure that the requirements are easy-to-digest for ChatGPT.
Prompt 4
Here are the structural and content requirements for a Senior Product Manager resume.
Don't create a resume now, just keep this in mind. Shortly, I will ask you to create a resume based on it.
**START Requirements**
{your_requirements}
**END Requirements**
As soon as ChatGPT acknowledges your request, you can move on to providing your braindump and asking it to write the resume itself.
Prompt 5
Here is information about me.
Please create a resume for me by using this information and follow the structural requirements I have shared with you.
Use only information about me, do not create any new information that is not there.
**START Information About Me**
{your_brain_dump}
**END Information About Me**
ChatGPT will create a blank structure based on your requirements and start filling it in with the data you have provided with your braindump.
Most likely, there will be missing information in your braindump. In this case, ChatGPT will leave those parts blank and highlight them for you (in this case, the graduation year).
So, just go over the resume it creates, fill in the blanks, and add any other missing information.
Step 2: Ask ChatGPT to Customize Your Resume Based a Job Description
Our resume template is still too raw to share with anyone. The most important thing that it lacks is customization for a specific job posting. This is, again, something that we can ask ChatGPT to handle for us.
First, let's share the job posting with our LLM model.
Prompt 6
Here's my resume, keep the information in it in mind.
Shortly, I will share job postings with you and will ask you to compare their requirements with my resume.
**START RESUME**
{your_resume_pasted_here}
**END RESUME**
You will, again, see an acknowledgment message. As soon as ChatGPT finishes processing your resume, you can start sharing the job descriptions, too.
Prompt 7
Here's a Job Description. Please evaluate it against my resume and:
1. Highlight the parts of my resume that I need to change to tailor my resume to this job description.
2. Suggest the information that I should add to the parts you have highlighted.
**START Job Description**
{your_job_description_pasted_here}
**END Job Description**
ChatGPT will evaluate your provided job description and give you a surprisingly good list of suggestions. Here’s what I got after running the prompt above.
ChatGPT will tend to suggest you add qualifications that you don’t have. DON'T DO IT! You should never tell lies in your resume.
But, apart from that, it will also suggest you highlight certain parts of your existing experience and skills to make your resume stand out among the bunch.
That’s what you want to do.
Step 3: Check If Your Resume is ATS (Applicant Tracking Systems) Friendly
So far, we have worked on human-tailoring your resume to ensure that hiring managers and HRs love it. But let’s not forget that many companies (especially the larger ones) don’t manually review every single resume they get. Instead, they use specialized software that is automatically shortlisting candidates for them.
So, to make sure that we get shortlisted, there is a second layer of tailoring for us to do. This time, our “target audience” is the automated tool (a.k.a. ATS) that the company uses.
The process here is similar to what we did in the last step. The main difference is in the prompts we use.
Firstly, we share our resume with the following prompt:
Prompt 8
Here's my resume, keep the information in it in mind.
Shortly, I will share job postings with you and will ask you to compare their requirements with my resume.
**START RESUME**
{your_resume_pasted_here}
**END RESUME**
Then, we'll share the job description and ask ChatGPT to act like an ATS tool and scan our resume for relevant keywords and action verbs with the job description in mind.
Prompt 9
Here's a Job Description. Please act like an ATS (Applicant Tracking System), evaluate my resume against this job description, and:
1. Highlight the parts of my resume that I need to change to get shortlisted by the ATS.
2. Suggest the information that I should add to the parts you have highlighted.
**START Job Description**
{your_job_description_pasted_here}
**END Job Description**
Now, let’s run this prompt for the Senior Product Manager role at Splunk and see if we are likely to get shortlisted by an ATS.
Based on the response I got, I’d say that our resume would most likely fail the ATS filtering process. So, we should go ahead and edit our resume based on the suggestions that ChatGPT gave us here.
Step 4: Manually Rewrite Your Resume
Yes, you heard me right!
I suggest that you NOT use the resume template and ChatGPT’s feedback on tailoring it to specific company’s needs directly. Instead, you should treat it as the source of information for the resume that you will write manually.
I know, It might seem counterintuitive. I mean ChatGPT was supposed to save you time by writing it for you—why would you do it manually?
The reality is that you will spend around 90% of your time
- Filtering opportunities
- Reading their requirements
- Researching the companies
- Brainstorming what you need to change to tailor your resume
I'm willing to wager that barely 10% of your time is spent physically writing your resume. So, by delegating the research and brainstorming parts of the job hunt to ChatGPT, you are still saving 90% of your time.
Based on my experience helping friends find a PM job, manual research, and tailoring usually took ~1.5 hours per job opening. After we adopted this process, each job opportunity took us ~10 minutes of running the prompts and manually writing/tailoring the resume.
There’s a good reason I’m asking you to apply for jobs only using manually written resumes.
- It’s not ethical to autogenerate a resume.
- Lots of companies will do AI testing and immediately dismiss your application if they find anything AI-generated in your application.
Step 5: Paste Your Info Into a Canva Resume Template
Finally, as soon as you have the content of your resume ready, all you need to do is find a good-looking resume sample on Canva (or use any Resume Builder SaaS tool out there) and paste your content into it.
I don’t want to dig deep into the design side of making resumes, because it’s a story for another day. The only remark here is that design is important to optimize, but relevant content in your resume > good design all day, every day.
How to Use ChatGPT to Write a Cover Letter
Sometimes job announcements will ask you to submit a cover letter along with the resume as part of your application.
For many of us (including me), this is the most disliked part of the job hunting process, as you have to spend hours on drafting and rewriting your cover letter before it becomes something decent enough to share with recruiters.
So, let’s make this process less boring and time-consuming for us by delegating as much of it to ChatGPT as possible.
Step 1: Let ChatGPT Make A Tailored Draft Based on Your Resume and The Job Description
This process will be a bit similar to how we tailored our resume in the previous section. We start by sharing our resume template and asking ChatGPT to remember the content with this prompt.
Prompt 1
Here's my resume, keep the information in it in mind.
Shortly, I will share job postings with you and will ask you to generate a product manager cover letter for them.
**START RESUME**
{your_resume_pasted_here}
**END RESUME**
Afterward, we paste the content of a job description in our prompt and ask the model to generate a cover letter for us.
Prompt 2
Here's a Job Posting. Please write a cover letter for this job posting that takes into consideration the information in my resume:
- Use only the information you find in my resume and the job description, do not create any new information that is not there.
**START Job Posting**
{your_job_description_pasted_here}
**END Job Posting**
Let’s try this for Splunk’s Senior PM position and see what our language model has come up with.
Apart from a couple of minor hallucinations (AI models writing stupid stuff), the overall result is quite acceptable and you can definitely use the structure and ideas there to draft your real cover letter.
Step 2: Rewrite it Manually.
Yup, again, you should not send an AI-generated cover letter to your future employer.
Just like with resumes, normally 90% of your time is spent thinking about what to write and 10% of it is spent actually writing the letter. (And in this case, cutting it down by at least 50%!)
In the end, you'll come out way ahead.
Hiring Has Slowed Down, But Great PMs Are Always In Demand
Yes, we did see a couple of waves of mass layoffs. Yes, we do have fewer job openings and a general recruitment slowdown in the tech sector. However, there are still plenty of companies building great products—and all of them need superstar PMs to lead that process.
So, if you think you’re the superstar that the tech sector is looking for, get yourself a ChatGPT-powered resume and start hunting for your dream job!
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