I recall when many years ago I was sharing an apartment with three other people. One of them, my namesake, was looking for a job. He would literally fool around for the whole day and then defend himself against a disappointed girlfriend that he did his best.
He’d send his (generic) application for fresh ads in the morning and all he could do next is wait.
Are you rolling your eyes? You probably are.
An active, passionate, and true job search is a full-time job! Especially when the first calls start to come in and you need to prepare yourself for the job interviews. This is especially true when looking for a new product management position which usually launches a three-month-long process with at least four stages.
Ideally, you’ll come perfectly prepared for each interview and know the company, product, market, and competitors. Suddenly, calling a job search a full-time job is no longer a stretch, is it? However, there is a job search companion out there waiting to help you: ChatGPT!
In this article, I’ll share how ChatGPT can take off hours of time and make you a successful candidate in your product management job search!
ChatGPT is an AI chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched on 30 November 2022. It is trained to interact in a conversational way and follow instructions in a prompt. It uses deep learning to generate human-like text based on the patterns it has learned from a massive amount of data. It also allows users to refine and steer a conversation towards a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language used.
ChatGPT is fine-tuned from a model in the GPT-3.5 series, which finished training in early 2022. ChatGPT is available as a web app, an iOS app, and a desktop application for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
ChatGPT is one of the most advanced and versatile chatbots in the world and can potentially help you get your next job. How do I know? Because I used it successfully in my last job search and landed my current senior product management position!
If you prompt ChatGPT correctly, you can use it in great ways and boost your chances as an applicant. Here are ways you can use it in your product management job search:
Creating a resume tailored to a specific position is the best and most ignored resume advice in the world. It helps you go through any bots scanning your resume and makes you stand out to a human reading your resume. It also takes a lot of time and energy and can feel useless if you still are not getting the calls.
However, AI and ChatGPT in particular can do this irritating task for you! With this, you can save time on manually rewriting your resume and you appear as if you really put extra effort into creating the resume. Well… you did! Just in a very efficient way 🙂
You can also use FixMyResume or Accio to basically do all that for you making it even easier. However, don’t let the AI run loose! Do read all that artificial intelligence provides and amend it to fit your personality and style.
AI-written text can appear a bit too formal and boring and if the resume is obviously written by a machine, it can be rejected by a recruiter.
Prompt: “Please write a version of my resume pasted below to prove beyond any doubt, that I match the requirements for the job listing also pasted below.
Resume:
[paste your resume here]
Job listing:
[paste the job listing]”
While bullet points might be great for many professions, I can guarantee you that story-driven resumes will perform better for product managers. But, this must be done right and in a compelling way, which is really hard. AI can help you with that!
Prompt: “Please write a version of my resume pasted below that is first person, active narration-based, rather than the current bullet point structure.
[paste your resume here]”
This is usually difficult to get right and takes a lot of time and effort to create something that sounds right. However, AI can create at least a strong basis that you can adjust.
The more specific you are, the better. You can tell ChatGPT the industry that the job you’re applying for is located in and if you’re switching industries. This will give an even more detailed answer about how your experience and skills will help you in the new role.
You can also tell it to give specific examples based on certain jobs on your resume. The more you customize it, the better, and the below prompt should be a good starting point:
Prompt: “Please write me a cover letter for the job listing pasted below based on my resume.
Resume:
[paste your resume here]
Job listing:
[paste the job listing].”
This might not sound all that important, but trust me, knowing trivia about the product/company you wish to work for can really impress! It surely worked for a company I interviewed and I almost got an offer for. I left the recruitment process when offered a job at another company.
Of course, this can’t be done on the nose. Such evidence of being well-prepared for the job interview should be discreetly woven into your answers. It will work so well when it’s casual! But, do take into account that AI can “hallucinate” and make stuff up. If you can, cross-reference the 20 trivia facts with Google, just to make sure AI got it right.
Prompt: “Tell me 20 facts about [product and/or company] that I need to know before my job interview with them for a [role name] position.”
Those basics will allow you to start any interview really well-prepared. In my experience, knowing all those elements before the interviews is expected of you. Even if it is not, you can have additional time to prove you are the best candidate that would otherwise be spent on introducing the company and the product. It will also help you with any case study involving the product you are interviewing for brainstorming new features.
If they fit the vision, mission, strategy, and/or values, they are more likely to be appreciated by the interviewer. As always, don’t take ChatGPT’s answers at face value: if only you have the time, fact-check them, even briefly, just in case. This is a small time investment considering how much of it was saved by the AI!
Prompt: “Please tell me [product and/or company]’s vision (or mission), strategy, values and where they fit in their market.”
Did you think knowing the company/product trivia was impressive? Wait until you can fluently talk about the competitors! You can ask ChatGPT to help you identify the top three competitors, key differentiating factors, and the differences in their monetization models.
This can really make a difference, as it gives you a lot of inspiration on how the same problem was solved in a variety of cases. It’s like having the liberty of examining a few parallel universes and making the call on which one of them did it best.
The benefit of AI here is that it might be able to aggregate multiple product comparison websites into a single coherent report. Of course, it would be best to try at least briefly each of the competitors (if possible), but this is a next-level effort that you might not have time for.
Prompt: “Please list me [product and/or company]’s top three competitors, their features, and their pricing model. Then compare them in a summary table.”
While nothing beats the actual interview and you will never be fully prepared for all the challenges, it doesn’t hurt to try your best! Thus, ask ChatGPT to create as many product questions as you need. Do be sure to provide the chatbot with the context of the product, company and position you are applying for to get the question neatly pin-pointed to your job interview context.
You can either write down or voice transcribe your reply. You can use it with the next proposed prompt.
Prompt: “What questions should I expect for my upcoming job interview with [product and/or company]? The role is [insert name of role here], so alongside general interview questions, please ask role-specific questions as well.”
That’s right! I often hear that product management aspirants organize themselves into mock interview groups which I unfortunately find pointless. Without an actual product manager to evaluate their answers, there is little hope they will be able to grow and learn the best answers to the questions.
However, though imperfect, ChatGPT is the closest you can have to a professional mock interview product manager expert. The AI might be able to suggest additional angles of the answer you should explore and give you a different point of view on the entire problem. You can also use it to polish a few standard questions that are very likely to appear and you can memorize and practice word to word ahead of time. Those questions include:
Prompt: “Please provide me feedback on my reply to an interview question [QUESTION] below: [ANSWER].”
Now that you know the product, at least a little, step into its PM’s shoes. What are the most important metrics to follow? Trust me, knowing this might turn up to be a great “wow” moment in your interview.
With the help of AI, you can not only double-check your best metric guesses for the product you are interviewing for, but also ChatGPTmay find some obscure article where the company outright states their metric. The current version of ChatGPT will show you its sources, so you can easily fact-check an article that might otherwise be impossible to find on Google.
Prompt: “What are the most important metrics for [product and/or company]?”
Coming back to the story from the intro, would AI help my friend back then in his job search? Unlikely. He was not all that committed and did not spend a lot of energy on the process. However, the truly invested job seeker knows well that looking for a new position can be a full-time job.
That’s why the AI use cases are so helpful! It will save you time and energy and, perhaps, limit the disappointment if a possible rejection comes up. We all know how difficult finding a new job is — let’s grab any help we can get. An AI assistant is always there for us, thus, take the opportunity modern tech gives us and use it wisely.
Good luck with your job search! Mine took only six weeks after I was laid off from Microsoft. Hope yours will be even shorter!
Featured image source: IconScout
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