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Generate a Cover Letter by Pasting the Job Post and Your Resume

careered.ai

141–150 of 151 posts

Re: Generate a Cover Letter by Pasting the Job Post and Your Resume

#141
post #86
post #81

Cover letters are for those that send in applications. Successful people network instead; don´t be part of the PDF pile, work around it!

That way, you hire people who are good at networking, and/or gaming the system, rather than people that are good at the work you're hiring for. This adequately explains one or more places I've worked.

Life can be modeled as a series of skinner boxes and markets. If a rat had a way of significantly increasing the probability of getting food versus pressing the bar it would.

Re: Generate a Cover Letter by Pasting the Job Post and Your Resume

#142
That’s not how you do a proper cover letter. In a proper cover letter, you get an opportunity to talk about what’s not in the resume. The cover letter is supposed to prove you’re a good fit for the job, but more in terms of soft skills. You CAN generate a cover letter if you telle ChatGPT what to put in it. You CAN’T generate one from just the resume and job post, or don’t expect to be recruited if it’s a company that cares about cover letters.

Re: Generate a Cover Letter by Pasting the Job Post and Your Resume

#143
post #18
post #11

This just devalues cover letters. As a hiring manager I am strongly motivated to avoid channels which would cause me to wade through a bunch of fake crap. If there turns out to be no way to filter out AI generated text, we will end up that you have to attend an in person interview at some intermediary whose job is just to verify that you are a human being and you have some idea what the job ad said.

> This just devalues cover letters. They already are very low signal. > we will end up that you have to attend an in person interview at some intermediary So like a recruiting agency that does pre-screening? That is a thing already.

Yeah, but recruiting agencies suck. Anything that causes more reliance on recruiters is bad for both employers and applicants.

Re: Generate a Cover Letter by Pasting the Job Post and Your Resume

#144
post #11

This just devalues cover letters. As a hiring manager I am strongly motivated to avoid channels which would cause me to wade through a bunch of fake crap. If there turns out to be no way to filter out AI generated text, we will end up that you have to attend an in person interview at some intermediary whose job is just to verify that you are a human being and you have some idea what the job ad said.

If the main reason you’re making me write a cover letter is to verify that I am human and know what the job description said, you don’t deserve anything better than LLM generated.

We don't make people write them presently, but the occasional one can be good way to clarify why a person fits the role especially if their CV isn't quite an obvious match. If they will be generated by AI then I won't have time to go through them.

My bigger worry is that we will start getting AI generated CVs. If we have to ignore CVs then there will be no alternative to paying middlemen.

Re: Generate a Cover Letter by Pasting the Job Post and Your Resume

#145
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bad usage of technology, in part. What's the ethical violation, here? Opposite of Consequentialism, at the least. Related tangent, harming the sick: Healthcare expense reimbursement denial by software, decisions "blessed" by Doctor at 60,000 diagnoses rejected per month. - https://www.propublica.org/article/cigna-pxdx-medical-health...

Health insurance business, at least the way it's run in the US, is evil IMO. It's a race to the bottom with the most profitable insurance being the one that can bully their way into denying the most claims.

Most of the AI implementation in the US bakes in various illegal practices and basically AI washes them.

Re: Generate a Cover Letter by Pasting the Job Post and Your Resume

#146
post #12

I wonder what I would think of a candidate who submits a computer-generated text for me to read, especially when the input is not even human bullet points but just the job post and the resume. We don't have any formal process for hiring (we're expect this is not going to go over well. As an IT person, I do have to commend the automation, though. There are pros and cons to weigh as you use this.

wonder what applicants think of employers that just use keyword search to filter their cover letters and resumes

The answer you're obviously looking to get is "the same", and indeed, I probably wouldn't enjoy working in a place that can't be bothered to have a human read invited human-submitted text.

Re: Generate a Cover Letter by Pasting the Job Post and Your Resume

#147
post #78
post #28

This is so funny, I was just doing this with ChatGPT to apply for jobs. If you make me fill out a bullshit form where I fake being passionate about your company, I’m going to get a chatbot to write it for me. End of story. I just need a job, why do you care if I’m passionate about building CRUD apps for you?

> I just need a job, why do you care if I’m passionate about building CRUD apps for you? Because people that lack passion for their work cut corners to avoid doing it.

Passionate people can cut corners because they want to see results.

If you want everything done "by the book", you want a pedantic anal retentive asshole. Unfortunately I never see that in job descriptions.

Re: Generate a Cover Letter by Pasting the Job Post and Your Resume

#148
A buddy of mine made the exact same thing a couple of weeks ago https://coverlettergpt.xyz

It's funny how people come up with similar ideas and are able to make them into products quickly with ChatGPT

His is open source if you are interested in how it's done: https://github.com/vincanger/coverlettergpt

Re: Generate a Cover Letter by Pasting the Job Post and Your Resume

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not charity, it is an economic transaction. What I don't get is what benefit does a company get by people pretending that they are applying for anything other than the (total) salary?

Although salary plays a big part in the transaction, it is not everything. Many years ago I worked as a hiring manager for a PR firm in India, the cover letter is a very good way to sift out the dedicated candidates from the unfocused. It also provides us with a unique insight into their psyche, using a combination of NLP and targeted interview questions regarding topics mentioned in the cover letter, we were able to…

This sounds scary accurate, what other insights on “points of leverage” did you uncover?

Re: Generate a Cover Letter by Pasting the Job Post and Your Resume

#150
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone hiring for a company with more than 10 employees in the 21st century even read a cover letter? And if they have, are they stupid enough to actually believe it? For most people looking for work, rent's due next month, and they are machine-gunning applications, they aren't actually deeply passionate about getting a job at .

I love cover letters for this reason. It’s easy to tell who is shotgunning and who is thoughtfully applying. I might be lucky in the sense that I still get the latter.

Agreed, I read all cover letters and so far they contain a good deal of predictive power on how an applicant will do in the interview process.
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