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

careered.ai

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

#71

Post by PragmaticPulp »

We don’t require cover letters, but a lot of people send them anyway. Many of them are useless boilerplate. Even before ChatGPT, you could tell that a lot of people looked up generic cover letter boilerplate and treated it like a mad libs where they filled in the company name and job position.

I wish more people knew just how low the bar was for writing a decent cover letter. You don’t need to spend hours researching the company or choosing the perfect prose. Just a few short sentences that add some context to your application that might not be fully captured in a resume format can make a huge difference.

The weirdest part is that when you get people into a conversation, like on the initial phone call, they can usually come up with a quick elevator pitch for themselves on the spot that would have been great cover letter material. Yet there’s something about the cover letter format that makes some people clam up and get writer’s block. Or they just hate the idea of writing something for someone else to read, so they don’t put any effort in.

Regardless, I don’t think ChatGPT generated cover letters are going to push this ahead. The samples look like it’s yet another ChatGPT style generically safe output. I also feel like I’m rapidly getting good at sensing ChatGPT style writing.

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

#72

Post by polygamous_bat »

ncr100 wrote: post #66
amrb wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was already the grift.. ATS system doing keyword match building short lists from scanning resumes.

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.

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

#74

Post by javajosh »

lwhi wrote: post #55
ajb wrote: 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.

I think ChatGPT is going to remove the value from a lot of roles and tasks. If it can be done by ChatGPT .. there's no point in the ritual; we'll most likely end up scrapping it. No cover letters. No marketing fluff. No library photography. Less hiring. Less jobs.

It will be interesting to see how ChatGPT interacts with BS jobs. Could go a lot of ways. One interesting scenario is if humans to finally accept that if you have a big population in a technologically advanced society, the demand for human labor is going to drop, while the supply increases. The only real jobs are those that require rare talent, on a power law dist. The best they can do is no negative contribution. NPCs just live, reproduce, and then see if their kids can do better. In general, this process will continue until ALL humans have BS jobs, or no jobs. So it's good to deal with it now.

Personally, I like the UBI idea.

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

#75

Post by kube-system »

ajb wrote: 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.

People who will cheat the written portion of the hiring process already do so without automation, by plagiarizing others resume and cover letters or by farming out the work to someone else.

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

#76

Post by Lex-2008 »

vkou wrote: post #30
rosywoozlechan wrote: post #25

So AI resumes and AI cover letters are now being auto-submitted to AI generated automated job postings then parsed by hiring AI. What an absolute circus this is becoming.

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 .

Happened to me over 10 years ago - rejection letter had this extra sentence at the end: "In addition, I really love your cover letter". The company back then had about 1000 employees, but it was for a position in a remote office which was probably very small.

Regarding "are they stupid enough to actually believe it" - I don't know, but what do people usually write in cover letters? When I wrote it - it was basically CV, just in text form instead of bullet points. But then _lying_ in cover letter is basically the same as lying on CV, no? Or, if companies tend to believe CVs, I would expect them to at least _pretend_ to believe cover letters, too.

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

#77

Post by berjin »

tiedieconderoga wrote: post #38
morkalork wrote: post #7

Bullshit like this is why hiring processes are so insane now.

Unfortunately, there is a massive sale going on for bullshit at the moment. It's not surprising that people are trying to start businesses which would not be viable in a market where bullshit was more expensive.

It's everywhere. A couple of examples:

Native advertising in the media.

Mass produced foods and products pretending to be artisan.

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

#78

Post by zepolen »

plants wrote: 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.

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

#79

Post by anigbrowl »

zabzonk wrote: post #31
gberger wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> They already are very low signal. by no means - when i was doing hiring (not now) cover letter was almost always the most important thing. the cv says what you have done, the cover says what you want to do. > So like a recruiting agency that does pre-screening? That is a thing already. and a very bad thing - i do not want possible good candidates screened out by some chinless-wonder in an agency.

I would not be inclined to use AI for this sort of thing, but it's a two-way street. but I can think of many hours spent writing carefully crafted introductory letters only to receive a form letter or nothing at all in return.

In the context of job applications, think how many recruitment ads are just a collection of buzzwords and happy talk, while omitting crucial information like pay etc. HR departments are notorious for their low quality of communication.

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

#80

Post by amrb »

Avicebron wrote: post #69
chpatrick wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until both the recruiter and software engineer become obsolete.

Then we can reach the real end game, RecruiterGPT hiring SoftwareEngineerGPT to work at StartupGPT building the next generation of cover letter generating AI.

griftGPT
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