Founder Scene – Job Search With ChatGPT

No more writing job applications – this app takes care of your resume, cover letter and mentioning your last scores at 22Bet.

Konstantin Lobanov has developed an app that automatically writes application letters. The basis of Applai.me is ChatGPT. Using artificial intelligence, the application optimizes the resume specifically for the job. The key to success here is the right keyword.

Let’s face it: hardly anyone likes writing job applications. The writer has to advertise himself, praise the job to the skies, and strike the right tone in the process. And precisely because this is not a popular task, 23-year-old Konstantin Lobanov has built a sleek, smart app that relieves applicants of this cramp.

And even more: Applai.me turns a job posting and a current resume into an almost complete application. Using artificial intelligence – based on ChatGPT with language model version 3.5 – the application optimizes the resume specifically for this job, generates a motivation letter, and also provides a few probable job interview questions tailored to this position to train for the interview.

If you talk to recruiters in start-ups, the cover letter is increasingly losing its importance. Even when it comes to the resume, a lot is said: job titles have become so diverse and spongy, you often can’t learn much about a candidate’s qualifications from them.

Konstantin Lobanov knows this, too. In an interview with “Gründerszene,” he cites studies according to which only half of recruiters even read cover letters. The most time-consuming part of an application is only checked in 50 percent of caseS:

Still, skipping one or even both altogether isn’t an option. Often, employers – consciously or not – do take a positive view of the fact that someone has taken the trouble to write a cover letter.

Plus point for effort. In this respect, the approach of outsourcing the effort, time, and expense to an AI, letting it write the cover letter and resume, and thus saving energy, may be just the right one.

THE FACTORS FOR A SUCCESSFUL APPLICATION

Unfortunately, the story of how he came up with the idea for Applai.me is “not as romantic as the guys who founded Uber while waiting for a cab in Paris,” Lobanov tells “Gründerszene.” Rather, he says, while a friend of his applied for various jobs – unsuccessfully – he realized more and more which factors seem to be decisive.

1. fit between CV and job posting: many job seekers are not aware of the importance of also matching the CV with each job application. Simply attaching the current CV is not enough. That’s because, Lobanov explains, “A lot of AI is already being used in recruitment, but against the applicant.” For many jobs, especially those advertised by larger companies that receive a lot of applications, the first step is for an AI to search through all the resumes for certain keywords. “If it doesn’t find them, there’s a good chance you won’t be invited for an interview,” Lobanov explains. So you have to “outsmart” the AI, as he puts it. Preferably with AI itself. Applai.me scans the job posting and identifies possible keywords, which it then suggests for the resume. 
2. cover letter: Even though the importance of the cover letter is on the decline in general, there are still rules on how to make this letter better quickly, Lobanov says. “The difference between a bad cover letter and an excellent cover letter is not what you write and how you structure it, but how you phrase it.” And that’s what generative AI can do amazingly well, he says, formulate things correctly. Again, Applai.me matches information from the job description with the text of the cover letter.
3. preparation for first interview: First, to be convincing in the interview, an applicant needs to know as much as possible about the company he or she is applying to, Lobanov says. With large companies, this is easy to research, and platforms such as Glassdoor can help. Second, it also helps to anticipate what might be asked about the job profile in question. The app generates questions tailored to the job in question, which applicants can use to practice.

Why not ask ChatGPT directly?

Now writing job applications, or more precisely: formulating cover letters, is probably one of the most frequently reported annoying jobs that OpenAI’s popular chatbot ChatGPT can do for people. In seconds. Couldn’t everyone just have the tool spit out their cover letter?

Why pay extra for an app – which also relies on ChatGPT? Lobanov is well prepared to answer this question: There’s a very general thing to consider here when using generative AIs, he says. “Prompts are the key to successful search.”

The prompt is the keyword, question or sentence that users type into the input line at ChatGPT. It is crucial to formulate the prompt in such a way that the tool understands what it is about, what the focus of the user’s request is, what exactly is meant. The better the input, the better the result.