Megan Riksen:

Hello and welcome to the Work Like a Laker podcast. I'm Megan Riksen. Today I'm joined by Grace Joaquin. Hi Grace.

Grace Joaquin:

Hi Megan.

Megan Riksen:

We're talking about a fun subject today in emerging technology, if you will. We're talking about ai, AI in the job search process. We're gonna kind of talk through how you, as a job seeker internship seeker, someone who's kind of getting started in this space might be able to use AI to your advantage. And we'll give you lots of ideas on resources and places to go. But we know there also are some limitations, so we will certainly be discussing those as well. But I guess I'll just start with Grace. Do you use AI in your, I guess I'm kind of curious, do you use it in your personal life or just your professional life?

Grace Joaquin:

Both. And I think I never really realized some of the things that I was using in my personal life was AI.

Megan Riksen:

Sure. Yeah.

Grace Joaquin:

But we'll talk about some examples of how we use ai and I think most people would realize that they do actually use it in probably everyday life actually.

Megan Riksen:

Right. And maybe longer than we thought. Like I feel like we think of like ChatGPT, at least I do as kind of the genesis of AI for like the everyday user. But there's, there's been some artificial intelligence that we've been using for much longer.

Grace Joaquin:

Way longer. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I can go into some of that background now.

Megan Riksen:

Yeah, that'd be great actually.

Grace Joaquin:

So one thing that I wanna start this conversation with is right now, you know, there kind of is this AI explosion. AI is the worst it will ever be right now.

Megan Riksen:

No, that's, that's really weird.

Grace Joaquin:

I know. So like this, I, this is something that I don't think is going to go away. It's something that we need to, I think, learn about and embrace. And realize how to use it. Because there definitely is a right and a wrong way I think to use ai when it comes to the job search process. So we're gonna dig into that. I do wanna also start with a little stat. So AI usage nearly doubled from 37% of weekly AI users in 2023 to 73% in 2024. And that's from a study out of Wharton. So that's just going to show you that it is really rapidly increasing. And again, I don't see it changing anytime soon. So learning about it, embracing it, and trying it out I think is probably in most people's best interest.

Megan Riksen:

Yeah. And it's probably probably going to be just more integrated in our everyday life in more seamless ways as well. It's not, it won't necessarily be, I'm going to ChatGPT, it might be my iPhone has, I mean, that already exists.

Grace Joaquin:

Yes. Well that's what we can talk about right now, which is, it is already integrated in your life, and you probably don't fully realize it. In some cases. So one example is Siri, Alexa, you know, if you're asking Siri for anything, she is ai. Alexa is ai.

Megan Riksen:

Yeah. That's weird. I dunno why I didn't think of that, but yeah, that's definitely ai.

Grace Joaquin:

Have you ever gone to a website where you were making a purchase and there's a chat bot in the bottom corner?

Megan Riksen:

Oh, of course.

Grace Joaquin:

So, you know, that's ai and I think those ones, it feels more obvious, the chat bots. And they don't always, they feel sometimes clunky, and it feels like ai. But those are also getting more sophisticated and better. So you'll, I think notice that as you interact with those more and more search engines are actually ai, that's another thing that everyone uses probably almost every day when you're going into Google and searching something. It's, it's using AI to figure out the best fits for you. Like the best articles that are trying to get at what you're asking. That's why if you make a spelling mistake or if you misspeak essentially on Google, it still knows what you're trying to do. It knows what you’re getting at. And now there's a newer feature too, I think in the last few months where, have you noticed when you search something, it'll give you an AI overview at the top?

Megan Riksen:

Yeah. I kind of like it. And then I'm like, is it bad that I like this?

Grace Joaquin:

Same.

Megan Riksen:

But it's so helpful.

Grace Joaquin:

I know. And speaking of that, there's a new feature I think within this last week or two, on iMessage on Apple phones. Where, which this, by the time this airs, it's probably gonna be older news.

Megan Riksen:

Yeah. This is like old news.

Grace Joaquin:

Yes. But your iMessages also can give you a little summary text of like, if you're in a group thread and there's a lot going on.

Megan Riksen:

That's pretty cool.

Grace Joaquin:

Yeah. So, and that's another use. Megan, can you think of any other uses for AI that you've had in your life?

Megan Riksen:

Yeah, I mean, definitely with social media. Yeah. I feel like AI is involved in things that are happening with the algorithm. You know, that is not humans who are deciding what you should look at. I mean, maybe in some cases, but for the most part, the algorithm is completely AI driven. Yeah. GPS I hadn't really thought of, but that's certainly when you're pulling up, I mean, we keep dropping brands, but Google Maps, right? And it's giving you these pretty exact ETA.

Grace Joaquin:

And something that, you know, it'll, it'll take into account traffic, right, for your ETA. And things like that, and that's going to be AI doing that. Yeah. And I, a last one here that I'll mention, although there's definitely a lot more is autocorrect. You know, that is an AI as well.

Megan Riksen:

Cool. All right. So let's dig in a little bit of ways that a job seeker might use ai. The first thing that really comes to mind, which I'm guessing a lot of you who are listening have tried this already, but would be to use AI to generate something. So that might be a cover letter, that might be some resume bullet points. Maybe you've tried to have AI write your entire resume. It could be smaller things like what should I say, at a career fair, right? Like an elevator pitch. Write this for me. It could be in how do I respond to an interview question or what questions should I ask in my interview? Right. So that is kind of the generating piece of ai and there's, there's kind of a lot that goes along with that because It sounds amazing, right? It's a huge time saver. But we definitely have some thoughts of ways to wield it in a way that is not going to make it feel like, oh, AI wrote this.

Grace Joaquin:

And I think a lot of our listeners probably are hearing this and thinking, oh, I already know all this. Like I already use it to generate stuff. Maybe use it to help with homework or whatever. But if you're going to listen to anything from this episode, please listen to when we refer to this piece of it and the limitations around it. And we wanna give some tips because personally I see ai, and I don't think we said this, but AI is artificial intelligence. I use it, or I think of it like a calculator. Like calculators are something that were developed that help us with math and now we can't really imagine not using them. And I sort of see AI the same way. Like it's a useful tool. It's, I don't think it's bad to use. But like with math, if you don't understand the math at all, you're, you have a better chance of not getting the correct answer even using the calculator if you're not understanding the steps in the algorithm or whatever the case is. And so you need to make sure that you are understanding what you're asking ai, you're understanding what it's giving you, because it's not always accurate. It's not always the best. You still need to put your own original thoughts and ideas into it. And so, when we think about one thing you might generate in a job search process is a resume like Megan said. And I did do that just to see what would happen. I put in, I did give some prompts. Like I, I think I only said the job titles I've held, the years I held them, and then my education. And I think that was it.

Megan Riksen:

So basic.

Grace Joaquin:

Very basic. And it wrote me a fairly decent resume. Like the, I think the best part is that it did the formatting, which is hard. And so I don't think it's a bad place to start if you don't really know how to even go up if you're scared of that blank page. You could start in ChatGPT. Which is what I used. And ask it to write your resume, give it some prompts like I did. But the thing is, you don't want to stop there. And I think that's the big issue that we run into is a student might put in a few personal prompts, get that resume and then they say they're done copy and paste done. And the reason that's a problem. So the resume sounded pretty good. I think I even read a few bullets to Megan. And they sounded really well written. And they were fairly descriptive of what I did, even though I didn't tell them.

Megan Riksen:

Didn't really say much about that.

Grace Joaquin:

Yeah! But I think based on my job title they could kind of assume. The role I had. But the issue is anyone else with the same, like I was a teacher, anyone else who's writing a resume who was also a teacher is going to get the same or very similar bullets.

Megan Riksen:

Very, very similar.

Grace Joaquin:

Yes. And Megan and I both know from reading through resumes and other things that have been generated, generated by ChatGPT, it does not take long for the human eye to realize when you're reading AI language.

Megan Riksen:

Exactly. It's pretty amazing what the human brain can do. How quickly we're already adapting to this. And you could probably test this out on your own, right? Like just go have, sit with a couple of friends and talk about something you wanna put in as prompts and see what comes out even when you write, you know, something potentially different as the prompt.

Grace Joaquin:

And the key here, there's two things that you can do to help prevent getting really generic resumes, if you're using ChatGPT or I mean, I'm sure there's other ones to use. We're we're saying ChatGPT, that's what we tried.

Megan Riksen:

Yeah. I used Gemini from Google As well. Yeah.

Grace Joaquin:

So there's other options.Our coworker, Sonya, who is our office coordinator in Allendale, she was saying that she saw a lot of resumes that were very similar and she could tell they were written by AI. And so to avoid that, two things you can do. One is be as specific as possible with your prompting. So when I said, Hey, I was a teacher from 2013 to 2016, and I gave the school name, but that was it. I could have also said, here's a committee that I was on.

Megan Riksen:

Yep. Here is the, here's the age I was teaching.

Grace Joaquin:

Yes. Some behavioral techniques I used to manage my classroom.

Megan Riksen:

Here's some of the demographics of the area I was in.

Grace Joaquin:

Yes. That's going to give a lot more specific and detailed bullets that are not going to match necessarily the person who also put in that I was a teacher. And then the other thing too is that then you still wanna edit it from there.

Megan Riksen:

Oh my gosh, yes.

Grace Joaquin:

If it's using a word you don't know, take it out and put in a different word. If it's using a word that you know, but would never use, take it out, put in a different word.

Megan Riksen:

And it's so hard to do that because you will read it and you will think, wow, that's well written. But then the person who's, I mean, okay, the end person reading this resume is gonna be a human. Even if that resume goes through ai, through a applicant tracking system first, that human can tell that a 20-year-old didn't write that because there's no personality behind it. You can tell when a robot has written something, it sounds too good. If that's even a thing, right? It's like too proper. It's, there's something that you can't really put your finger on that just doesn't sound human. So use those bullet points but then completely rework them with some of those things like you were mentioning with your teaching position. Like what are those things that no one else could say about that role?

Grace Joaquin:

Think about it sort of like when you're trying to not plagiarize on an assignment. If you're using ideas from a textbook, you're going to not copy word for word. You're going to take a paragraph and you're going to completely rearrange it so that there aren't any three words that are in the same order that could be flagged as plagarism. You wanna do essentially the same thing with whatever AI spits out at you.

Megan Riksen:

Like it's gonna probably give you an amazing first word, right? Like action verb. Keep that, cool. Great. If that's a word you would normally use, but then yeah. Kind of go from there.

Grace Joaquin:

Exactly. And that goes the same with anything else you might generate like a cover letter. I would even be more cautious with the cover letter because that's really where you want your personality to shine through -

Megan Riksen:

And your writing style to shine through.

Grace Joaquin:

Your writing style and your individual story to shine through. So I would only probably use it if you're again afraid of that blank page or maybe even asking it the AI to maybe write you an outline.

Megan Riksen:

Yes. I think that outline Yeah. Tip is a really good one because then you won't be as tempted to use every little bit. 'cause It won't all be there. It'll just be a outline for you.

Grace Joaquin:

Exactly. Another thing too, we didn't talk about when generating materials Megan, you did mention the applicant tracking system, which, we have a podcast episode about. And that's essentially a system that employers will use to have AI go through their applications. And it will kind of go through that first before a human will look at it. And I think it helps weed things out a bit. And one thing to keep in mind because that exists, is it will be looking for specific keywords, phrases that were probably in the job description. So one way that you can play along with that and have your application materials speak with their AI is to maybe plug in that job description into the ChatGPT or Gemini or wherever. And that will, along with like your own personal story, have that be the prompt. And then when it writes to your resume and cover letter, it will have specifics from that job description. Now again, you cannot just copy that job description and paste it in and nothing else because you're gonna get the same thing that anyone else with that same idea would have is gonna get.

Megan Riksen:

Of course. Right. Yeah. Think about that. If there's 300 applicants for a job and they all threw the job description into AI.

Grace Joaquin:

Yes. Which a lot are going to, it's getting more and more common.

Megan Riksen:

Yeah. It's, yeah. You gotta do something more with that.

Grace Joaquin:

I know last summer, this was kind of at the very beginning I think of ChatGPT and everything. At least from my perspective. I had an internship position open and I received, I wanna say like 60 applications. And at least two of the cover letters were nearly identical. And at first I thought, are they friends? Like this is an interesting thing to copy together. Yeah. Which like, is just rare. And then the more I thought about it, I realized that they probably both put the same prompt, which was the job description, and then copy and pasted.

Megan Riksen:

Write me a cover letter for this job ChatGPT.

Grace Joaquin:

Yes. So it was very, and neither of them got an interview because, you know, just that shows to me not a lot of effort was put in. Not a lot of original thought. Anyway, so that, that's definitely something to be cautious about when writing a resume or a cover letter. And then another thing, you know, Megan mentioned elevator pitches. Like if, you know, just that can be actually, I think that, and then interview answers is probably one of the better ways to use this. Because you're still going to end up putting it into your own words because you'll you'll be verbally saying it. So it might be a great way to get some bullet points of what you wanna say if you're going to a career fair. Or like, for example, one thing that I did that I thought was really helpful was, I thought of the question, what are your strengths for an interview. And in ChatGPT, I uploaded my resume. I uploaded a letter of recommendation that a colleague had written me.

Megan Riksen:

Ooh. Smart.

Grace Joaquin:

And I uploaded just a few other, you know, random thoughts about myself. And then I asked it to, to generate an answer for that question, what are my strengths? And it did a really good job. And it was very targeted to my background. The, you know, the prompts were very specific and very detailed and that helped. But then of course what it spit out didn't sound like me. So I was just going, I read it and I wrote down some bullets from there.

Megan Riksen:

Highlight a few key points.

Grace Joaquin:

Yes. Right. And then that would just be a great way to jump off preparing for an interview, and practicing. And so yes. I think that's definitely something that anyone could use.

Megan Riksen:

For sure. Yeah. I think it's a little less sticky when you're not writing something. Yeah. Because you're saying it out loud and putting it in your own words just more naturally.

Grace Joaquin:

Exactly.

Megan Riksen:

Yeah. Good. All right. So what about reviewing, what sort of tools would we recommend for students who are like, well I already have a resume that I feel pretty good about? What can I do now?

Grace Joaquin:

Yeah. Through the Career Center we have some tools and resources that we pay for that students can use for free. So if you have a resume already or you're working on one, we have something called Resume AI through Big Interview. If you go to our website, gvsu.edu/careers or just Google GVSU Career Center, you can go to our resource page and you'll see resume AI on there. If you click it -

Megan Riksen:

It's also on our resume guide that's on our website. We have it multiple places. You're not gonna miss it.

Grace Joaquin:

Yes. And when you click into that, you'll be signed in through your SSO and, your single sign on, and then you'll be able to upload your resume that you have and an AI will look through it and give you some feedback. You can also upload a job description. Or like a program description and it will tell you like how well it matches with that. It will tell you if you have enough action verbs, it will tell you how your grammar is, punctuation.

Megan Riksen:

It kind of breaks it down more so than what just like a general AI could do. Like it's focused on resume writing specifically.

Grace Joaquin:

Yes. And it does a pretty good job. It's not perfect. Nope. It's still gonna maybe give you some, if you're applying to be a teacher and it says, Hey, you should include a LinkedIn website on your resume as a teacher, you probably don't need that. Like they might give you some advice that isn't general to everyone, but for the most part it's a really good place to start. Also something that is coming soon for our students, summer 2025 is going to be an Interview AI. We currently do have help with interview via big interview that you can get to on our, our resources. But pretty soon this summer you'll be able to also practice interviewing and have AI feedback on that as well. So that's going to be pretty neat. So keep an eye out. But another way to get some interview help through ai, there's a free, so resource called Interview warmup. If you just Google that, you'll find it. And with that you can speak into your computer and it will give you some feedback based off of your cadence. I think, you know, if you're using a lot of filler words, it will pick up on if you're using action verbs and strengths and connecting it to the job description, it's not gonna be able to pick up on content. I did a practice one where they asked something about data analytics and it doesn't know like if I'm answering it correctly. But it can tell me if I sound good while I'm answering it, essentially.

Megan Riksen:

Yeah. Because there's yeah. Multiple pieces to interviewing. It's not just the actual words you're saying, it's how you're saying them. Yeah.

Grace Joaquin:

So again, that's, that's interview warmup. I think it's just another good tool to use when you're practicing for interviews. And then finally one, Megan do you wanna talk about this one? There's a resource called Notebook LM that we fiddled around with and if you haven't tried it out, I think you should, but -

Megan Riksen:

Yeah, it's very fun. It will generate basically a podcast for you. So we're not looking to replace ourselves here, but we did put in some prompts that would be very much work like a Laker episodes. Yes. And it generated a pretty excellent podcast. It's pretty amazing that that technology 'cause it's voices, you know, some, for some reason that's more impressive to me than just reading what the AI gives me. This was literally like a 20 minute podcast episode, a man and a woman speaking back and forth.

Grace Joaquin:

And if someday Megan and I sound a little different, we maybe we just had a lazy -

Megan Riksen:

We had a sick day. And we still needed to produce our content.

Grace Joaquin:

But that, I think one way you could use NotebookLM, I've heard students using it, you know, to maybe summarize the textbook chapter or something like that, which I think is smart. Or it could be helpful also, you could put in a job description and if it helps you to have podcast people talk about it and that might help you kind of hear what are they seeing from that job description as the highlights of what that job is looking for.

Megan Riksen:

Because we all, we all learn differently. So some of us might be best by just we're just gonna look at the bullet points. And others of us, kind of that auditory component coming in could be really helpful for getting it to stick.

Grace Joaquin:

Yes. You know, I do wanna give one little caveat there that it's not always 100% accurate. Especially when it comes to factual things. So like, for example, if you were doing it as a study tool for a class, don't expect that it's gonna get every date correct and every fact correct from your textbook. It's not. So it's more of just I think a good overview of maybe like the tone of something or the content but not the specifics. So I think that's really the main things we wanted to talk about today. But we wanna just, I think leave it with some of those limitations and just make sure that we are emphasizing how to use AI correctly. So Megan, do you wanna kind of go over those again?

Megan Riksen:

Right. Yeah. I mean I feel like we've done a fairly good job throughout this podcast of our little warnings here and there, but it's like you still need to think critically. Yes. Right. Use your human brain that we know is different from AI and we can think critically. I'm sure, you know, maybe by the time this comes out, the AI will be better at this. It probably will, but it's, it does make mistakes. So do humans, and that's why we need to review it. That's why I still would not recommend that you only have resume ai Look at your resume. No, you should have a roommate, a parent, someone in career lab review that for you. Right. Because they'll be able to hopefully give you some honest feedback that, oh, ooh, who wrote that? That doesn't sound like the rest of this. Or whatever it may be. Yeah, exactly. What else? What other limitations are we thinking?

Grace Joaquin:

I think that's the main thing. You know, putting in very specific prompts and then heavily editing it so that you're using your, your critical thinking to make it sound like you. And I thought we could leave with one example.

Megan Riksen:

I love this example.

Grace Joaquin:

I just think it's so funny for some reason. I, so Amazon is another place that does some AI summaries. So it's I think helpful if you're looking at anything on Amazon, a product, you can see an AI summary of the reviews.

Megan Riksen:

It's super helpful. There's 5,000 reviews. You're not gonna read all of those.

Grace Joaquin:

Exactly. However, something to keep in mind is again, don't, you know, take everything with a grain of salt. I was looking for a child sized hairbrush for my daughter who is two and the AI summary of one particular brush said customers like the hair quality build quality, which hair quality -

Megan Riksen:

Yeah, that also sounds a little weird.

Grace Joaquin:

Yeah. Build quality and color of the hairbrush. They mention it works well with their hair is well made and will last a while. Some also say it's pretty. Opinions are mixed on the size with some saying it's big for small kids and the same size as an adult hairbrush, while others say it's too large and takes up the entire bathroom.

Megan Riksen:

That kills me.

Grace Joaquin:

So I just think, you know, clearly probably someone made a joke in one of their reviews, and AI cannot understand.

Megan Riksen:

Like sarcasm, jokes just, it might not be as good as that.

Grace Joaquin:

Exactly. Yeah. So it's never perfect. So just keep that in mind.

Megan Riksen:

Awesome. So yeah, we will definitely throw in a ton of links into our show notes 'cause I know we've kind of thrown out many, many options here. But yeah, just know that in the career center we're thinking about ai, we want to be on top of this. We think it's a great tool. But we just, yeah, always kind of with that thought of, I'm gonna be careful and I'm going to think critically. Okay. That's it for today. So thank you so much to everyone for listening, and we hope you tune into a future episode soon.