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Amar Saurabh created a custom GPT to help him find a job and landed a role at PayPal.
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He found that ChatGPT was not suitable for personalized job applications, which led him to choose the tool.
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Custom GPT improved his interview responses and helped negotiate his job offer at PayPal.
This spoken essay is based on an interview with Amar Saurabh, a product manager in his 30s at PayPal based in San Mateo, California. It has been edited for length and clarity.
I spent the last five years of my career at Meta and then TikTok as a product manager.
While I enjoyed the rapidly growing and rapidly evolving culture of TikTok, I was looking for a job at a more established, stable company in the US, so I started applying for other jobs in April.
In the first two months of applying for jobs, I only got two or three interviews. After not finding much help from ChatGPT, I came up with a custom GPT.
It took less than two hours to set up and the tool helped me land a key product manager job at PayPal. If I had to find another job, I would definitely use him again.
ChatGPT kept making mistakes
I contacted recruiters on LinkedIn at the beginning of my job search, but personalizing each message took a lot of time. Tried using ChatGPT for draft messages but kept getting errors.
I realized that I’m not just talking about job searches in ChatGPT; I also talk about recipe ideas, workout plans, budgeting, and travel itineraries. When ChatGPT gave me an answer, it often got mixed up or gave generic answers that weren’t tailored to me.
I also kept getting asked to re-upload my resume or share more information about myself. Then I had the idea to create a custom GPT, a specialized AI assistant that performs a specific task, exclusively for my job search.
Creating a custom GPT was very easy. Here’s how I did it.
You can access custom GPTs with the free tier of ChatGPT, but a paid subscription allows you to upload more documents. I use the paid version which costs $20/month.
I clicked on “custom GPT” and named it “PM Job Search Advisor”. I’ve shared my resume, a link to my LinkedIn profile, and additional information about projects I’ve worked on. I then provided the context that I was looking for a senior product management position.
It probably took me about an hour and a half to set it up with my down payment before it was ready to go.
My GPT writes messages, customizes my resume, and helps me prepare for my interview
I then started the outreach phase by asking my custom GPT to prepare custom messages for recruiters or other members of the team I was applying to.
I could ask you to write a LinkedIn connection request with a 300 character limit or a longer email. mail type message. I even asked my GPT to find me the right people to contact for the role and email them. email address to contact them. When I applied for a job, I had to improve my resume to match the job description.
It also helped me prepare for the interview. Before the interview, I would type in the job description, tell the date of the job interview, and ask, “What should I highlight from my experience? What questions should I expect the recruiter to ask?”
I’ve saved hours that I would have spent trying to remember everything I’ve done in my career.
My custom GPT makes mistakes like a human being
A few times he forgot some information about me and I had to remind him, “Hey, you have all my information. Do you remember this conversation we had?”
He would repeat something like “oh yeah, sorry I’m not taking that into account” and yeah. It was like talking to a human being. Overall, my custom GPT worked very well for me.
After implementing custom GPT, the number of completed applications did not change, but the number of responses received and interviews did. In two months, I did at least 7 interviews with companies like Reddit, Intuit, and PayPal.
I officially quit TikTok and signed the paperwork to start a new job at PayPal.
My GPT helped me write a custom email. email to the PayPal recruiter and prepared me for each round of interviews. When I got a job offer, I even used him to help me negotiate my salary.
I would use this method again if I were on the job market in the future. The benefits of custom GPT are confusing and will only get better as more information is added. My next step would be to create my own GPT to have agent capabilities, meaning it could apply to jobs and answer application questions for me.
Do you have a story to share about a unique or unconventional job? If so, please contact the reporter at tmartinelli@businessinsider.com.
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