You don’t need the perfect prompt to get started with AI: Just have a conversation
If you feel overwhelmed by the barrage of AI how-tos, step inside my post. You already have everything you need to use AI.
My LinkedIn feed is flooded with posts about AI, many of which propose guides for the “perfect prompt”.
And yet, when I mention using AI to my clients, several have told me they don’t know how to prompt AI for their various use cases.
For example, I have one client who is interested in transitioning from academia to industry. He shared with me a resume that was begging for improvement by AI. Great raw material including relevant technical and statistical experience, but overly detailed on the “what” and “how” instead of the “so what” in business terms.
When I suggested he throw his resume and the desired job description into ChatGPT, he felt lost. “What prompt should I use?” he asked. “I don’t know much about industry, so I don’t know what to ask it.”
What to expect in this post: A demo
When I heard this, I realized there is a gap in the narrative of how to use AI.
Using AI should make your life easier. And the magic of this technology is that you don’t need anything other than what you already carry inside you to make it work for you.
You don’t need a perfect prompt to get started with AI - just start a conversation
To practice what I preach, I’m not going to give you tips on how to not write a perfect prompt for AI.
I’m going to show you.
For the rest of the post, I’ll walk through a demo of how I used ChatGPT.
I asked it to make suggestions for tailoring a resume to a particular job description, specifically in a situation where the person knows very little about the domain they are transitioning into, like me when I moved from academia to industry.
First, the “perfect prompt” process
Let’s start with a baseline of what using a “perfect prompt” for AI looks like.
To find the elusive perfect prompt, you would probably turn to your trusty search engine and use keywords like “AI resume optimization prompt tips”.
When I typed this phrase into LinkedIn’s search, it returned many many posts filled to the brim with prompt tips. Wonderful!
Except when you review the posts, you realize that only about 1 in every 10-15 suggested prompts meets your use case, half the posts are duplicates, and the one relevant prompt requires brain work to tweak into what you need.
The prompts also tend to be highly transactional, utilitarian, and don’t go beyond the initial prompt.
I don’t know about you, but I’m not feeling all that energized about the idea of doing homework ahead of a task that should be “so easy with AI”.
Create a conversation tailored to you
Let’s check out what’s behind Door Number 2: going straight to the source to get a conversation 100% tailored to you.
Before embarking on your AI adventure, it is helpful to get some clarity on what your task is. That answer is inside of you, not out there in a search engine.
In this example, you have a resume and you have a job description.
You want to tailor your resume to this job description.
And you don’t know much about the world behind this job description.
In fact, you don’t really know how people will evaluate your resume - what they find relevant and what they find missing.
This is a perfect task for AI, because it can help fill in those blindspots for you. You can sidestep the paradoxical situation where you need answers to ask the right questions to get you to better answers.
Let’s jump in.
Starting the conversation - you don’t need much
First, imagine you’re talking to a friend or trusted mentor who may need a little background before hearing your ask. Now, tell that to ChatGPT.
In this situation, ChatGPT doesn’t need much to go off of because it’s been trained on lots of examples related to job descriptions, resumes, business needs, and even transitions from academia to industry. For the most part if the information exists to a high degree on the internet, ChatGPT will know about it.
Follow its lead + give it more information
Next, I shared with ChatGPT a resume and job description.
(Behind the scenes fun fact: I created this resume and job description using ChatGPT. For more info on what that conversation looked like, I’ll share the full transcript soon and link it here when I do.)
Here’s the resume:
Here’s the job description:
This was ChatGPT’s reply:
Open up the conversation by following your natural curiosity
Now we’re starting to roll. ChatGPT has given me several answers I can dig into depending on my own curiosity.
For example, here are some of my follow-up questions:
“In the Tailor Skills section, can you give more detail or examples? Don't rewrite it for me.”
“How would I know if my resume is meeting the expectations of the job description? I've never applied to industry before.”
“Could you tell me more about what business-oriented language means?”
“Can I share with you more details on my research, and you can help me understand what aspects of it and how to describe it would be relevant for a business?”
A few notes on these questions:
I tend to always tell ChatGPT not to write or rewrite for me when I’m working on something I’m writing, whether it’s a resume or this post. I believe strongly that what I produce reflects me and my own writing style. I mentioned briefly my thoughts on this in my earlier post where I share other examples of how I’ve used AI. And rest assured, it’s a topic that will come up again.
Question 3 above on “business-oriented language” was directly in response to ChatGPT’s own suggestion to - “Ask yourself: Am I using business-oriented language, or am I still in research-speak?” This is a great way to use ChatGPT - to ask it to elaborate on its own points. Those are the places where you can bring in your own unique interpretations.
If you are interested in the full transcript of the conversation I used for this example, I’ll share it soon then link it here when I do.
Human-centered AI usage
I hope you enjoyed this little peek into one way you can use AI that is human-centered instead of based on programmatic “perfect prompts”.
Personally, I love using AI this way.
By taking it a small snippet at a time, I can turn a boring task like resume optimization into a small journey of self-exploration on what working in the business world looks like and how I could fit into it.
Don’t get me wrong, I think “perfect prompt” guides are an excellent source for inspiration.
But when you’re first starting out, if you’re overwhelmed by all the “how-tos”, close down those tabs and just start a conversation. You do it every day with the people around you. You can do it with AI, too.
I help people create more technical agility, authentic leadership, and personal balance in their lives. Want to explore working together? Let’s connect — leave me a message here or email me directly at afw.coaching@gmail.com.