Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Get involved and learn about your industry.

An industry meaning finance, real estate, education, healthcare, because this generative AI is impacting the industries as well as roles.

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating Podcast.

I am your host, Roberta Ndlela.

If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into.

Communication and soft skills are crucial for your career growth and leadership development.

And by the end of this episode, please log on to Apple and Spotify, leave us a rating and a review and what you'd like for us to discuss on this show.

Now let's get communicating.

Now let's get communicating with Ben Gold, who is here to help us use AI to our advantage when careers and job searches and how best to take advantage of this new technology.

And before I go any further, please help me welcome him to the show.

Hi, Ben.

Hi, Roberta.

Nice to be here.

Thank you for being here.

Welcome.

Tell us a little bit about yourself before we get into all the techie stuff.

Perfect.

So I have 20 years of experience in technology.

The last five years, I worked for an enterprise application that used AI to analyze large amounts of conversations.

And I just was really fascinated how this technology could take a whole bunch of information and give actionable insights to our clients.

The beginning of this year, I went through a personal transition.

I was let go from the technology company I was working at.

And I started this journey of trying to find what's my next step.

And originally, I started by applying for jobs, and I was able to leverage this brand new technology, this Generative AI, or what people know as Chat GPT, and started using that to write really targeted cover letters and prepare for interviews.

And after a few months, I began to realize, you know, I think I could create a company that makes this easier for other job seekers and began this road through the creation of a startup.

And in the process of creating the startup, I began to also reach out and do webinars and coaching and podcasts to reach out to the different communities that I wanted to understand more about.

And really where I'm at right now is those conversations have been very deep.

I've learned a lot and I am moving more towards the consulting and public speaking.

However, the common thread is I have been able to meet with multiple people in different industries, in different situations, and to see how my message is you should learn AI if you're unemployed to get your next job, and you more importantly need to learn about AI to keep your job.

Because Generative AI is here to stay.

It is something that is absolutely radically transforming our workplace, it has deep implications, and we can discuss that.

And if you say, well, I tried ChatGPT, and it didn't really do a lot of stuff, this Generative AI has a lot of powerful applications, and it's important to understand them and to master them.

Yeah, welcome to that hole.

What prompt you give it to give you what results?

But the first thing, if you say you use it for your cover letters, if everybody does that, aren't they all gonna sound the same?

That's a great, you know, you hit kind of that one point that I think ChatGP has ruined the cover letter.

That is an area where I think a lot of companies are like foregoing them.

However, to me, cover letters is just a very small snippet from a job search or career point of view, because the AI can give you, even before you write the cover letter, and I actually, one of the things I should say is I wrote this book called Find Your Next Job with ChatGPT.

Right.

And that was inspired by all the conversations about what's the right prompt, and how do you do this, and how do you do that.

And I realized that it's never identical, and I think you've hit on that, that the two keys for Generative AI is you have to have a prompt and contextual data.

And a lot of people don't understand this concept of contextual data.

The AI does not know who Roberta is, doesn't know who Ben is.

So contextual data is really important when you feed that to, whether it's ChatGBT or Cloud or some other AI tool.

An example is my resume.

Resume is really your succinct element of who you are.

And so typically what I will do when I coach other people is to say, here's your resume, a job description.

Now, before you write the cover letter, why don't you do an analysis?

Give me, and so the prompt being the command would be something like, give me, based upon the cover letter and my resume, show me a compatibility as a percent.

So what is my compatibility?

Give me an element of my industry experience, my education and my skills as compared to what's needed.

And then give me my top three strengths and top three weaknesses.

Because if you do that before you even write the cover letter, the AI can tell you if you're a good match or not.

I mean, if you're below an 80% or 85, and there's a lot of other applicants, this is exactly what the companies are doing on the other side of the applicant tracking system.

And so it's good for you to understand this, that maybe this isn't one that's worth pursuing because there's a skills deficit, an industry deficit or something like that, or you need to change your resume to address these things before you submit it.

And then the next question becomes, and I've seen this, I think I saw a TikTok that said something like, I think some job applications asked you, do you want AI to read your resume or assess your application or something like that?

Is that something that's going on along those lines?

I'm gonna say that it varies by company.

Are you asking if a company asks you that question in the application process?

After you've submitted your resume.

So some people are saying, sometimes it asks you, do you want humans in the company to assess your application?

Or now some companies are starting to let AI assess if you're gonna go to the next phase of the application process.

And they ask you, which one do you choose?

I've not heard that because honestly, the challenge we've got is that you have LinkedIn that has this easy apply, and they wanted to make it easy for people to apply.

And I've met job seekers that have applied to a thousand jobs.

I'm not a big spray wide because that just clogs up the applicant tracking systems.

When everybody applies to a thousand jobs, when they're really only 20 or 30 that were really good for them, then it forces the employer on the other side to deploy either keyword spotting or AI, meaning they're looking for keywords.

And that's been around for a while.

Applicant tracking systems have been around for decades, but now they're, instead of using just keywords, they're using AI to screen candidates.

So I've never heard that one, nor I'm surprised they would give you that option because what I'm understanding is that the volume of resumes coming in is a human cannot read them.

Yes, be able to handle everything.

So some of it are now going to be assessed by it.

Because remember, an application process is in stages.

I think that's the initial, so that they don't waste time with people they know will never make it.

So I thought that was quite interesting.

And so if anybody's listening and they're wondering, okay, if I'm job seeking, what's the first thing I need to do to use AI to increase my chances of landing my dream job?

What would you say to them?

So first of all is go to ChatGPT and set up an account.

I have a philosophy called AI first strategy, meaning, especially if you're unemployed and you've got 40 hours in a day, in a week, take two hours a day to learn AI.

And what does that mean?

It means, first of all, set up a free account.

I'm going to suggest pay the $20 a month for the paid account because you're going to get about a 20% to 30% improvement in the accuracy and the, let's say, the amount of perceptiveness that the AI has.

That's the difference between the 3.5 and the 4.0 for ChatGPT.

So that's the first thing is learn that.

I would also say, buy my book, find your next job at the ChatGPT because it walks you through, maybe you need to redefine your career goals.

Maybe you need to redo your resume.

Even before you apply for that next job, why don't you do an assessment of where you're at?

Because one of the other things about AI, and I talked to a lot of people that are in marketing or they're in HR, and they're a little bit confused.

Like I've been a professional for 20, 30 years and all of a sudden they can't find a job.

I'm applying everywhere.

And the dynamic that's happening is that this Generative AI is making it so that a lot of these tasks that used to take a degree and years and years of experience are getting done by a robot.

So a company that might have had 10 employees in their marketing division, 10 that were a year and a half ago, today with 6 or 7 can get the same amount of work done.

Writing a blog, updating a website, all of these things are 5 or 10 times faster because when you learn how to use Generative AI, that helps you to become much more efficient.

So the first thing I would recommend is set up an account for free to test this out.

There's a bunch of newsletters out there about AI, what's going on, and get involved and learn about your industry.

An industry meaning finance, real estate, education, health care, because this Generative AI is impacting the industries as well as roles.

Sales, marketing, HR, and the thing that's important is to understand both elements, because that automation is leading to a transformation.

And if you don't understand this, you're going to wonder why did I get let go or why am I having a difficult time?

And doing this research will help you to redefine your goal and figure out, do I just need to make a slight shift in what I'm doing or do I need to redefine myself completely?

Because the other element to that is, you know how we always say to people, don't just copy and paste your resume to the 10 different companies you're applying to.

Look at the job specs, tailor make it, change the keywords, keyword searches, change the keywords, et cetera.

When you say that you're going to have to change your resume, should they follow that system as well of always change your resume to be tailor made to the job spec of each job application and each company you're applying to?

Well, that, okay, in an ideal world, first you would do the assessment of a prompt with contextual data.

Am I compatible?

Like if you're in the 75, 80 percent, then chances are you're going to get knocked out by the ATS because they're going to be using a similar analysis.

And you want to be typically in the high 80s, low 90s for compatibility.

Like you've, you know, you're almost there.

Then get some feedback.

So once you're there, you say, do I go to the next step?

Which is absolutely give me my top five weaknesses on my resume.

Okay.

So then it will tell you.

And sometimes it'll be, hey, there's sometimes in my resume, it's implied but not said specifically.

And it's like, hey, you might not have this skill or you might have it.

I'm like, I got that.

So out of the five, maybe three of them I actually have, but I just didn't put them in my resume.

That's where I would change it.

That's where I would use the AI to determine how do I position my resume as best as possible.

And I would make the change and then send it in.

So you must still do that process of each application.

You're not just going to copy and paste.

Each application needs to be tailor made for the job ad.

I'm going to recommend it.

And that's why I'm not a big fan of going for 150 or 200 job applications.

I think it's, for a person, I think best practice is when you have a good LinkedIn profile.

LinkedIn is going to help you to find, at least it can recommend some jobs, and that their AI is pretty good at saying, here's 100 jobs, and I'll go through them with an eye.

There's times where somebody is like, no, that's not a good one.

That's not a good one.

But I do think that you're better off being very narrow and saying, yes, I'm going to take the time to put a configured resume for an opportunity that truly is a good match for me, than to send out 100 resumes that I can do automatically, because there's a lot of competition out there, and you really do have to be very careful.

The other element is I would always put in my skills, even if you've never used ChatGPT, in a very short period of time, if you take, let's say, four or five weeks, you could become an expert in that, and you should put Generative AI as one of your skills.

Because that's another thing is that when you're being interviewed, I always like to explain to people that there's AI and Generative AI.

So AI has been around for decades.

That has been your Google search, your Netflix recommending a movie, or Amazon recommending a product.

That's AI.

That's been for big corporations to make money, and that's been around.

Now, Generative AI, which has been released to the public last November with ChatGPT, that is the democratization of AI.

Suddenly, an individual user with no computer programming background could go in and be able to create both, we're talking images, we're talking about refining text content.

And when you think about this, it's important to do this because the moment I get these oohs and aahs, I feel like I'm Morpheus giving Neo the red pill when I'll do webinars and I'll show people what this can do, because all of a sudden, I'm like, this is what you're up against when you say, you know, give me this, give me this and press enter.

And all of a sudden, it starts writing out, here are your top five weaknesses.

You need to do this, this, this.

Here's the social media profile the person is going to interview me.

What are the top five questions I'm going to be asked?

It will be able to do that.

And I've had a number of my students who have gone to, I said, you have an interview?

Well, here, let me run this for you.

I said, this is what they're going to ask you.

This is going to be probably your three weakest points.

So, and then say, well, how would I answer that?

And it will help you to give a good response.

So my point is, is that this Generative AI, if it does that for your job search, imagine what that does if you have your, in the job.

Employers are going to expect that you can take this knowledge, and on day one, you're not going to be writing longhand blog posts, or creating content.

They're going to expect you know, ChatGPT, and the image tools like Dali, and Mid Journey, and things like that.

And that's, you don't have to be a programmer, but you do need to take time to learn those things.

And put it on your resume as an extra skill that you've acquired.

Absolutely.

I'll tell you a story that I have a colleague of mine, and she was telling me about, she's an expert in marketing and branding, and she was helping a company find a new CMO.

Four finalist candidates came to the interview, and the question was asked, do you know ChatGPT?

Two of them, one of them said, I've never used it, and one of them said ChatGPT is a fad.

The moment they said that, the CEO basically, the eyes glazed over, the interview was over.

And so the idea is that you need to learn this, not just to write a good cover letter and not just to do this, but you need to research your industry.

If you're, for example, in human resources, and to understand what are the programs today that, for example, automate the initial screen, so that now robots will do the initial screen in some cases, what are the things that automate onboarding?

How are you going to use generative AI to communicate better with the employees in the company?

So it's not just that they're hiring you, but they're hiring your knowledge and your mastery of this technology.

And it doesn't matter your age, it's just a question of curiosity and taking the time to learn that and to stay on top of this.

It's changing very quickly.

If I'm at university and I'm trying to decide what to major in, and I remember when generative AI first came out, I heard some people say, oh, well, if you are in the legal profession, for instance, I don't know if you heard this, but they'll say, oh, then it's going to write your legal brief.

So what are you going to do?

Are they so busy?

You're a lawyer, you just go to court.

But if anybody is listening to you and they say the things that AI can do, which means that if I'm at university studying and it can do my job and my listening, my chances of getting one when I graduate, so what is it that I should avoid as a major and study something else that's going to have longevity?

You're asking really, really interesting and perceptive questions.

Okay, Roberto, so I just say that this is because I'm actually doing a talk next week to Georgia Tech's Career Centers and I've spent a lot of times with students.

Actually, this is also one of the other things I'm pursuing, is I'm going to be doing talks on college campuses because that is the elephant in the room.

The elephant in the room is you have this technology that last year professors hated because basically it allowed students to cheat.

Yeah, just write this assignment, and it was seen as a tool there.

Now what's happening is, and actually this is my message to the students, and again, when I was a student, you get out of college what you put into it.

And I had a wonderful college-university experience, and if you cheat and if you use ChatGPT to write for you and to not do critical thinking, then that's your mistake, you lost out.

However, universities right now are starting to realize that their students have to get a job when they get out.

So what I've been talking to students about is that if you're a graphics designer, give you an example, maybe a year ago you had to know Adobe and Adobe Photoshop because that's how you did stuff.

Now you press a button in mid-journey or you use Adobe Firefly or Dolly, and you get two hours of work in about 10 seconds.

But the question then becomes is, okay, maybe as an artist, the kind of job I thought I was going to have is going to be different, master that because companies still need people who know how to do text to image.

It's not that easy right now.

I mean, I've been working, kind of tells you how old I am, I know Facebook and LinkedIn, but with mid-journey you have to go into Discord.

And the only way for me to figure out how Discord work was to go to my 15-year-old son and say, I'm completely lost here on mid-journey and line up, and then you have like this, Discord is like Slack, it's a communication thing.

He's like, press this button, do this, then enter this and boom, now you're in.

I'm like, oh, okay.

So my point is that those are the kinds of things that as a university student, and that's what I teach them, is make yourself an AI expert.

And an hour a day as a student, over a course of four or five months, it's a fantastic investment.

There's a couple of newsletters I recommend.

One is called The Neuron.

The other one is called Superhuman.

And these are ones that talk about their daily newsletters about what's going on in AI.

I also get Google Alerts for AI and recruiting and careers, so that I know what's the new technologies coming out.

So you probably spend 20 minutes a day just keeping up with the new innovations and new apps.

But also, like I said, that when you start playing in ChatGPT, a lot of times people will do something like, write me a cover letter.

And of course, it's going to imagine, because if you don't give it the right prompt, it's going to give you garbage.

And if you don't give them a resume and you don't give them a job description, of course, it's going to say, I have 36 years of experience in real estate, and therefore, and you're like, wait a second, they call that hallucination.

But when you learn how to create the prompts and you learn the contextual data, and then you learn how to talk to it like it's your coach.

For example, when I do a business plan, I'll say, you're Tony Robbins, and I'm writing a business plan.

Usually I'll say, give me the 10 questions you need from me for you to be able to give me advice.

That's usually what I'll say.

And then I'll answer the questions, who's your audience?

What are you doing?

Why are you doing this?

And then it will say, okay, here's my recommendation.

And then it's a back and forth of either digging deeper or saying, can you clarify or can you do this?

And I had one morning where I woke up at six in the morning and by noon I had a business plan.

And my wife woke up and I said to her, I said, I may just spend the morning with Tony Robbins.

And it was awesome.

Very good.

That's awesome.

You know what?

Do you make me think of the parallel with programming when you describe it like that?

Because you know how somebody will go study computer science at university, but then you'll have a bootcamp of seven months of people who are actually getting up to date with the current technology.

So the graduate after four years hasn't caught up with these people who only spend six months in bootcamp because new technology, it's always new technology every day.

So if you say that they should learn that at university, the AI and text to image, is there a way to also just keep up with what's going?

Because every day there's something new.

And universities sometimes have been proven, especially with programming, not to catch up as much.

So I think that's why I say that you need to take an hour a day of your own time, carve it out, and do it for learning AI.

And I mean that from the bottom of my heart.

I know students are really busy, but that's really what needs to happen is, is to take time out every day and say, I'm going to take this time to read the newsletters, to research, and then also try it out.

Not on your homework assignment to write your thesis or history paper, but maybe if you are a programmer, there are a bunch of things that ChatGBT can do.

If you're a graphics designer, go and test out and learn the best prompts for Mid Journey and for Dali.

What I'm finding is that Dali 3, which you can get on Bing in the Bing browser right now, is I'm finding I'm getting better results from that.

It's like Mid Journey can be more artistic, but Bing or Dali, I think, gets me.

Like if I say, draw this, it'll generally do a better job.

Yeah, so those are the kinds of things that you just learn from experience.

And I'll give you another example.

To me, it was mind-boggling that you can take a picture with Chat GPT, so I can take my phone and I can take a picture, and Chat GPT will analyze the image.

And some people say, well, so what?

And I'm like, I took a picture of a Japanese magazine that my father, who's a collector, said, can you tell me what this is?

And it not only translated it, it gave the context of it, why it's important, what this magazine does, and what the sport that it was referring to from a picture.

Just from a picture?

I took a picture of my resume, okay, from a computer screen, and said, give me your thought process on both the structure of my resume and the formatting of my resume.

And it gave me an analysis of the text in the resume, as well as the spacing and everything else.

Now think of how smart that is.

And my first thought was, how many jobs are going to be eliminated because of this innovation?

Hence, when you're in college, I wanted to just ask you one last question, Ben, before you go.

The students that you speak to in colleges, what is the one main concern that they have with AI right now, Generative AI?

I think they just don't know how to take advantage of it.

It's interesting because most of the students I've talked to are familiar with ChatGPT, but they don't understand the deeper level of ChatGPT, how it can impact that, how they can leverage it in their daily activities outside of doing homework, and how they can use it for their career advancement.

So that's the part that I think it's not so much a fear.

I think the fear is more on the university official sides and maybe some of the administrators, but I would say for the students, it's more of not understanding or not being able, understanding how to navigate through that.

That makes a lot of sense.

And I hope anybody listening will follow your advice and actually start practicing every day and setting up their time to do that.

Please give us the title of your book one last time before you give us your website and social media handles.

So I have Find Your Next Job with ChatGBT.

I also have a book coming out in about two weeks that is specifically for fraternities and sororities called Use AI to Grow Your Fraternity and Sorority, which is a special project that I worked on with Greek University.

My website is bengoldai.com.

bengoldai.com.

That's your website.

Find Your Next Job with ChatGBT by Ben Gold.

Is it on your website and Amazon and everywhere else?

Thank you so much for that.

Any last words of wisdom?

Let's first start with career professionals.

If anybody already has a job, what should they do?

Okay, we've heard about invest some time to learn AI, but is there anything else you think they should also take cognizant of?

They should ask about in their role.

I've actually sat down with some sales reps, and I've shown them how to say, you've got an upcoming prospect meeting.

Well, let's do this.

Let's go take a look at the social media profile of the person you're going to meet.

What can you learn about them before you meet with them?

You can copy the social media profile and say, give me five things that are based on my profile, their profile that we can break the ice with or build commonality and friendship with.

I would just say that in your role, if you ask a question, if in your current role today, you compose emails, or if you write any kind of content, or if you do any external conversations, then you definitely should learn to master Generative AI because it's going to help your message be crisper.

It's going to help you to communicate better.

It's going to help you to be more precise when you reach out to people because now you are able to get a better insight into the person or the situation that you're entering into.

And whenever they say, is there anything you can ask us, you can even have material for that instead of saying, how much does it pay?

Because that's usually not the first question they want you to ask.

But Ben Gold, thank you so much for being here today, teaching us how to maximize AI for our careers.

I appreciate you and your time.

Thank you.

Thank you so much, Roberta.

This was great.

I enjoyed it as well.

Thank you for joining the Speaking and Communicating Podcast once again.

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