AI & Landing Your New Job

A week ago, a friend came to me looking to prepare for a new role he was interviewing for.

He felt he was woefully underskilled for it.

He landed a second interview, and we prepped for it using ChatGPT.

Here is how you can do the same:

1. Grab the job description from the LinkedIn Job you are applying for:

- Copy and paste everything under the heading "About the job" ((example here: https://lnkd.in/gnsvmndX)

- Paste this into a Word or Google doc titled "Job & Company Description"

- Click File > Download > PDF

2. Go to the section "Meet the hiring team" and select the profile of the person who is hiring (example here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kale-panoho/):

- Go to their profile

- Select "More"

- Select "Save as PDF"

3. Go to the website of the company using Google Chrome:

- What the company does (e.g https://lnkd.in/gz2wvvhT)

- What the company is about

- How it works

- Customer reviews

- For each of these pages in Google Chrome, use "Control" click to open the options and select "Reading Mode", then copy and paste all of the text from the page into a Google or Word doc - called "About The Company"

- Click File > Download > PDF

4. Now go to ChatGPT (pay for the premium version so you can get voice):

- Open ChatGPT and select "GPT 4o" model

- Upload each of the docs that you have as PDFs into a new chat alongside your own CV

- Use this prompt:

"I've uploaded the following documents (About The Company + Profile + Job & Company Description) as material for a role that I want to apply for the Profile PDF is the hiring manager for the position, and the two docs (About The Company + Job & Company Description) are about the company and the position.

Please create a range of questions that I can expect to be asked and how I can use the strengths on my CV to answer these so that they match the company goals to show that I've done my research.

Please create a broad set of questions I can ask the hiring manager based on her history.

Please add a broad set of questions that relate to the industry and things that may not be obvious to the hiring manager that I can add value to from the skills you see I have on my CV.

Please set these questions up as a mock interview that we will discuss in real time using voice mode - be critical of my answers"

The AI component is great but the big stand out here is getting reps on understanding the company you are hoping to work with.

Winning With Magic Moments

“Magic moments” is a corny term used by founders to describe the times their business exceeds customers expectations.

…By how much and in what way, I’m not sure. But I’ve found it a useful term to capture the essence of what we’re trying to achieve with our fundraising platform at Gravy.

I’m sure you’ve heard expressions like all the good ideas are taken. This looks to be particularly true for software. There’s seemingly ten’s if not hundreds or thousands of software solutions for every imaginable problem.

At the very least all the low hanging fruit is gone.

So to build something of significant value you’ve either got to tackle a very difficult unseen problem or do something meaningfully better than everyone else.

Building Gravy sits somewhere in-between those two challenges. There’s a couple of incumbents floundering who’ve yet to truely solve what is an annoyingly complex problem.

Our grand plan to win here is to solve the fundraising problem with as many magic moments as possible. Wedging our way in to market one feature at a time.

We want every interaction with Gravy to in some way exceed customers expectations.

For example, in the funding industry, all funding applications require a cover letter. Almost exactly the same as you’d write when applying for a job. These materially impact your chances of getting approved for funding.

Most people write them poorly and spend stupid amounts of time doing so.

So we built a feature that helps people write cover letters for their funding applications with 3 mouse clicks (< 60 seconds) that read noticeably better than average.

This approach can be applied to any business and It’s actually quite simple.

First we broke down the big job (fundraising) into individual tasks. Fundraising is made up of at least 100.

Then we found out how potential customers are currently doing those tasks and wrote them up as SOP’s.

Finally (in progress) we’re figuring out how to eliminate, simplify, automate or improve steps in those processes and building software to do them instead.

Each magic moment we create opens that door for Gravy a little further.