Show HN: Generate a Cover Letter by Pasting the Job Post and Your Resume (opens in new tab)

(careered.ai)

18 pointsspqr2333y ago7 comments

Introducing my new AI-powered tool that generates personalized cover letters in seconds! It's powered by GPT-3 and all you need to do is upload the job post and your resume, and the tool uses the language model to analyze and match the keywords and requirements from the job post with your skills and experience. The generated letter can be further customized, and you can create multiple letters quickly and easily.

It's still pretty bare-bones so I'm thinking of ways to make this better. I'd appreciate any feedback! Let me know what you think.

7 comments

waselighis3y ago

I love the idea! I spend weeks making countless minor tweaks to my resume until I finally land a new job, and I hate employers who ask for, or even require, a cover letter. I'm a fairly sincere person and I hate writing cover letters because it feels like kissing ass for a corporation I really don't give a crap about. Letting AI do that job for me sounds like a great idea. Besides, it won't be long before the majority of job applicants start using AI to generate personalized cover letters, effectively making cover letters worthless.

On the other hand, I dread knowing that recruiters are also using these AI generators to write introductory messages. It used to be easy to filter out the worthless recruiters, the majority of them it's super obvious they didn't read your resume or profile. "I'm super impressed by your experience!" Uh huh. But now, AI can generate an introductory message which takes every detail of my skills and experience into account. So now, if a recruiter contacts me and they reference one or two details in my resume, I have to wonder if it was an actually competent recruiter or just an AI.

mordras3y ago

I basically launched a similar service just recently [1]. Guess, the idea is pretty obvious, especially hearing about all the layoffs in the past months combined with OpenAI's impressive progress.

For feedback: I tried your generator, and it gave me a cover letter (impressively fast!) as promised. The letter's signature was a link and read "Candidate Name", which I clicked (of course) and went straight to a 404. The cover letter was gone. So, maybe some way to save a link to the letter, e.g. a unique URL, that you can navigate back to? You could store the letter content for a few hours or days for that, or even just encode the full content into a query string. Alternatively, a big, fat "Copy to clipboard" button could also help.

You mentioned GPT-3 - is it actually 3 or 3.5-turbo?

Looking forward to what a multimodal GPT-4 can do for us now. AI-generated profile photos, application video, automatically calling the recruiters on the phone, etc. The ideas to shake up recruiters' lives seem endless now ;)

You are welcome to test my generator and borrow some ideas if you find it interesting. It's behind a free signup, as I was slightly afraid of piling up OpenAI API cost.

[1] https://www.resufit.com

spqr233OP3y ago

Yeah I noticed I wasn't the only one with this idea either :)

It's using text-davinci-3 mostly because I was too lazy to move to gpt-3.5-turbo since that required moving to the chat api. I'll probably make the move if people use this tool enough that I'm worried about the bill from openai.

- It being impressively fast comes from me using the streaming API. That's actually where I spent most of my effort making work. OpenAI sends their messages via SSE to my server which then instantly streams that also by SSE to the browser client. It turns out this is hard to make work because most reverse proxies want to buffer responses so you have to figure out the configuration to make sure your responses aren't buffered.

- The candidate name link problem comes from the fact that I translate GPT3's output as markdown so [Candidate Name] turns into a link to nothing (I'm gonna go and change that soon I swear).

scarface743y ago

For fear of sounding like the “do people still watch TV. I haven’t watch TV in 10 years guy”, do people still write cover letters and do any companies actually read them?

spqr233OP3y ago

What I've noticed is that it's optional for most places I applied to. There was this time where I applied to a startup and added a cover letter. The interviewer remembered of me as "the guy who wrote a cover letter".

That made me realize that since most people aren't doing it, a cover letter would help me standout. Seeing a cover letter is rare enough that people value it more. Nowadays, I make one for any role I'm very excited about.

incahoots3y ago

unfortunately yes, last few places I've shot off a resume to hit back that I need a cover letter.

I'd be curious how many are asking for cover letters and run resumes through the HR grinder. I like to believe the ones still asking for them actually read the cover letter/resume, manually.

lazyant3y ago

Some companies require or encourage them (HashiCorp, Shopify for ex)

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

7 comments

waselighis3y ago

mordras3y ago

I basically launched a similar service just recently [1]. Guess, the idea is pretty obvious, especially hearing about all the layoffs in the past months combined with OpenAI's impressive progress.

You mentioned GPT-3 - is it actually 3 or 3.5-turbo?

You are welcome to test my generator and borrow some ideas if you find it interesting. It's behind a free signup, as I was slightly afraid of piling up OpenAI API cost.

[1] https://www.resufit.com

spqr233OP3y ago

Yeah I noticed I wasn't the only one with this idea either :)

- The candidate name link problem comes from the fact that I translate GPT3's output as markdown so [Candidate Name] turns into a link to nothing (I'm gonna go and change that soon I swear).

scarface743y ago

For fear of sounding like the “do people still watch TV. I haven’t watch TV in 10 years guy”, do people still write cover letters and do any companies actually read them?

spqr233OP3y ago

incahoots3y ago

unfortunately yes, last few places I've shot off a resume to hit back that I need a cover letter.

I'd be curious how many are asking for cover letters and run resumes through the HR grinder. I like to believe the ones still asking for them actually read the cover letter/resume, manually.

lazyant3y ago

Some companies require or encourage them (HashiCorp, Shopify for ex)

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse