This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Amar Saurabh, a product manager at PayPal in his 30s, based in San Mateo, California. It’s been edited for length and clarity.
I spent the last five years of my career at Meta and later at TikTok as a product manager.
While I enjoyed the high-growth, fast-paced culture at TikTok, I was looking to work for a more established company with stability in the US, so I started applying to other jobs in April.
During the first two months of filling out job applications, I only landed two or three interviews. After not finding much help from ChatGPT, I came up with the idea of creating a custom GPT.
It took less than two hours to create, and the tool helped me land my lead product manager job at PayPal. If I needed to find another job, I’d absolutely use it again.
ChatGPT kept making mistakes
At the start of my job hunt, I reached out to recruiters on LinkedIn, but personalizing each message took a lot of time. I tried using ChatGPT to draft messages, but it kept making mistakes.
I realized that, on ChatGPT, I’m not just chatting about my job search; I’m also chatting about recipe ideas, workout plans, budgeting, and travel itineraries. When ChatGPT would give me an answer, it would often get mixed up or provide generic answers that weren’t customized to me.
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It also kept asking me to reupload my résumé or share more details about myself. That’s when I came up with the idea of building a custom GPT, a specialized AI assistant that performs a specific task, exclusively for my job search.
Building a custom GPT was super easy. Here’s how I did it.
You can access custom GPTs through ChatGPT’s free tier, though a paid subscription allows you to upload more documents. I use the paid version, which costs $20 a month.
I clicked on “custom GPT” and named it “PM job search advisor.” I shared my résumé, a link to my LinkedIn profile, and additional details about the projects I’ve worked on. Then I provided context that I was looking for a senior-level product management position.
It probably took me about an hour and a half to fully prep it with my initial input before it was ready to work for me.
My GPT writes messages, customizes my résumé, and helps with interview prep
Next, I started the outreach stage by asking my custom GPT to draft customized messages to recruiters or other members of the team I was applying to.
I could ask it to write a LinkedIn connection request with a character limit of 300, or I could request a longer, email-style message. I even asked my GPT to find me the right people to reach out to for a role and the email address to contact them at. When I applied for jobs, I had it refine my résumé to fit the job description.
It also helped me with interview prep. Before an interview, I would input the job description, tell it the date of my job interview, and ask, “What should I highlight from my experience? What questions should I expect from the recruiter?”
It saved me hours that would’ve been spent trying to remember everything I’ve done in my career.
My custom GPT makes mistakes like a human
There were a couple of times when it would forget certain details about me, and I’d have to remind it, “Hey, you have all my information. Do you remember this conversation we had?”
It would come back saying something like “oh yeah, sorry for not taking that into account,” and it would. It was like talking to a person. Overall, my custom GPT worked really well for me.
The number of applications I filled out didn’t change as I implemented my custom GPT, but what did change was the number of responses and interviews I got. In two months, I landed at least 7 interviews with companies like Reddit, Intuit, and PayPal.
I officially quit TikTok and signed papers to start my new job at PayPal
My GPT helped me write my custom email to the PayPal recruiter and prepared me for each round of interviews. When I did get the job offer, I even used it to help me negotiate my salary.
If I were in the job market in the future, I’d use this method again. The benefits of a custom GPT are confounding and will only get better as more information is added. My next step would be to build out my GPT to have agentic capabilities, meaning it could apply to jobs and answer application questions for me.
Do you have a story to share about landing a job in a unique or unconventional way? If so, please reach out to the reporter at tmartinelli@businessinsider.com.
