Jobs & Work: 21 real cases

Check a résumé (CV) against a job ad and tailor it honestly with Copilot

Jonathan Haddock, job hunting in the UK, uploaded a CV to Microsoft Copilot and asked for improvements. Some tips weren't localized for the UK, such as phone number format, and others repeated changes already made, but Haddock rewrote the professional summary on its advice. Then Haddock gave it the job advert as a PDF. Copilot compared the two point by point and noted that writing playbooks wasn't mentioned; Haddock had done that work, so added it. By the third version, Copilot called the CV 'now a strong fit'. Haddock kept every change factual and the CV to two pages.

Land a job after a layoff using a Claude Code job-application workflow you built yourself

Mads Lorentzen, a geophysicist by training, lost their position in late 2025 and built a Claude Code workflow to run the job search: profiling their own skills, scraping Danish job portals, evaluating fit, and drafting and reviewing each tailored application, plus interview prep. Lorentzen used it weekly and told every employer about it, which they say usually sparked a technical conversation rather than counting against them. Sixty-nine tailored applications, twenty first interviews and one signed contract later, Lorentzen started as an AI engineer in June 2026, and published the workflow as an open-source project.

Track 186 applications, find missing keywords and review interview notes with Claude to land an offer

Margareth Felicia Gono, an international student who needed a visa, started job hunting scattershot. Gono built an application tracker with Claude, had it pull the main skills and keywords from each job description and compare them with the résumé, and used it as a career coach, which led to three résumés for analytics, sales and marketing, and consulting. Where interviewers allowed recording, Gono ran sentiment analysis on the notes to see where Gono hesitated or used filler words. The tracker showed 186 applications, 44 cold outreaches, 19 interviews, six take-home assignments, three final rounds and one offer, as a senior associate at DoorDash.

Land a new software job within a month of quitting, using ChatGPT for interview prep plans

Rathesh Prabakar, a senior software engineer in Bengaluru, quit in October 2025 without a job lined up. Prabakar applied before work and prepared after, and asked ChatGPT to act as an experienced résumé writer. For each interview, Prabakar gave it their skills, experience and the job description plus the time available and asked for a prep plan; a high share of the likely questions it suggested came up. Questions Prabakar couldn't answer went back to ChatGPT afterwards, and doubtful answers were cross-checked on Google. With a referral from a LinkedIn contact, Prabakar accepted an offer in early November.

Get final paychecks released within 30 minutes with an email citing state labor law, written with Grok

After two weeks of trying to get final paychecks from a former employer, Rolo had Grok help write an email citing Illinois labor laws and the consequences for the company. Several people at the company replied within 30 minutes to say the checks would be ready for pickup. Grok was explicit that it isn't an attorney.

Build a custom GPT as a job-search coach and go from 2 or 3 interviews to at least 7 and a PayPal offer

Product manager Amar Saurabh, ex-Meta and TikTok, got only two or three interviews in the first two months of applying, and plain ChatGPT kept giving generic answers and asking for the résumé again. In about an hour and a half Saurabh built a custom GPT, 'PM job search advisor', loaded with their résumé, LinkedIn profile and project details. It drafted recruiter outreach (including 300-character connection requests), tailored the résumé to each job description and prepped each interview. Over two months Saurabh landed at least 7 interviews, with companies including Reddit, Intuit and PayPal, and took a lead product manager job at PayPal.

Practise interview answers out loud with ChatGPT voice mode, not memorised scripts (partial)

On their way to interviews at Microsoft, Bain and Sweetgreen, a job seeker who writes the Ambitious Slacker newsletter pasted job descriptions into ChatGPT and had it interview them in voice mode, answering out loud and asking for feedback. That practice helped. Having ChatGPT write answers to memorise backfired: after a final round at Target, the interviewer said they were the best candidate but the company chose an internal candidate because they sounded too scripted. Once they stopped memorising and practised a few stories out loud, they did much better.

Write a first job application with ChatGPT and get an interview invitation

A poster says they used ChatGPT to write a job application for the first time one weekend and received an interview invitation shortly after.

Prepare for job interview rounds with a Gemini Live mock interview

Android Police's Khumail Thakur gave Gemini their resume and the job description; it outlined their strengths and weaknesses for the role, then ran mock interviews in Gemini Live. They kept adding each round's notes and interviewers' LinkedIn profiles so it could predict the next questions. They say they made it through to the end of the process and Gemini helped them work out what salary to quote, though they took a different offer.

Compare ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude at building a resume, judged by a recruiter

How-To Geek's Dibakar Ghosh gave the same job posting and prompt to Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini, each told to ask them questions first; ChatGPT asked 30. They liked Gemini's look best, but the recruiter picked ChatGPT's: the only one-page resume, with no fabricated details, though they found it busy. They say the questionnaire step is what made it work and that AI resumes still need human oversight.

Practise for an Amazon interview loop with ChatGPT and Claude mock interviews

Writing a month after accepting an offer from Amazon, a new hire says one of the things that helped was using ChatGPT and Claude for mock interviews: they fed both tools the job description and asked each to interview them like an Amazonian would, which surfaced questions they wouldn't have thought of. They also used AI to find gaps in their 15 prepared stories but wrote the stories in their own words.

Rewrite weak resume bullets inside Google Docs with Gemini (then fix what it made up)

Android Police's Oluwaniyi Raji highlighted copied-job-description bullets in their resume and asked Gemini in Google Docs to rewrite them with action verbs and metric-led outcomes. The first output looked like it belonged to someone two levels above them, partly because Gemini made things up; generating took about 10 minutes and their own editing pass about 30 minutes before they had a resume they could submit to a recruiter.

Find target employers with Gemini Deep Research and prepare a son's job applications

A parent describes how the family got their son a job offer in under two months: Gemini Deep Research (several prompts) to build a target company list, a story-style resume, a master application, a unique cover letter per role using AI research, AI help finding hiring managers, and four AI-assisted interview prep sessions per interview. The poster reports about 20 applications, 5 interviews, 1 offer and 3 interview offers pending.

Use Gemini as a job-search co-worker after a layoff: resume, cover letters, outreach and interview prep

The day their role was eliminated, a poster started using Gemini as a full-time job-search co-worker. Over three weeks and more than 40 hours, they say it helped them optimise their LinkedIn profile, update their resume, write custom cover letters, networking messages and recruiter follow-ups, and prepare for interviews. They review and challenge everything it produces.

Tailor a resume, cover letter and LinkedIn summary with ChatGPT, then get Gemini to judge them

A writer fed ChatGPT a job description and their existing application details to produce a tailored resume (two attempts; the first looked too plain), a one-page cover letter and a LinkedIn summary with recruiter keywords. They then asked Gemini to play the hiring manager: it scored them 8.5 out of 10 with 'a very high probability of landing an interview', but said the documents were too 'tech-first' rather than 'finance-first' for this employer.

Check a 'take-home task' repo from a job offer for malware with ChatGPT before running it

A developer offered a 'unicorn' job taking over a software project was asked to review and run the company's GitHub repository. Instead of cloning or running it, they asked ChatGPT to analyze it, and say it found hidden malware in what looked like a harmless library file, built to connect to an outside server and steal files, keys and credentials when the project was started. They call it a common scam aimed at job seekers.

Apply to LinkedIn jobs from a resume with Perplexity Comet

Comparing Comet and ChatGPT Atlas for LinkedIn job applications, the poster found Comet far better; with a detailed prompt and their resume, it applied to 20+ jobs and sent notes to HR.

Poster says:20+ job applications

Spot when you avoid conflict in meeting recordings with Claude Code

Dan Shipper puts all their meeting recordings in a folder and asks Claude Code to find every time they subtly avoided conflict.

Apply to a job with ChatGPT agent (small-button trouble)

Testing ChatGPT agent on a real job application (to OpenAI), the poster found it much better than the earlier Operator but it struggled to click small buttons; they rated Manus as slightly ahead at times.

Tailor a résumé, cover letters and mock interviews for a job hunt with ChatGPT

Returning to job hunting after 10 years, Santiago Barraza Lopez used ChatGPT to pinpoint roles at the intersection of legal practice and emerging tech, rewrite their résumé against target job descriptions within minutes, draft tailored cover letters, and run mock interviews with role-specific questions and feedback. They say they eventually landed a role in AI.

Rewrite a resume from three reviewers' points of view with Grok

Andrew Donato uploaded their own draft resume so Grok 3 could match their voice, then asked it to critique the resume as a fast-screening in-house recruiter, an outsourced recruiter sourcing a senior sales leadership role, and a CRO. At each step they asked how likely that reader was to reach out and tweaked toward a 9/10, then had Grok merge the feedback in their original tone. They say the two-page result has already gotten them a few responses.