Businesses have been using Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) for decades.
Unfortunately, if you don’t get passed today's AI screening process, your skills, experience, and humanity may never see the light of day. LinkedIn Premium even tells you ahead of time if it thinks you are a good match for a job, but it’s limited to the data you already have in your profile, which is only a sample of your accomplishments.
The challenge is to produce a custom resume for each job that is simultaneously a clear representation of your value, and also matches well against the job description (JD). AI can help you, but only if it has far more detail than a typical resume or LinkedIn profile to draw upon. AI needs to understand the relationship between:
- The employers (or clients) you worked for
- The roles you performed
- The projects you worked on for each employer
- The Situations, Tasks, Actions, and Results (STARs) that you produced
- The tools and technologies that you used
- The skills that you used or acquired
I’ve seen AI tools promising that they can give you the magic formatting to win. Others claim they will search and submit on your behalf. But no matter how well you polish a resume, you don’t need AI to turn your resume into cannon fodder across the internet. What you need is AI that understands the full context and relationships described above and produces clear, relevant output based on a JD.
My relational resume in Notion looks more like a webpage than a traditional resume. It’s a fair bit of work to populate the databases, and it’s useless for email or applications that want you to upload a flat document. However, it’s ideally structured to feed the data to AI so that an agent can produce a highly relevant document that matches appropriate job descriptions. My Job Search Agent in Notion understands the relationships in my background, and can use any of the models currently integrated with Notion: Sonnet, Opus, Gemini, or GPT. I copy a job description into Notion, then ask the agent to:
- Look at a JD and extract all of the keywords (actions, skills, and experience)
- Look for potential red flags to ask about based on the JD
- Draw from my experience and create a custom resume
- Produce a professional cover letter that merges the JD with my experience
- Generate numerical scores showing how tightly the output matched the JD
I still need to read it carefully for accuracy and hallucinations, but the quality it produces as a starting point is mindblowing.
Details of the entire process are covered in the video below, and I’m making it publicly available as a Notion Template here. However, you will need your own Notion account with AI to use it.