In the past, the process of finding a job was often laborious and time-consuming, especially in the tech industry where specific skills were in high demand. However, with the rapid advancements in technology, the landscape has shifted dramatically. Today, job seekers have access to a plethora of online platforms and tools that streamline the search process. But how can we easily navigate or get a job with the use of AI?
In today’s episode, I have Vilas Tulachan, Founder of JobsGuru AI. We talked about the challenges of the current job search process and how Jobs Guru AI aims to help address these challenges using artificial intelligence. Moreover, we discussed how the application tracking systems, cognitive biases and how Jobs Guru AI analyzes resumes and job descriptions to determine good job matches, generates customized cover letters and interview questions, to help streamline the job search process and reduce frustration for job seekers.
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Streamlining Job Applications Using Generative AI With Vilas Tulachan
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. How many of you out there listening has searched for a job lately? And, lately, I mean, since the pandemic, it’s gotten even crazier than it was before. It’s a really tough process and a process that I’ve seen frustrate a lot of people, myself included, as you may have heard about in one of my past episodes. My guest today, Vilas Tulachan, started a company called JobsGuru.ai to help with this process that’s really become frustrating for so many people.
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Vilas, welcome to the program.
Thank you, Stephen. Great to be in your podcast. I’m excited to share some of the ideas I have on how to help people get jobs faster with you today.
Yeah, so let’s start with where the process is right now. Right now, a lot of people are frustrated by the job search process. What do you think is going on that’s making it so cumbersome, such a hard process when all people really want to do is find a job and then work it?
Stephen, great question. It’s amazing. We are living in an amazing time. As Charles Dickens said, the best of times, the worst of times. The best of times, because unemployment rate in the US is the second lowest in the history of 3.7 as of end of last year.
Wow.
It’s amazing, right? So there’s 1.7 jobs opening for every job seeker. That’s the stats, that’s the economic news. But on the ground level is a different ballgame for job seekers. I’ve talked to job seekers that have applied at 50, 100, 200, 500 job application, they hardly hear anything back. Or they get a good thank kind of response from email back and maybe they’ve gotten maybe two or three interviews and they get ghosted by the employer. It’s been a really weird kind of job market.
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah. And there are a couple of things I see, and the reason I got into this whole idea was as — I met you when you did the startup at Denver a year and a half ago and then I was looking to applying the AI and the ML into helping smaller businesses implement an AI in their businesses. And then I talked to a lot of people who were having issues with jobs, I’m wondering this sounds like a crazy idea, when there are so many jobs and I really did some research and found that a lot of people have a couple of challenges. Number one is called, it’s a cognitive bias called the Dunning-Kruger effect. So you must have heard about this where people either overestimate or underestimate their skill sets.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah. And it’s strange. So, if you look at the industry stats, about 73 percent of the job application, according to LinkedIn, are rejected right away before even a human sees the resume, and mainly because the resume doesn’t match fully the job requirements. So that’s the first thing. So you only get 30 percent chance of ever getting a resume through this human being. The second thing, which is even worse, is called the application tracking system.
Oh, yeah.
It’s a software that sits in the background so most people must have seen this when they have to upload their resume, it goes to a software that essentially does a keyword mapping of your job description, what’s on the job description and what’s in your resume, so if you don’t match 70 percent of the keyword, it doesn’t get seen by the human being. And the keyword — I mean, for example, let’s say the job says they want five years of Microsoft Office experience and you say I have seven years of Word, let’s say Excel, it’s not matching, right? Because the way that I asked were two different terms, even though you have the experience. And that’s one of the challenges with this whole thing is that ATS system. And until you pass through the ATS system, you get a score of 70 plus is what I think they look at, depending on the ATS system, you are never seen by a hiring manager or a recruiter. That’s another problem. And the third thing mainly is also we’re human and after doing this for like three months, two months, people give up or they feel rejected, dejected, they don’t hear back after two months of sending out resumes and people tend to get frustrated and lose some kind of enthusiasm for applying and that’s another problem —
Of course.
Yeah, and that’s a challenge. So these are the three main kind of, there are others, by the way, but these are three challenges that most people I think are facing in this industry based on my experience of talking to a lot of recruiters and job seekers.
And so who is it more frustrating for right now? Is it the company looking to hire the right person or the job seeker know it’s frustrating for them on both ends but, yeah, is one of those ends faring worse than the other?
I think it’s mostly the job seekers. I mean, both are, right? As job seeker, they need jobs, a lot of people really can’t afford to be out of a job for more than a couple of months, right? So that’s a huge economic pressure. But on the other flip side, the companies are also getting tons of resumes because people are sending on jobs and 90 percent of them are not even qualified, but somebody has to go through them, the ATS system, so for them, it’s a problem on both ends. And they’re not getting enough qualified candidates and they take a long time to respond and so it’s a mess on both ends. So I’m trying to address at least the job seekers at this point. At some point, I may also kind of help the companies, especially small companies that may need some tools to filter out the most qualified applicants.
So, yeah, so we identified this problem and what’s a bit about your solution? Because your solution involves using AI to help streamline this process.
Yes. So JobsGuru.ai has — focused on like three basic issues. First of all is we’re going to take away the emotion, human emotion, human decision making and the Dunning-Kruger effect out of this entire equation. When you see the data drive, whether you should apply for the job or not. Right? And here’s the really interesting thing. A lot of men tend to — they look at the job description, the top two matches are close enough, company says we want 10 years of experience, let’s say Java programming experience, senior programmer. The guy thinks, I have four years’ experience, I’m good for that job, or they might say, no, they wanted somebody with a presentation skill set, has done C-level kind of presentation to C-level exec, and the person might have, I’ve done presentation quite a few times in my company, I’m good enough, and this is the problem that it takes away those biases out of the equation. You load your job description text file, you load your resume, which mostly is a PDF format, and the first thing he does is simple. It extracts the required job requirement in terms of importance, the key hard skills and the soft skill. That’s the first thing it does is, hey, what is this job requiring? Gets all the requirements out there, and next thing it says, okay, let me then take a look at your resume, it then analyzes the resume and says, hey, how well does it fit? The match. And right now I’ve set it up that if you don’t match at least, based on the criteria, 70, 80 percent It makes a recommendation, apply or don’t apply, based on those data.
So the whole idea is do not apply at jobs that you are not — you don’t have much chance of getting a response and don’t be frustrated. Click To TweetOtherwise, you spend all that time frustrated. And then based on that, you then apply, the next thing is now, the second question is how well does the resume match the word description, the ATS friendly, how it is ATS friendly. So it goes out there and then fix it for you, to be ATS friendly.
So it tweaks the resume —
Yeah.
— in order for it to get through the ATS.
Exactly. At this stage, it’s kind of the second thing. General API is great but it also tends to have something, to make up things, and for this reason, you can download all the text file and then you basically have to review it and then kind of make your edit further, if need be. So once you have this, then the next question is, a lot of jobs will ask for cover letter or cover letter optional. And writing a cover letter can be challenging.
Yeah, of course. I mean, people spend a lot of time writing those things.
Yeah. And a lot of times, you don’t want to sound too boastful. Also, you don’t want to underplay your skill sets, right?
Yeah.
So this will take the resume and the job description and experience and craft a customized letter that says how you are the best qualified person for this particular job.
So, quick question, is there a way to enhance the use of AI, and I guess one of the questions I have is that I think the frustration a lot of times is that job descriptions are often written from a template, written in a way that people don’t understand what that person is looking for, right? But go online, you can research the company and try to speculate all the hidden things that everyone in the job search process, the committee, the hiring manager has in their head about what they want, like, yeah, we put this in a job description but our office is not really balanced, we need someone with like, say, maybe more of this personality or we need someone to solve a particular problem, this is what we’re dealing with right now. Is there a way to use AI to kind of comb through some of that, maybe some of the materials a company has online or even whatever their latest statements have been, their Q4 earnings report, if it’s come out yet, and figure out, okay, this person — they’re looking for someone that has maybe this skill or this particular attribute that maybe the job seeker is not really thinking of that can put them over the edge?
Not currently. Initial application doesn’t do that but in the future, I can add that feature very easily, just say, hey, what are the company thinking of in terms of hiring? Are the DEI friendly? Do they have certain kind of interest in getting more diverse kind of workforce, right? Those all I think can be added. But right now, at this early stage, this is the MVP right now I have. That’s not there yet. I showed this to one tester, a woman, and the letter she — and I generate the letter, she said, “You know, this is amazing,” she said. “I would never write this letter because it sounds too aggressive or too positive,” so she was downplaying her skill set just because the wage she was reared and all that stuff. I said, look, but men are doing this all the time anyway, so it puts you at a disadvantage if you’re not as assertive as the other applicants.
But in the future, I could add features that says, hey, you know what, I’m interested in this job. I want companies that are friendly to whatever your needs are, and maybe have some specs in terms of, and it could go out there and do that stuff, yes.
Yeah, the most obvious thing right now that comes to mind is everyone’s different perspectives and different desires around work from home, work from the office, hybrid. I know some companies and some leaders of companies honestly feel like people need to be back in the office again, a la before the pandemic, in order for people to work properly but I know there’s also a lot of people, especially in the development space, that might not want someone that’s going to heavily mandate people coming back. So as you meet a lot of these other kind of aspects of jobs that as far as personal preferences and stuff that may make or break who they want to hire.
Yeah. So, Stephen, one thing they can do is on the resume, they can put a note that says, prefer to work from home or hybrid, and then if the company says we want hybrid, is this a match, versus — or they say only work from home and the company says we want a hybrid, then you know it is not a good match. And the nice thing about this whole thing is report, it generates exactly — one of the key features, requirements, you match or didn’t match. Or what needs improvement. So by the time we get the report out, you can see exactly where you stand in terms of the requirement versus your skill set.
I see. And then you can make a decision because —
Exactly.
The frustrating thing that a lot of job seekers experience is that you spend a lot of time, you see a job you like, you’re like, “Okay, how can I tailor my resume to it? How can I write the best cover letter?” and it comes like a 40-hour a week job in and of itself and then, all of a sudden, you get to your new job and you’re just burnt out from the job search.
Exactly, and that’s what we’re trying to avoid is we’re trying to — we wanted to make that process as simple and as easy as possible so that they can be more productive.
Another thing also is jobs is not really about applying for jobs, it’s also the networking. Click To TweetYeah, for sure.
If you spend eight, nine hours a day submitting resumes, you’re so tired you go ahead continue working in the afternoon or evening, and I’m going to write this whole blog later on.
That’s why we think it will help people get jobs faster is because we’re reducing this frustration, the stress of applying for a job and also helping them network as much as possible.
Especially because one of the things in one of my previous job searches that I’ve had, and life is realizing I’m an extrovert, I just ask myself, well, why the heck am I just sitting here online typing keywords into tablets when, as an extrovert, I’m probably going to have a lot more help at least figuring this whole thing out if I get out there and start meeting people.
The game of getting a job is almost like a full time job. You need to do both of them in parallel. And our goal is to help make that happen using the generative AI.
And so a slightly darker turn on this that you brought up the situation which is happening all over the place where people lose enthusiasm, get frustrated, even getting really kind of depressed because, as you said, they apply to a hundred, thousand jobs, and also you see all these situations because of those keywords, the ATS systems where you’ve applied for all these jobs that you’re more than qualified for and didn’t even hear anything back, something would go wrong, and you get to this hopeless state. What are the consequences and what are the consequences societally on continuing to do the job search the way we’re doing it now with all these people kind of losing hope?
It’s this whole idea of mental wellness, right? If you do this for months at a time, you would lose your, not only the enthusiasm but your self-worth. People don’t want me because I don’t have anything to contribute, and that’s a really bad mental state to be.
Oh, for sure.
And you cannot blame them because they’ve tried this for two months, three months, five months, and yet they’re seeing very little feedback from them. And usually a lot of companies won’t even tell you why. Why they didn’t get, or they’ll say, “Hey, sorry, blah,” Thank you for your —
Yeah, that standard crafted email that says, “We have a lot of interest in this job but we are —
Exactly.
— moving forward with other candidates,” that’s right.
Yeah. And so it leads to wondering, doubt, having self-doubt and self-valuation. And so one of the way we’re trying to avoid that is, hey, if you only apply to jobs you’re better qualified for, you reduce the number of rejection. That’s one area we’re doing. The other thing also is pacing is very important. The optimal, if we look at stats, is three jobs per day, is what they say, really three good jobs a day, and you can keep that, 15 a week, let’s say, and take the weekends off. Do not get frustrated. What a lot of people do is they work 18 hours a day for months at a time and they burn out, psychologically burnt out. We don’t want that to happen. We want you to basically take it as an eight to five job, be consistently at a sustainable pace.
So think of job search as a marathon and not a sprint. Click To TweetAnd when you apply at jobs you’re qualified for, the chances of you getting interview is much higher. You get a much better ratio of application versus some sort of feedback, and that I think is meant to keep some at least excited. And then keeping the pace really is very important in long term.
Yeah. One of the things that I find extremely frustrating about the way things currently work in the job search process is just the amount of time and energy, so you think about like a productive economy as a whole, and you think the most productive we can be is if everyone is working hard as much as possible and people are happy working hard, something happy, and so I think of like several different categories of things that are just purely a waste of our collective energy. And, for me, definitely is the amount of time people are spending preparing resumes, preparing cover letters, preparing all this stuff, where they’re not going to experience anything back. I understand some things are growth, you learn, you do coursework, your coursework, if you’re learning a new skill, isn’t necessarily going to be a new product but you’re learning something from it.
Exactly.
And it feels to me like after a while, writing cover letter number 428, I get the point of a cover letter, I get how it’s crafted is no more for me to learn about it, especially if you’re not getting that feedback.
Yes. And that’s what we’re trying to — I mean, reduces drastically is where we’ll do this take for you, you can take the cover letter and tweak it a bit and send it out. Instead of having spent eight, two hours trying to get a right cover letter for you. And so that they can spend the time learning new skill sets, for example. They may spend two hours learning the new language or whatever job requirements are that’s hard. And that’s the place — not only helping you reduce the frustration, the angst of applying jobs, not hearing back, but also give you the flexibility of time to network and to learn new skill sets, which will enhance and help you get a job. That’s the whole kind of idea behind this whole JobsGuru.ai. And I believe we do. Employed people are happier, they’re productive, the family are happier too, right? And the economy, instead of being on unemployment, they’re now contributing to the state’s economy overall. So it’s great for everybody. So I want people to get employed fast.
Now, if someone is experiencing that job search burnout, just from your product research and interviews and stuff, do you have any recommendation of what someone can do? If someone’s right now, they’re just so burnt out and hopeless, anyone listening in that spot?
Well, the thing is, to be very selective in jobs they apply and one of the burnout is they apply for a lot of jobs, they may not be — they may think they’re qualified for, from their point of view, but, technically, they’re not qualified because they only meet 80 percent or 70 percent of the requirements. That’s what I’m offering, your listeners, hey, if you’re feeling that burnout, try JobsGuru for 30 days free and see how much time it saves you and you would do a lot more better because it enhances your ability to apply for jobs, it’s skill driven, unbiased, and it takes away that heaviness of that grunt of doing this every single day with the help of AI. And that’s the value add from my point of view.
And so, and we’re going to include this link in the show notes online so if someone wanted to take advantage of this offer, just go to JobsGuru.ai or is there some other?
Yeah. I will send you a link, a special link for your listeners. That way, they get a much better kind of more time off and a few things. Yes, I’m doing a special just for your listeners.
And for those listeners out there, just in case you’re listening and you’re not familiar with the website where the show notes are where this link is going to be, action-antidotes.com, so if you go to that website, you can see all the different episodes. If you click on this episode, you’ll see the show notes and you’ll be able to click on that and take advantage of this offer.
Yeah, and the other thing, by the way, so, finally, you do your cover letter and you apply and let’s say you get a call for interview.
Yep.
The next challenge is, oh, what questions will they ask me, right? That’s another frustration. Because you could ask any questions, you could be qualified but the questions they ask you, you’re not really prepared for, you blow your chance. So the next option here we have also is to say, hey, generate me eight potential questions that they could ask during the interview. And it uses the STAR method to kind of frame the question and so you can then prepare for those questions. Now, granted, we have no way of knowing how many of those questions will be exact match but they’ll be enough kind of in terms of the concepts that if you prepare for those eight questions, you should be able to answer pretty much any question that they ask in the interview. And that really is another really big advantage we provide.
Now, does this take advantage of the materials there are about different companies asking different questions? I think most people out there are familiar with like the Google questions and how Google asks a lot more behavioral questions, like in this situation, what would you do versus if you’re going to a startup, you might get different questions or if you go into like more of a standard old-school corporation.
So right now, it uses the so-called — I come from a high tech, I used to work for AWS, so it’s more geared towards that kind of environment, so-called, hey, what if, kind of, hey, what do you do in this case? Those are — but at some point, based on the type of company, I could generate a very specific question. But right now, it just does a very specific behavioral question based on my experience at AWS and Oracle and IBM, that’s what it is. It’s a bit biased right now. Yeah, but that can be changed once I get some traction and see what people are experiencing and I get more feedback.
And then in the grand scheme of things, as you kind of bring this product to market, as you help a lot of people through this, what’s your goal for what impact you’re hoping to have with JobsGuru.ai?
My only big goal is to help people who are unemployed get jobs faster. Click To Tweet
That’s it. I mean, why go through all that hassle, frustration when there’s a tool that can reduce the time? If I can get you employed a month faster or two months faster than you would do otherwise with less frustration, less hassle, that, to me, is worth all the effort that I’m putting in. Because I really want to, at some point, bring happiness to unemployed people, get a job, that’s what they all won. And this is also the final feature we have is called the mock interview. So, for example, some people are good at interviewing but a lot of — I mean, my experience had been with a lot of geeks, they’re not really, I mean, they can code really good but their people skills aren’t that good. They can schedule a mock interview with the right person, by the way. If they want, that’s an option. So we want to make sure that not only do they have the right question but they also are able to interact really well with the interviewer and get the job done. And that’s kind of the whole package right now. And I have two more ideas in the future I want to implement right now, these are the five features that are available that people can take advantage of. They don’t have to do everything, they could just say, “Hey, I will tweak my resume, I can write a cover letter myself, I don’t need that,” that’s fine, or it’s basically a lot of options that they can pick and choose.
But like with the five options, it’s kind of like a package that takes people through the whole process from the very beginning, looking at job ads or whatever site you’re on, deciding if you want to apply or not, then go into the process of cover letter, then go into the process of finding the interview questions and the mock interview, it’s a whole process most people looking for jobs do right now plus with the networking, which you’re kind of enabling sometime and, more importantly, cognitive energy for people to go out there to those events.
Yeah, those are my goals in terms of what’s — the one thing it doesn’t do, it does not select the job for you because that part can be a little bit more tricky at this point so you select the job you want, that you’re interested in, and then you upload that text file and the resume. And then everything else kind of goes in the process step by step.
Now, to dive a little bit deeper into what’s happening right now, you said that there was 1.7 jobs available for every job seeker?
Yeah, according to the latest stats, but those, again, those numbers make sense from a point of view of columnists but doesn’t make sense from point of view of job seekers. The particular job, there might be a different mix of those openings. But if you look at the numbers, it’s like 1.7 jobs for every job seeker.
Just from observation, just from looking around me, it feels to me like there’s some sort of almost like a duality or you probably walk around, go to restaurants and stuff and see every single one of them having “We’re hiring,” or like you’ve been there, and in your face in many different places. So I’ve envisioned that there’s some jobs where they’re just really, really struggling to find anyone willing to do them while there’s other jobs, especially if it’s like a neat company with a really cool purpose and maybe a really flexible working, work from home policy, where those jobs actually, for that subset, may have way more people looking for them than are available.
Agreed. So, according to the US Labor Department, every job approximately has about 250 applicants.
Yeah.
And the chance of being selected is 3 percent, mostly because people, 70 percent of them, their skill set don’t match the job requirement or a few other stuff. And so, you’re right, and especially — another area with jobs we can help a lot is a lot of jobs, especially in the high tech, at LinkedIn, you’re applying for a month, two or three weeks, if you don’t apply within that span of time, they close it. They basically turn it off. And so if you do the old way of doing manually, you’re going to miss out on a lot of those opportunities that might close really fast. With JobsGuru, you’re able to at least keep up with that kind of for peace and so, have an opening out there, I will be the first 50 to apply or first 100 to apply and that gives you a leg up versus being, oh, I missed my time, job closed yesterday, and I just kind of saw this day before yesterday, I just missed it. So that kind of problem also gets solved with JobsGuru because it helps you accelerate your job application process.
Yeah, because one other thing I had heard about these ATS, applicant tracking systems, is that they still show them in like a chronological order and so the first one to apply that reaches whatever keyword threshold is going to be the first one that shows up on, the hiring manager is usually the one that gets it — well, actually, usually HR first then the hiring manager, but, yeah.
Yeah, agreed, and this is where I think early bird catches the worm kind of stuff. If you’re early enough, you’re helping yourself on that kind of continuum of getting an interview and that’s the first step. Interview first, and then with all our kind of cover letter and the questions, you get the next big chance, now you can answer questions much better, you can interview much better. And with the mock interview, you can even do that personally even far better. So this whole goal is to really, how can we accelerate the job search and reduce the frustration of job search, that was kind of the big kind of driving force.
Now, you have a lot of experience, you mentioned AWS, several other companies, working for big companies in tech roles, what made you decide that you were going to take that step and decide to try something on your own, try to build a business as opposed to just staying on that path?
The job at AWS was great. I was AI/ML evangelist for AWS’s worldwide public sector group so I was talking to people in India, Singapore, Australia, helping companies out there. London, Israel. And a couple — it’s a great company and good pay, nice stock options, all that stuff I picked up. But it wasn’t that satisfying. Sometimes, I do work a lot ’til midnight because I was supporting a company in India, next morning, I have to wake up at seven o’clock in the morning to support folks in Israel, and I’m wondering, I need a better, especially with the COVID, post-COVID, I think I need a better kind of life-work balance. Plus, I wanted something that was meaningful. I was looking at options, I came across this, I said, I can leverage my experience as an AI in AI and ML and then what happened was OpenAI came up ChatGPT and that was just a whole game changer. I thought, this can really, really change the world, right? And so I played around with this idea, it worked, I showed a few people, they said, “Hey, this is amazing,” and then I had to build the entire infrastructure to make this all happen. So that took 3, 4 months.
First of all, the lifestyle that you wanted, but second of all, you wanted to build something meaningful. Did you have any second guesses when you were stepping out there and saying, “I’m gonna leave my full-time job and I’m going to go and try to build something”?
Yeah. I mean, as always, and you talk about this in your episode, this whole self-doubt. There’s always this doubt. But then I realized, sometimes, you have to take a chance, and I had enough money saved as a backup so I knew I could try for — here’s my thing. I could try for a year and a half, two years, if it succeeds, I’m great. It doesn’t succeed, I can always go back and get a job because I’ve had so much experience, it will be the solution, I will get a job with any AI company anywhere so that wasn’t a whole loss, the whole loss was just time and the — so, yes, I had some doubt, but you just have to jump sometimes and take risks. The benefit of helping so many people was so much greater than not doing it.
Yeah, and so it’s interesting, you have the courage to go out there and build something based on having that solid foundation of knowing that you have a marketable skill set for the foreseeable future and that that marketable skill set is always something you can do. And so anyone out there listening, if you’re thinking about stepping out on your own, trying something new, knowing what you have to offer and you can do something else if it doesn’t work out the way you’d hoped, or whether it be the business not working or along the lines of like it did work but it didn’t turn out to be what I expected lifestyle wise, all the different reasons why people head back.
Yeah, and I think you could always pivot. If this doesn’t work out, I have now built enough infrastructure and experience, I may have something else that I could probably pivot and do it so my first implementation was conversational AI using AWS technology. And even though that was okay, that wasn’t as flexible, that wasn’t as good. And so I pivoted but I saw this, I thought I can now use this and I came across the idea of people having a hard time finding a job so I thought, okay, can I apply this technology to help people find jobs faster? And I thought this is a great kind of experiment to try out and see how well it works. So we’ll see. I mean, it’s too early to say what the outcome is, but I’m excited. I want people to try it out. All I ask is give me a feedback, how it’s working for them or not, and how ways I can improve it.
All right. And then one last question to ask because this is what’s on everyone’s minds talking about AI at this point of, we’re recording in last day of January 2024, that is, we’re hearing people say when they’re watching this technology emerge, anything from this could be the extinction of humanity. robots take over, or people that think it’s going to bring in some sort of new utopia where we’re not going to have to even have jobs anymore and everything in between. Do you have any thoughts or feelings about where AI is taking humanity over the next decade?
Oh, Stephen, that’s hard to predict. And especially with the AI, it’s very hard to predict. Example, just a year and a half ago, we didn’t think we would be where we are today. And the moment I saw OpenAI and ChatGPT, it was like the time when you went from those phones before iPhone, there was like all this keyboard phones, it’s the same aha moment I had. And that was now — yes, I see both sides of this in a way it could be now it can generate images, text, voice, everything, so there could be a really bad scenario that we could get into, especially in this next coming up election there could be a huge problem.
Yeah.
But also I see there are people trying to do it good, do the right thing and put some guardrails around it. So it’s hard to tell but I hope the result will enhance our lives, it’ll help us do whatever we do better, faster, and, hopefully, it also will help people that have less skills to understand how AI works and maybe enhance their life too. But there might be, as with new technology, we have structural changes where some people might have issues with job. For them, the universal income, basic income might be one of the options in the future. So it’s hard to say but I’m feeling positive and I hope the people that are guarding the AI development have that same positive thoughts and feelings.
Well, my best hope for AI in the future is — so what the internet initially did was it connected everyone to everyone or everything to everything.
Exactly.
The big thing that’s stressing me out, whether it be who to apply to, who to hire, who to look for for a social circle, who to look for for any kind of service, it’s who, what, what now, based on — and Google famously tries to do that based on keywords, you do a Google search and they try to do that. My hope is that in a broader sense, AI will connect a person to the right solution based on all the factors rather than just a keyword, like I’m looking for a job coach, let’s just say, or I’m just looking for a mindfulness coach even or a therapist, well, therapy is a great example. Well, what therapist? Who’s going to be the right therapist for you? Who’s going to be the one who understands where you’re coming from, that you’re going to click with and so rather than just go with whoever got to the top search, it’ll help you connect to the resource that’s going to make sense for you given who you are a lot quicker, what your current need is a lot quicker than clicking through all these Google search results and calling people and asking a bunch of questions and all that.
Stephen, I totally agree with you. Now, there is a thing called the AI agent so you could empower the agent all about you, your needs, your requirements, and then it will be the one doing the search, say, “Hey, I’m looking for a therapist.” So, based on your profile of what you are like, your experiences, it could just go and find the right two or three therapists that jives with you and that’s, I think, very doable. That’s another potential service I could probably do in the future. This is great, yeah. Yeah, this is like a job, for example. Right now, the job search, you have to upload the job description and resume. My goal for my company in the future is essentially, you tell the company, hey, all you do is every week or every month you put in your experience at whatever jobs you’re doing and then what you could do is tell them, hey, I’m looking for a job, you give a profile, a company-type profile in terms of what the beliefs are, blah, blah, blah, all that information, and then what type of company, startup, large company, work at home, hybrid, all that could be part of your knowledge about you that your agent would know about that. So then you would go and say, hey, I’m looking for a job. Okay, it would go and search, find the right company, and tell you, by the way, there’s an opening at so and so company, are you interested? And that’s one of the vision I have. A lot of knowledge about likes and dislikes, how you work, what kind of people you want to work with —
That’s the stuff I feel like has been so missing from like the vetting people for job applications has been like what kind of a person are you? Are you going to jive with the company culture that we’re trying to implement? Are you going to get along with the set of personnel, the way the group is now, is your addition going to be a good one that’s going to positively flow with everything or are you going to disrupt it all?
And then nice thing is the agent learns from your experience. As you work at different companies, it learns about you so you may not even have to tell it directly what you want, it knows about you.
Yeah.
Yeah. And then it can search for the right jobs or it could just say, “Hey, I’m not interested in job but if there’s something that really matches their fancy, let me know,” It’s almost like an agent running behind the scene and it just kind of keeps track of it and say, “Hey, by the way, I found two jobs up your alley, it’s right down, let’s say, a block or two blocks from where you live. Are you interested?
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Yeah, that’s a doable thing and I’m going to put that as a to-do feature on JobsGuru in the future. Thank you, Stephen, that was amazing. That was a very good way to end this.
Well, I’m glad I can help. Vilas, I’ll tell you 100 percent honestly, when social media first came out and started proliferating around, I was very, very pessimistic about what it meant for the future. I have a very different feeling about AI coming in because it has the — it’s able to save our time and possibly even enhance connections with other humans as opposed to what social media did which was really just take it away so I’m glad to have given you like a minor amount of help.
That’s a very good talk. I had that conception in mind but now you bring it out and so, yeah, that makes perfect sense.
It was all wonderful and, Vilas, thank you for taking time. Thank you for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes, sharing your offer, sharing your story about what gave you the courage to step out there and start JobsGuru.ai as well as some really thoughts about what we all could be doing that’s a better use of our time than sitting around writing cover letters.
Thank you, Stephen. It’s been a pleasure talking to you and thank you for having me here and giving these nice ideas. I really appreciate it and I hope to help your listeners with, if they’re interested, join the link I’ll be sending you.
Excellent. And, finally, I have to thank everyone out there for listening, for taking the time out to tune in to Action’s Antidotes. Hopefully, you’re getting inspiration and ideas out of this episode as well as the countless other episodes that I’ve recorded before this day.
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About Vilas Tulachan
Vilas Tulachan, CEO and Founder of JobsGuru.ai, has a background deeply rooted in technology and innovation. Under his leadership, JobsGuru.ai was developed to address the complexities of the job search process. Leveraging Generative AI, the platform is designed to streamline job hunting, offering tools for job-resume match report, resume optimization, personalized cover letters and interview preparation, and more, aiming to enhance the efficiency and precision of connecting job seekers with their ideal roles. The future of job seeking can be explored at https://www.jobsguru.ai. For listeners of the Actions Antidotes podcast, JobsGuru.ai is thrilled to offer 30 days of free access. Ready to transform your job search? Scan the QR code provided and embark on a journey to success.
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