Long gone are the days of delivering your Times New Roman, 12-point font resume to the office receptionist. Young workers and job seekers are turning to digital brand-building tools to help them stand out — and AI is making it all the easier.
“Why don’t you just call up the company and ask to speak to the CEO?” While not all Gen X career advice gets quite this antiquated, it’s not uncommon to see new grads roll their eyes at the outdated suggestions from the well-meaning adults in their lives.
Before the age of Glassdoor and Indeed, the now cringe-worthy strategies like a cold phone call or a stop by the front desk were practically the only way to stand out from the crowd. But long gone are the days when starry-eyed budding professionals focused their efforts on securing crisp handshakes at the career fair or choosing an outfit for the now hard-to-come-by in-person interview. There’s a new way to capture employer attention: building a digitized personal brand — and AI is here to help.
For today’s generation of young workers, having a LinkedIn profile is just about as common as having an Instagram account. Complete with a headshot, executive summary, resume section, and countless bonus features for uploading certificates, publications, and awards — these sleek landing pages give an exhaustive look into the professional lives of each of the platform’s 1 billion+ users.
In terms of LinkedIn’s AI capabilities, there’s nothing short of a laundry list. On top of the more well-known algorithm-based capabilities like personally-tailored connection and job suggestions, LinkedIn Premium Subscribers have access to an AI-powered writing tool that helps with everything from leveling up your profile’s copy to writing more engaging posts to share with your network.
“Using LinkedIn’s AI features — especially the personalized suggestions on how to improve my profile — has really helped me build a personal brand from scratch,” shares Olivia Holm, a recent graduate of Dartmouth College currently on the hunt for her first full-time job. “Even little suggestions like which skills to list first have helped me showcase myself more effectively, and I do think that will open up more opportunities for my career growth.”
For those looking to take it to the next level, website-building tools like Wix, Squarespace, and Notion have ramped up their own AI game to make the set-up process seamless. Whether it’s showcasing a portfolio of writing samples or creating a visually pleasing space to explain your skills, personal websites are powerful tools that help you “gain control of your own image,” as Forbes put it back in 2016. With Wix’s AI Website builder tool, all users have to do is answer simple chatbot-generated questions like “What do you want to call your site?” and “What are your site goals?” to prompt the instantaneous creation of a fully built-out website dedicated to showcasing their personal brand.
When executed correctly, a strong presence on other social media channels like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram — all of which are being completely reshaped and optimized by both directly integrated and off-platform AI — are slowly starting to be seen as signalers of important professional qualities like strong writing and creativity. For those applying to roles that ask for social media-specific skills, this is all the more important, and even at companies where an Instagram profile might not be priority #1 just yet, having an employee with those chops on hand can be a massive benefit in the eyes of hiring managers.
The chatbot heard around the world — ChatGPT — is perhaps the most important AI tool for building a personal brand from the ground up. Its use as a cover letter idea generator — and oftentimes a total ghostwriter — has skyrocketed since its launch in 2022. While it won’t do all the work for you (The Wall Street Journal reports that most users feel it takes a good number of reps before the LLM spits out anything “amazing”), it makes these more run-of-the-mill branding exercises a walk in the park, leaving time for greater creativity elsewhere. After all, feeding a chatbot a job description and your resume is a far cry from the decades of fighting writer’s block at the typewriter — and even from the more recent days of staring down the blinking cursor on a blank Word document.
“I’ve also used ChatGPT to search for jobs that make sense for me,” says Holm. “If you type in keywords like ‘entry-level openings’ and a few things that describe your brand identity, it generates a list of company websites and job postings that you might not be able to find elsewhere, or at least in one centralized location.”
With the importance of honing a personal brand continuously on the rise — in large part thanks to self-dubbed “corporate” influencers like @LoeWhaley and @CorpoorateNatalie on TikTok — job seekers like Holm face a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the overwhelming presence of these “LinkedInfluencers” and the endless options for digital “wowing” can make the job market feel like a much more complicated maze than the handshake, pat-on-the-back 1980s.
Yet with an ever-growing list of smaller AI branding tools (like Jasper AI, Writesonic, Social Bee, Audiense) on top of the capabilities being worked into the LinkedIn and ChatGPTs of the world, those who make the initial investment in learning how to leverage these features can sit back and watch their professional story be neatly packaged up in front of their eyes — all from the comfort of their own home (or that of their parents).
