I Didn’t Know About Career-Ops
Before I knew about the career-ops workflow, I started creating my own. Really small. Piece by piece. And personally, I think it fits me better. It’s definitely leaner, and uses far less tokens.
In my examples I get the same amount and quality results with my workflow and the career-ops workflow.
Here is mine.
I Started Small
I started with a scheduled task in ChatGPT to go out and find open roles that meet my criteria for languages, pay, and location. It sends those me to daily. That’s basically free.
I used that for awhile. I knew a layoff was possibly coming. But I thought I would make it through the end of the year, so I was passively looking. Boy was I wrong! (I’m laid off now and looking!)
The AI Workflow and Skill
Then I had the thought that an AI workflow could tailor my resume for each position I was applying for. So I would simply pass my resume in and have it return a tailored version. I know this is slow and stupid, but I was worried about it being obviously AI. In hindsight, humans aren’t looking at these anyway, so I guess it doesn’t matter.
Then I moved to skill development and landed on a skill that has a docs folder with a master-resume and a master-cover-letter.
The skill takes a url, reads the content of the position, scores a match based on my resume. If the match is 8 or higher, it builds a tailored resume based on the job description and a cover letter. Stores them both in a directory named after the company name.
It works pretty well, and is fast. But I did have some trouble with the cover letter. It was just so AI like. I just needed to train it. So I wrote a cover letter in my voice as an example and fed that to Codex to use as a template. I like those better, but I don’t if they work better yet. I guess I’ll find out in the next couple of weeks.
You Probably Love Career-Ops
I know a lot of people love career-ops, but I shouldn’t be surprised that it’s not for me. I’ve never liked big kitchen sink things. Not because they are bad. Only because they didn’t work for me. I didn’t a popular ZSH toolkit because I felt it had things I didn’t want or need. I had a phase where I would choose Sinatra over Rails, and I’ve never been a huge fan of Node.js based on the giant dependency tree those apps usually have.
I still work with those things as needed. But given my choice, I’d rather use something small that has a higher probably of me understanding everything it does.