Editor’s Note: Previously in the Career Talk series, our experts on doctoral-career counseling have offered advice on managing your job applications, looking for industry positions, negotiating job offers, and other career-planning topics.
Applying for jobs has always been time-consuming, emotionally draining, and frequently demoralizing. You send carefully crafted applications out into the void and hope to hear something — anything — back. For industry openings, each application probably represents a couple hours of work. For academic positions, the amount of time per application can be much higher. And yet, very often, the answer is … crickets.
Now generative AI tools promise relief. After all, why should anyone spend hours drafting a résumé or a cover letter when a bot can do it for you in seconds? And why bother when you know that employers are using AI technology to review your materials and even to interview you?
You’re far from alone, however, if you’re vacillating about whether to take advantage of AI in a job search. Many academics have serious ethical concerns, not only about how AI is affecting the college classroom, but also about the major ecological impact of constructing energy-sucking data centers for this technology. Maybe you’re also frustrated by the added responsibility of having to design assignments that mitigate the use of AI. Or you’re suspicious of its actual value proposition. For all of those very valid reasons, you may choose to avoid AI tools as much as you can.
But for many job seekers in 2025 — especially those with Ph.D.s or advanced degrees trying to transition out of academe — the ability to generate application materials quickly seems like a gift. And it can be. But it comes with a catch, even if you set aside your ethical or social concerns. Because AI is not just changing how people apply for jobs, it’s changing what those applications look like, and what hiring committees do with them. And not necessarily for the better.
In a tough job market, such as we are in right now, candidates are told to “apply widely.” Some candidates take that to mean that they should be sending out hundreds of job applications each week. AI can make it all too easy to do so. But we would advise against that for Ph.D.s. That ease of effort comes at the cost of quality, voice, and sometimes even opportunity.
At the same time, there are ways in which AI tools can help you in your job search — so long as you are thoughtful and reflective about what you choose to outsource to technology. We will get to that last part shortly.
“Brainstorm” With AI on Your Career Options
For the purpose of exploring career paths, especially in industry, the bots can serve as a brainstorming partner and research collaborator. If you’re new to using AI tools in a job search, this is a good place to begin.
Assuming you’re open to it, start by spending time with an AI tool. Have a conversation with ChatGPT, Claude, or one of the many other bots about a research area in which you’re an expert. You may be surprised at how well the tool converses about complex topics. But to get to that point, you have to be willing to move past the fully public version of the tool (which is generally little more than a search engine) and create an account (which will give you access to more detailed results and allow you to save your chats).
“Talk” with the AI tool about your work experience, your professional interests, and your career goals, and ask it for help in identifying industries, job titles, and companies or organizations that would be a good match for you. Here are some good questions to ask AI in the early stages of your career exploration:
- Here is my LinkedIn profile/résumé. Can you help me brainstorm some jobs and industries I might be well suited for?
- Where do people find jobs in X industry?
- What are some common entry-level job titles in this industry?
- What are people saying about this company?
- What are the biggest employers/industries in this geographic region?
- I really care about X topic. What are some companies and organizations that are working on that?
Some of the answers will be neither helpful nor relevant, but other results will be. And in this early stage, when you find yourself getting discouraged, an AI tool’s perpetually cheerful and almost-too-encouraging persona can keep you engaged and on track in a way you might struggle with on your own.
If you still have questions on how to use AI for this kind of research, your university’s career center can help. Its staff members are no doubt working hard to master AI tools, often with the support of professional associations such as the National Association of Colleges and Employers, the Graduate Career Consortium, and the National Career Development Association. The career center very likely offers workshops on using AI for career exploration, or has advisers who can walk you through it in a one-on-one meeting. They may also be able to suggest AI-based tools — such as Jobscan or Teal — to help you to organize your job search or help you understand how companies use technology to “read” your résumé. Be sure to take advantage of the campus-based resources available to you. They can also share the pros and cons of using AI in your search.
Your career adviser will very likely tell you that the one thing AI cannot do is network for you. A bot can help you find people to contact or suggest phrasing for an email seeking an informational interview. But human connection remains the purview of humans, and it is more important than ever for actually getting hired.
How It Looks From the Hiring Side of the Table
Imagine that you are leading a job search. Three days after you post the opening, you find that you have already received more than 150 applications. Yikes. As you begin slogging through the pile, you notice that a lot of the applications simply don’t sound, well … human. But a good chunk of the applicants do seem qualified. You start to wonder if there are any tools to help you distinguish between them.
For hiring managers, AI has created a tidal wave of (often mediocre) applications — some of which don’t even come from real candidates. It’s small wonder that, in response, some employers have eliminated cover-letter requirements altogether. Others have turned to filters, AI tools, or time-saving heuristics that push thoughtful applications to the bottom of the pile — often because they don’t match the qualifications exactly. And though we’ve talked to a few hiring managers who claim to look at every single application, most of them don’t have the bandwidth to read everything they receive.
Minimizing the human role in hiring can remove curiosity and imagination from the process, whether a hiring manager is using a traditional “applicant-tracking system” (or ATS) or building a new set of AI tools to help with recruiting. An AI-heavy search very often works to the detriment of people with advanced degrees who may not look like the candidate the bot “expects” to see. In applying for industry jobs, ex-academics have long relied on hiring managers who could look at a Ph.D.’s somewhat unusual résumé and imagine (with the help of a good cover letter) what they might bring to the company. No bot can do that.
As a job seeker, you have no control over whether an overwhelmed hiring manager uses AI to make their own job easier. What you can control is whether you choose to add one more obviously AI-generated application to the pile or to take a more — dare we say — humane approach that will benefit both you and hiring managers.
Dos and Don’ts of Using AI to Apply for Jobs
Don’t use AI to fully automate your job applications. That means don’t ask AI to create résumés and cover letters from scratch based on a job ad. It’s easy to understand the appeal of doing so, even to candidates who would never use AI for their scholarly writing. For many Ph.D.s, drafting résumés and cover letters for industry jobs doesn’t seem like meaningful writing. Even in applying for academic jobs, while the requisite cover letters are longer and more culturally weighted, there’s still a sense that the writing isn’t doing intellectual work — it’s just summarizing what you have already accomplished. Summarizing and synthesizing is exactly what AI tools do well, you might be thinking, so why shouldn’t I take full advantage of that?
Our answer: Because the very task of summarizing and synthesizing your work is meaningful. It’s the chance for you to connect the work you’ve done to the work you want to do. Writing cover letters and résumés helps you understand what you’ve achieved, what you’re good at, and what you want next in your career. In answering the question of, “Why me, and why this job?” you have the chance to discover things about yourself and your career goals — and those revelations can help when you get to the interview phase. If you outsource that writing entirely, you skip the insights that come with it.
Also, you risk not sounding like a human in your application materials. And that won’t help your candidacy in the least.
AI tools can help in drafting your application package — but only if you use them intentionally and in ways that preserve your voice and support self-reflection, while making strategic use of automation. For example, AI tools are especially useful for tasks such as:
- Reformatting a résumé for a different labor sector.
- Translating academic experience into industry-friendly language.
- Brainstorming the bullet points for your résumé.
But a bot shouldn’t replace you. Only you can really express your interest in a particular job opening, your motivation for applying, or your fit for the position.
Do write (or ramble) for yourself first. Before opening any AI tool, draft a “professional narrative” in your own words. What’s the thread that runs through your work? Which problems excite you? What skills do you want to use? Your narrative needn’t be polished at this point. But writing it out — even roughly — helps you get clarity and gives the AI something real to work with later. If the blank page is overwhelming, ramble into a microphone or an empty Zoom room and create a transcription.
Do this stage for every opening you seek. Before you ask the AI tool to do anything, wrap your own head around what appeals to you about the particular position. Even if you are following the general advice to “apply broadly,” you should not be applying so broadly that you can’t do this for every application. If you find yourself applying to so many jobs that this step becomes unreasonable, that’s a sign to be more selective in your search.
Don’t use AI as a ghostwriter, but rather, as a collaborator. Instead of asking AI to write your cover letter from scratch, ask it to revise or clarify something you’ve drafted (or at least rambled into a microphone). Ask it to help you tailor your letter for a specific role. AI is great at rewording and summarizing, but less great at capturing what makes you uniquely you. You should never let it have the last word.
AI is also helpful in doing research on individual companies and organizations (including universities). But its sourcing can be thin, and it is prone to “hallucinations” (e.g., “making things up”). Make sure that you review any source an AI tool gives you to ensure it actually says what the AI claims, and use your own judgment about the source’s quality.
Do invite critique and pushback. AI tools can give very helpful feedback but, by default, are too polite — bordering on sycophantic. An AI bot will often tell you that things you say and write are “brilliant” and “insightful.” That is not at all helpful when what you need is constructive feedback on your application materials. Prompt the AI to challenge your work with directions such as:
- Point out any vague or generic phrasing.
- Does this sound too buzzword-y or academic?
- What parts of this paragraph are weak?
Do make sure your materials sound like you. AI-generated writing tends to sound weirdly formal or strangely chipper. Before you send any AI-influenced documents to a potential employer, you need to ask yourself some questions:
- Would I say this out loud?
- Does this sound like me?
- Is it specific enough to matter?
If the answer to any of those is no, we recommend revising. In a world in which hiring managers are slogging through hundreds of applications, anything that sounds generic fades instantly.
Do rethink what it means to “apply widely.” Yes, AI tools make it easier to apply to 50 jobs in a day. But that doesn’t mean you should. For Ph.D.s in particular, job applications have never really been a numbers game. Given the state of both the academic and industry job markets, it’s important to consider multiple career paths. But we still believe that creating thoughtful documents for a reasonable number of openings promises a better payoff than applying for hundreds of jobs with generic application materials. Reflective writing is hard and tiring, but in a sea of bland, AI-generated cover letters, it will make you stand out.
Yes, job applications are a slog. But they are also an invitation to ask yourself: What have I done? What do I want? Where am I going? You won’t get useful answers to those questions from ChatGPT. And in a job market that already feels impersonal and opaque, self-reflection may be the only thing keeping you grounded.
Go ahead and use AI tools to make the search process more streamlined and less soul-crushing, but never surrender your own thinking to a bot’s. Your mind is still the most valuable thing you bring to the table, and you want it on full display to our beleaguered hiring manager, not buried beneath layers of AI-generated prose.
