Job Search Slot Machine
Sometimes you start with a kernel of an idea. And then it just goes to off the rails.
My original goal with this bot was to get users to upload their resume and have the bot search Indeed.com for matching jobs. The output would be a list of jobs with descriptions. The goal was to save users time and hopefully deliver something more valuable than an emailed job alert.
After building the prompt, the model kept telling me it couldn’t give me the job descriptions from indeed.. After fidgeting with the prompt, I learned the model would give me links to the jobs on Indeed based on my resume, which wasn’t bad. For a job seeker, that’d mean you rely on the model to interpret your resume and pull jobs for you. Which is kinda cool. But the output wasn’t consistent. It didn’t always do that. Sometimes it listed the full job. Sometimes it listed parts of it. Sometimes it timed out. It was madness.
So I took it a step further and tried removing the search on Indeed, opening it up to searching the Internet for match. The first couple of passes, it found better jobs and the many recently posted jobs.
The problem was, it wasn’t reproducible. I couldn’t guarantee this output each time. So back I went to the prompt to try to structure the outputs better. But then I ran it several more time and kept getting results for 404 pages.
In the end, this wasn’t a very reliable bot. Sometimes it pays off. I discovered some jobs I hadn’t seen before (I am always job searching). And other times the jobs were completely off. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Just like a slot machine.
Honestly not sure this bot is any better than a typical job aggregator.
Play with the Job Search Slot Machine bot here.
What I learned
Iteration is key. I did over 20 versions of this prompt which is silly for such a silly bot.
This use case relied heavily on what GPT found on the web. After removing the Indeed constraints on the first prompt, I didn’t control where GPT searches for on the open web. As a result, every time I ran this bot with my resume (I ran it over 15 times) I saw it cycle through different websites, some of which were irrelevant. If this weren’t a prototype, and I’d have to deliver actually deliver on this use case, I’d experiment more with defining and prioritizing the job sites it posts.
There’s a lot more to explore on the web search.
I also learned that OpenAI doesn’t always save your prompts, so save them elsewhere.
