The Correct Take on ChatGPT

Someone had to do it.

Show me someone who thinks ChatGPT writes great persuasive copy and I’ll show you someone who got a C in high school English.

I debated jumping on the ChatGPT hot take bandwagon. But I have yet to see The Correct Take. It’s Friday so F it, here we go.

There will be actionable, useful takeaway for recruiters at the end. Stick with me…

I’ve played around with this thing since launch. What most people, especially ChatGPT Prompt Guru hucksters (former experts in Clubhouse, web 3.0, and crypto), get completely backwards:

👉It’s terrible at creative things. It’s great at boring things.

Ad copy. Sales emails. Blog posts. Tweets. Slogans.

ChatGPT sucks at these. If you disagree, see my opening line.

It’s a robot. It writes like a robot. Always.

The Prompt Gurus will say something like “You have to train it, give it similar writing samples, tell it what persona it should be, specify tone, regenerate the response 10 times, then you’ll have a starting point.”

Sure. Or you could save a bunch of time by writing it yourself.

Why? No matter what instructions you give it, ChatGPT writes like a robot attempting to imitate a human. It’s incapable of writing a banger.

2 things it is GREAT at. Examples in recruiter terms:

1. Research & Preparation.

👉When recruiting a skill set you’ve NEVER worked on before, give it the job description. Ask it:

• Explain what this role does and its impact on the business.
• What qualifying questions would you ask a hiring manager?
• What screening questions would you ask a candidate?

👉When sourcing, ask it:

• What Boolean strings to try. 
• What competitors in the same industry/size to target.

2. Boring Writing and Proofreading.

ChatGPT writes terrible job ads. But passage job descriptions.

• Give it a title and summary of the key points. It’ll spit out the rest. It won’t be 10/10 but will save you a ton of time to start.
• Review candidate summaries for hiring managers. Or outbound emails. Anything you want a second look at but don’t want to ask a human to review because you hate talking to people.

Tip: It works better on single sentences or phrases than a full body of text. Fixing awkward phrasing, suggesting synonyms in a specific context, switching passive voice to active voice.

James Hornick

Partner at Hirewell. #3 Ranked Sarcastic Commenter on LinkedIn.