Will AI like ChatGPT be the Death of Cover Letters?

You may have heard claims that OpenAI’s newest chatbot, ChatGPT, will be the end of a range of things like high school essays, programming, and cover letters. The recently unveiled language prompt-and-response program boasts an impressive ability to produce legible and convincing written pieces, perhaps one of the best out of a long line of chatbots.

The program works by asking it to do something for you, for example, “write me a five-paragraph essay on themes of racism in To Kill a Mockingbird”, and it will produce what you asked for within seconds. Most programs like this produce tangled messes of prose and aimless points, but ChatGPT actually has a command over basic literacy enough to write acceptable pieces. In the case of this high school style essay, it will restate the thesis and wrap it up with a conclusion. It may even pass as something a high schooler would write.

That is, about, the limit, though. ChatGPT is as impressive as a high schooler — which, for an AI, is nothing less than astonishing. However, when it comes to creativity and depth, it lacks. ChatGPT is not meant to be used this way, after all. Its strength actually comes from locating and organizing information for us, like a guide through the jungle that is the modern internet. As humans, we can barely navigate, but ChatGPT knows exactly where everything is and how to present it to us.

It’s good at formulaic writing like the dreaded five-paragraph essay, code, and cover letters because there is a very particular way to write them. Ian Blogost, in his piece about ChatGPT, explained that “computers have never been instruments of reason that can solve matters of human concern; they’re just apparatuses that structure human experience through a very particular, extremely powerful method of symbol manipulation.” AI is very good at mimicking human writing, but not much more.

However, this technology could still very well change aspects of our life. For things like cover letters, you can input both the job description and your own resume and then ask ChatGPT to write a cover letter based on them. Cover letters often follow a formula so ChatGPT is rather good at crafting these average — lifeless, but fine — cover letters. For people who hate writing cover letters, It’s actually a very powerful tool. For example, here's one it gave me after talking to it for less than a minute:

It could also be a game changer for the hiring industry. Already 75% of recruiters use AI for hiring, specifically applicant tracking systems (ATS) that sort through hundreds of applicants to find ones that best fit the given position. So, oddly enough, most cover letters aren’t read by real humans anymore and are instead skimmed by an AI. This aspect of hiring has been called inhumane and unfair since the AI often looks only for buzzwords and specific skills.

So ChatGPT could actually offer a rather powerful weapon against ATS. Theoretically, ChatGPT can take exactly what the ATS is looking for and plug it into a cover letter, and then that cover letter is fed to an ATS, who sees those particular words as a positive hit and sends it to HR for consideration. If ATS is the shield blocking many job seekers then ChatGPT is quite like an ax that can cut right through it. Soon enough job seekers could be utilizing AI to get interviews, leveling the field and also completely disrupting it.

This also, though, begs the question of why have cover letters at all? If it's AI reading cover letters written by AI, what's the point? After all, if ChatGPT can produce convincing cover letters which highlight skills the job post is looking for (but the candidate may not actually possess), can it be an honest way to help find a good candidate? There is currently no way to detect if something has been written by an AI or not — especially ChatGPT, which gives differently worded answers to the exact same prompt. You can’t necessarily tell by reading it either.

It’s impressive and also unsettling, but the technology is here now and the cat can’t be put back in the bag. It forces us to look at the systems we’ve created and question if they can, or should, continue into this new era. Lately, many companies don’t even require cover letters, Google famously being one of those. The truth is, everyone hates writing cover letters and HR hates reading them, so perhaps ChatGPT is just the final straw for a dying hiring method.

Published by WOW (Work Onward) By Hannah Drake / December 19, 2022