Students use AI to write cover letters
Danial Asaria and Reese Bretow created AI Cover Letter in an effort to harness the power of artificial intelligence to help students who are applying for jobs and internships. The website drastically shortens the process of writing a personalized cover letter to just 30 seconds.
The students were inspired to create the website after they spent a significant amount of time writing cover letters for internship applications. They realized that this was not efficient, especially since recruiters simply look for keywords and skim through, Bretow said.
“It’s very frustrating spending 10 to 20 minutes writing a cover letter that I knew was not going to really be read,” said Bretow, a junior majoring in business administration. “I wondered if this could be automated, so I texted Danial.”
Friends before creating AI Cover Letter, Asaria and Bretow knew how to divide responsibilities to make their goal possible. While Asaria coded the website, Bretow designed its interface. The website requires the user to upload their resume and paste the job description and role they are applying for. It then extracts information from both these inputs to produce a cover letter. The most important aspect of the software is that it matches the job description to the relevant parts of the resume to make a story.
The website was built upon OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, a generative model that allows for text completion, and then trained for cover letters. The model first picks the correct prompts and then scans the resume so it can dissect it and find the important parts. To train it, the creators used cover letters from an open forum at USC, their own cover letters and online examples that hiring managers said they liked best.
AI Cover Letter has had more than 3,400 visits since its launch. While the website is open to anyone who is in the process of a writing cover letter, current users are mainly undergraduate students at USC.
“We are undergraduate college students, so the people we sent it to happen to be the same,” said Asaria, a junior majoring in computer science and business administration. “But anyone who’s applying [for] a job can use this website.”
Rushikesh Pande, a junior majoring in neuroscience, and Josh Cohen, a sophomore majoring in business administration, praised the app for its simplicity and said they would recommend it to others.
“The ease of use is definitely something that is helpful,” Pande said. “This was a lot easier because you can copy and paste any job description … you don’t have to do too much.”
Cohen said he often uses it as a baseline for a cover letter and then edits it to better fit his needs, rather than starting from scratch.
“I edited it obviously,you got to proofread it to make sure it’s talking about what you want it to talk about,” Cohen said. “Most of it was pretty solid and I didn’t need to change a bunch.”
ChatGPT is another popular model using GPT-3 that can write cover letters quickly. However, AI Cover Letter already does the key steps of sorting the resume, prioritizing information, choosing the correct prompts and training on cover letters. Hence, the creators argue that it is more efficient than ChatGPT.
“As a product designer, it’s important to make products that work really well and fast,” Bretow said. “While ChatGPT could get you something similar with the right fine-tuning of the prompts, that’s an extra layer of effort I strive not to have.”
While Cohen hasn’t used ChatGPT for his cover letter, he is unsure if it can import the same data as AI Cover Letter, which is specifically made for this purpose. Compared to this, users may have to edit more to make sure ChatGPT gave the cover letter tailored to the job.
While USC didn’t help in the development of this website in any official capacity, Asaria and Bretow said they learned skills from their classes and organizations that inspired leadership. According to them, the innovation culture at USC is underrated and the university’s startup culture is not as well-known as that of other schools. This, however, does not stop students from making interesting projects here.
“It’s really exciting to see what’s going to be coming out of here and what already has,” Bretow said.