Artificial intelligence is seeping its way into every industry. And it’s bringing with it a fair amount of hype. As a career coach, you might be wondering if AI tools can actually help your clients write their résumés, find jobs, and prepare for interviews. Or is this a bunch of hogwash?
To get to the bottom of it, we gathered nine career coaches here at the International Association of Career Coaches (IACC) to test 33 different AI job search tools and pick the best ones.
In this article, we’ll narrow down their research and share with you the best tools for each part of the job search process and a few tools that might not be worth the hype.
Importance of Using Technology in Job Hunting
Whether or not you use AI for a job application, other people will be. In fact, nearly half of job seekers use ChatGPT to write their resumes or cover letters.
And if AI is indeed useful with the application process, then not using it will put you at a disadvantage. One survey suggests that of applicants who have experimented with ChatGPT to apply for jobs, 7 in 10 say that using AI actually boosted the response rate they got from their applications.
So, if you aren’t tapping into AI tools, it’s possible that you are falling behind.
Benefits of AI tools for job search
Before diving into specific tools, here are the top potential benefits that AI can provide in helping a client with their job search.
Saving time. This is a big one. Finding a job can be a full-time job in itself. So, if AI can save job seekers time by helping them find job openings and produce their application materials, it’d be unwise not to capitalize on this.
Enhance the quality of the application. There are AI tools to help you write a more complete résumé, upgrade your interview skills, and network more effectively. Just as it’d put a job seeker at a disadvantage to write their résumé on a typewriter, they might be at a disadvantage to skip over these tools.
Cast a wider net. When applying for jobs, you can only see so much. You have human limitations. But having an AI on your team is like having a few virtual assistants helping find more job postings.
Give you a second pair of eyes. We all make mistakes. This is why book writers use editors. AI tools can help job seekers see the mistakes they’re making on their résumé or in their interviews.
Limitations of using AI tools for job search
While AI provides benefits, if you lean too heavily on it, you will bump into some of these limitations and problems.
AI will make errors. AI tools are incredible, but they still require human eyes. When writing, they might mess up the formatting or write things that don’t make sense. AIs don’t have brains; they just use pattern recognition, which often leads to blunders.
Lack of personalization. While AI tools are designed to be as customized as possible, they can only go so far. Using an AI to write a cover letter for a job application based on your résumé is helpful. But the tool simply won’t know the nuanced details about your life that you do.
Privacy concerns. To use AI tools, job seekers will have to provide a fair amount of personal data. It is worth considering that data misuse or breaches do happen, and they could have serious repercussions.
Lower quality. In its current state, AI technology can’t create as high-quality products as humans. The best combo is when a human uses AI to complement their own work. But if a job seeker tries to rely solely on AI, they’ll simply put out subpar applications.
With the pros and cons of AI considered, let’s move on to some of the best tools.
Top AI Tools for Job Search
Before jumping in, it’s worth noting that the nine different IACC-accredited career coaches who tested out these tools are independent career coaches. They’re not employees of any of the apps reviewed nor of the IACC.
With that said, here are our top tool picks:
Type of AI Tool | Top Pick | Description |
Job matching & career exploration | Helps identify your ideal career path through a comprehensive quiz. Most useful for new graduates or those early in their careers | |
Résumé & cover letter generation | Generates a sleek résumé based on your input and provides feedback for improvement | |
Interview preparation | Simulates interviews with various question styles and provides feedback on your responses | |
Interview recording | Records interviews, transcribes them, and highlights action items | |
Job search organization & application: | A CRM-like system for your job search that helps you manage applications and track progress | |
Networking | Analyzes personality types of people you want to meet based on their online profiles and suggests communication strategies |
Now, let’s go into more detail with these tools. Plus, we’ll check out some runner-up options and a few AI tools that don’t live up to the hype.
AI job matching and career exploration tools
Top Pick: CareersPro
CareersPro is an AI-powered platform that aims to help you find your ideal career.
The platform takes you through a fairly comprehensive quiz and afterward spits out your top career strengths and what career paths might match your skills and preferences.
Lisa Virtue of Lisa Virtue Coaching explains that “to answer the often elusive question, ‘What am I supposed to do vocationally?’” most of us are seeking “the sweet spot of three overlapping circles:
What am I great at?
What do I love doing?
What are jobs available that will pay me what I deserve to be paid at this point in my career?”
CareersPro does a fairly good job of drawing out some traits for (a) and (b) and supplies solid job options with a suggested path into each.
That said, Lisa Virtue suggests that this tool would be most helpful for helping new graduates or those who are very early in their careers and might not be the best pick for more seasoned professionals.
Runner Up: Match That Role
Match That Role is a free tool that helps job seekers prepare for their dream job and matches them with possible job titles.
To use it, first you identify your dream job five years down the road. Then paste your résumé.
At that point, Match That Role will give you advice on how to move toward that dream job over the next five years. It gives tips about networking, getting further education, and improving your résumé.
Andrea Barnes of Andrea Barnes Career Consulting considers it a “great tool to prepare a five-year career plan.”
Match That Role will also tell you ten job titles you might be a good fit to apply for. However, this feature is less useful since many of the titles it picks match those on your existing résumé.
Plus, as Barnes points out, the tool might “not help if you’re unsure of your next move, which is a majority of job seekers.”
AI résumé and cover letter writing tools
Top Pick: Rezi
Rezi is a platform that helps automate the process of writing a résumé.
The user must enter the job title and description they want to apply for, and then they input their education and work experience. Rezi will then combine all this information into a sleek résumé.
Rezi will then rate your résumé on its content, format, optimization, best practices, and application readiness. And it will give you tips on how to improve each category. Here’s a screenshot of what its ratings look like:
Career coach Jaclyn Rose with UpRose Coaching remarked that she was surprised at how well Rezi understood common résumé language and rules.
That said, Rose did mention that Rezi didn’t parse the résumé information too well, made a few grammar errors, and didn’t always recognize the role titles she input.
Rezi also can write your cover letter for you based on your résumé and the job description, but you have to pay to become a member. Either $29/month or $129 for a lifetime fee.
Runner Up: Resume Worded
Resume Worded is our next pick. It’s designed to give you custom feedback on your résumé and LinkedIn profile.
You simply upload your résumé or LinkedIn, and you get back scores and detailed feedback by section.
You can get a part of the feedback in the free version, but to get the full list of feedback points, you need to pay either $49 per month, $33 per month on a quarterly plan, or $19 per month for one year. There is also a career coach plan that gives you unlimited uploads at $149 a month.
Ruth Vitkovitz with Ruth Vitkovits Career Consulting was impressed by the detailed feedback but didn’t agree with all of the feedback suggestions that Resume Worded gave. She found the tool was well set up to catch résumé rookie mistakes. And she thought it could be effectively used as a second pair of eyes before submitting an application.
Resume Worded also includes an AI writing tool that can help you upgrade the phrasing of any piece of text in your résumé.
If you do opt for the paid version, you’ll also get over 500 sample résumé points that got people in your industry hired, as well as ATS-ready résumé templates. ATS stands for “applicant tracking system.” Many employers run résumés through an AI ATS that filters the best-fit résumés to the top of the pile. So, the idea is that if you use an ATS-ready template, your résumé will be more likely to pass through the ATI screen and reach human eyes.
That said, a proclaimed “ATS-ready” résumé might not be as effective as it sounds. There are hundreds of different ATS companies, each with different technology. So, there is not yet an AI that can ensure that your résumé will pass through every ATS system out there.
Not Worth the Hype: Résumé.io
Résumé.io helps you populate your work experience onto one of their résumé templates. Their goal is to help you follow the “résumé rules” employers look for.
It is a fast and easy-to-use tool.
And while Résumé.io does have some slick options to choose from, the main drawback, as Vitkovitz explains, is that it doesn’t advise which résumé to pick.
As any career coach will know, your application and résumé should match the job, industry, company culture, level, and location of the role. Without this guidance, the efficacy of Résumé.io is limited.
Another issue is that you can’t customize the résumé templates. So if you want to change the margins or organization of a template, you’re out of luck.
Vitkovitz was also dubious of much of the résumé advice the tool provided.
If you’d like more clarity on when and how much to use AI (and specifically ChatGPT) to write a cover letter, you may enjoy this article.
AI interview preparation tools
Top Pick: Interview Ignitor
Interview Ignitor is an AI-driven platform that helps you practice for interviews.
There are a variety of styles of questions you can go through for different roles and skills. For example, if you want to practice talking about your soft skills, you can field interview questions about managing conflict. Or, if you practice for a product manager role, you can practice with questions specific to product management.
The platform will ask you a question out loud, and then you can respond verbally using your microphone.
After you finish your response, Interview Ignitor will rate you on the different emotions that came through your response. For example, it will tell you how calm, contemplative, or awkward you came across.
Then, the platform will give you pretty detailed feedback on the content of your response and run your answer through an interview framework of your choice (EG, you can run it through the framework Google or Amazon uses for their interview process).
If you are a coder, there are also extensive practice problems specific to coding.
Career coach Gayle Morihara of Gayle Morihara Career Consulting tested the tool and found the interview questions to be “spot-on.”
You can pay $25/month for unlimited use of the platform. And for a one-time fee of $129 you get the CEO’s cell phone number for support.
AI interview recording tools
Top Pick: Metaview
Metaview is an AI-powered tool that records the audio from your online interviews and takes clean, organized notes for you.
As a career coach, you can sit down with your clients and look at their interview responses to help them learn what worked and what didn’t.
Plus, you could even record your coaching sessions with clients and send them the notes.
While Metaview is technically geared for companies and recruiters to use, interview candidates can also use this tool to great effect.
Here’s a screenshot of Metaview in action, summarizing the post-call notes:
Impressively, you can ask the AI to organize the call notes in a variety of ways: through questions and answers, topics that came up, or your own custom template. Career coach Ruth Vitkovits found the interview analysis insights to be “spot on.”
You can sync up Metaview with Calendly. It’s also compatible with Zoom, Google Meet, MC Teams, and Webex.
The free plan gives you five free calls. Then, you can upgrade if you’d like at $26/month for 12 calls per month or $60/month for unlimited calls.
Runner Up: Otter.ai
Otter.ai is another great option that records the audio from your online interviews and writes a transcript of who said what.
Kayla Quijas with Kayla Quijas Career Coaching notes that Otter.ai is “excellent for job seekers for recording interviews and extracting helpful first 90 day action items.”
As Quijas referenced, Otter.ai has a great feature that gathers the action items mentioned throughout a meeting. As a career coach, this can be a helpful way to summarize any assignments that came up in your client session. Here’s a screenshot of the feature:
As Quijas puts it, “For those who have just begun a job, it's a great way to be in the moment in your onboarding meetings and have the Otter notes to go back to later.”
The free plan gives you 300 recorded minutes per month. You can also pay $120/year for 1,200 minutes per month or $240 per year for 6,000 minutes per month.
AI job search organization and application tools
Top Pick: Teal
Teal is essentially a CRM for your job search process.
If you find a job posting, you can use the Teal extension to import the information from the job posting into your Teal account.
Teal organizes all of your job applications by status: bookmarked, applying, applied, interviewing, negotiating, and accepting. You can also mark your excitement level for each job opportunity.
Teal also helps you track interview dates.
Lisa Virtue was impressed with the organizational support that Teal could offer job seekers, and she “recommends the sleek Chrome extension to easily save job postings and track your application’s progress.”
To upgrade and get a few more features, you can pay $9 every week, $29 every month, or $79 every three months.
On Our Radar: Sonara
(At the moment, Sonara is not accepting new signups).
On its website, Sonara claims to be the “first-ever AI-powered job search automation platform that finds and applies to relevant job openings until you’re hired.”
To use it, first you fill out a questionnaire. Then, Sonara will identify the job opportunities in the market for which you are best suited. And then it actually sends out job applications for you!
Sonara uses AI to comb through millions of online job postings so you don’t have to.
The cost is free for three days. You can also pay $19.99, $49.99, or $79.99 per month based on the number of jobs you want Sonara to apply for per week (the max being 50 jobs per week that Sonara finds and applies for).
Essentially, Sonara has the possibility of saving you a ton of time in your job search.
However, career coach Kelly Drummond of My Soul In Bloom points out a valid concern over legality issues. Job applications, unlike résumés, are commonly considered legal documents. Many applications end with a statement where the candidate affirms that the information provided is true and accurate.
This affirmation means that any omission of facts could result in rejection of their application or, if they get hired, disciplinary action and possibly dismissal.
Because of these legal implications, it is crucial to provide accurate and truthful information in every job application. And if a candidate allows an AI to submit a job application for them, they are essentially forgoing the ability to verify that the information is accurate.
So, if someone applies for a job, they might be able to use Sonara to expedite their application process, but sending off any applications they don’t personally review would be unwise.
Drummond also expressed uncertainty at “how to stop [the] system from applying to your current employer if [it is] in stealth mode.” If Sonara does apply to a job your current employer has posted, that would certainly be awkward.
With these considerations on hand, once Sonara starts taking new customers again, this could be a great tool if you want to mass spray applications and focus more on interviews. That said, if there is a role that you really want, it’d be better to spend some time customizing your own application.
AI networking tools
Top Pick: Crystal
Crystal is a fascinating networking tool that uses AI to generate personality types for people based on their LinkedIn profiles. The idea is, before going into a meeting with someone, you have a cheat sheet of their personality characteristics and how to successfully engage with them.
You just go to someone’s LinkedIn page and click a button on a Crystal Chrome extension, and the tool will tell you who they are and how to connect with them.
Here’s an example of a personality type that Crystal might share about someone:
And here are some tips Crystal would give to connect with this person:
Annette Garsteck of Annette Garsteck Career Consulting suggests using Crystal for new people who you don’t know well.
You can pay for a feature where there’s a personality reminder for each person’s type in a large Zoom call.
Crystal also gives you tips on how to write emails to people based on their personality. For example, some personalities might like emojis, whereas others like more crisp language. Some folks might want to get right to business on an email, and others like remarks about the latest sports game first. Additionally, Crystal has an AI writing tool that will craft messages to people for you based on their personality type.
A free account limits you to analyzing ten people’s personality types. If you upgrade for $600/year, you can analyze 200 people.
Takeaways on AI Tools for Job Search
If you’re a career coach and you want to best support your clients, some of these tools could offer them an extra boost in their job search.
As a refresher, here are our top picks:
Top AI tool for job matching & career exploration: CareersPro: An AI platform that helps identify your ideal career path through a comprehensive quiz. Most useful for new graduates or those early in their careers.
Top AI tool for résumé & cover letter generation Rezi: Generates a sleek resume based on your input and provides feedback for improvement.
Top AI tool for interview preparation Interview Ignitor: Simulates interviews with various question styles and provides feedback on your responses.
Top AI tool for interview recording Metaview: Records interviews, transcribes them, and gives you organized summaries of your call.
Top AI tool for job search organization & application Teal: A CRM-like system for your job search that helps you manage applications and track progress.
Top AI tool for networking Crystal: Analyzes personality types of people you want to meet based on their online profiles and suggests communication strategies.
And if you’d like to up your career coaching skills and join a vibrant community of career coaches, you might be interested in one of our International Association of Career Coaches certification programs.