Should You Use An AI Selection Criteria Writer?

ChatGPT has been in the news a lot these past weeks, especially being the start of the school year. Today I look at natural language artificial technology (AI) in particular ChatGPT and selection criteria response writing implications.

ChatGPT is the child of InstructGPT which in turn is the child of GPT-3 and so on back to 2016. GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer if you’re wondering.

It’s not new but it is now newsworthy because of its ability to do everything from write school and university assignments, write code, write stories and work papers and briefings, and of course job applications.

No, I am not here to trash ChatGPT or scream that the sky is falling and say everyone is going to take the easy way out and use AI selection criteria writing tools to write their job applications. Far from that so read on.

What IS ChatGPT

According to mashable.com it is:

“ChatGPT is an AI language model developed by OpenAI, which is capable of generating human-like text based on the input it is given. The model is trained on a large corpus of text data and can generate responses to questions, summarize long texts, write stories and much more. It is often used in conversational AI applications to simulate a human-like conversation with users.”

And yes, that was written by ChatGPT when they asked it “What is ChatGPT?”

ChatGPT is not the first artificial intelligence or chat bot on the Internet, you’ve probably dealt with many including the ATO Chat-bot Alex, and, Woolworths Olive. If you thought they were human because they’re very good, sorry, they’re bots.

ChatGPT is still a research tool, and, it is being made available to the public as a way of crowd sourcing millions of testers. Did you know that Google Image Captcha’s in the early days was a way of helping machine learning learn to identify what images like traffic lights are? Yes, millions and millions of people clicking those lights are traffic lights, or crosswalks etc, was a way of helping train machines.

How Hard is ChatGPT to learn?

Pretty easy. Tutorials are all over the internet and there are resources on the OpenAI site.

The top Google hit is this video which is about 30 minutes long and very comprehensive. You can watch that and know how to use ChatGPT.

Being an artificial intelligence tool that is not surprising, it is very intelligent so easy to use.

The News

There will always be someone who runs screaming the sky is falling for example The dark side of ChatGPT employees businesses need to know which includes hyperbole such as:

No job and no-one will be left untouched,
Threat to our mental health and livelihood,
Compete at levels they are wildly unprepared for.

Wow. There is some balance to the video, but it really does focus on the dark side as its name suggests.

What I LOVE about OpenAI and ChatGPT for Selection Criteria

Yes I said it, I love things about OpenAI and ChatGPT.

I love Summarise for a Second Grader. Sorry. I do. I love a feature that summarises something for a 7-8 year old.

I am not insulting your intelligence but what it is brilliant at, and I mean brilliant, is decoding selection criteria.

These are some of the selection criteria I discussed in my What are Business Administration Skills blog,

The criterion are at the top, the decoded version are in green at the bottom.

You can also do that in ChatGPT which is explained here.

I would recommend to anyone struggling with understanding what government criteria are asking to use it or at least try it. Reading the second grade explanation of the criterion gives you a really good idea what examples you’re going to need.

Go beyond the blog. enrol for comprehensive learning

Think how much you can learn in a course not just a blog!

Click Here To View Our Courses

What I Like Less, but Don’t Mind

Resumes

The instruction video mentioned above discusses ChatGPT resume building during the video here.

Is it revolutionary? Ummm, no. I’m underwhelmed.

What is the difference between asking an AI tool to write your resume, entering statements to refine it and picking a template on Office.Com and entering the details?

To me, not much. It certainly didn’t take my breath away. In government selection criteria processes your resume is not assessed either, it is supplemental information only.

Selection Criteria

The first thing I tried was simply copy/pasting a criterion into ChatGPT. I used one of the criterion I used the second grader feature for:

This is what it produced:

I genuinely like that the first thing it says is:

“As an AI language mode, I don’t have personal experiences”.

And that is exactly what a selection criteria response is asking you to supply.

What I don’t mind is it gives you a theoretical answer to the criterion:

I can provide information and examples on proactively reviewing and improving business processes and promoting a culture of continuous improvement. Continuous improvement is a process-oriented approach to work that involves regularly seeking out ways to enhance performance, efficiency, and productivity. This can be achieved by reviewing existing processes, seeking feedback from employees, and implementing changes to improve results.

To promote a culture of continuous improvement, leaders should encourage employees to identify areas for improvement and provide them with the resources and support they need to drive change. This can include setting up cross-functional teams to review processes, providing training on process improvement methodologies, and recognizing and rewarding employees who drive positive change. Overall, by proactively reviewing and improving business processes, organizations can stay competitive and achieve their goals more efficiently.

If you gave that as a selection criteria response it would be a great theoretical answer but you would not be rated as being suitable as you not related work achievements or personal experience.

You could use that to help you think of an example, and break out the particulars, which is why I don’t mind it.

The Risks of ChatGPT and Selection Criteria

There are many risks I see in using an AI selection criteria writer when exploring how to write your selection criteria responses for you:

Plagiarism detection in built to ChatGPT.
- I don’t know what that looks like but they are looking at building it
Plagiarism detectors:
- In the education setting detectors like GPTZero already exist and are evolving
A purely theoretical response
- A response based on only theory will not get you shortlisted as you show no personal experience or examples or evidence.
- That would be like me applying for a job as a heart surgeon and having a perfect theoretical response, I am still going to get found out at some point, hopefully before I cut into someone’s chest.
Multiple people submitting the same
- Not as silly or improbable as it sounds. It’s a funny thing about having more of something is that you can start to draw conclusions from the aggregated data.
- The often asked but never answered question of what tolerance do police give you in speeding fines is easily answered with data. Get enough people to say what was the lowest speed they got a ticket in a 60km/h, 80km/h and 100km/h speed zone at and the tolerance will become immediately clear; even though no one individual can tell you.
- It is entirely possible amongst the purely theoretical responses in point 3, that they will recur. Natural language is great, unlikely everyone uses the same natural language.
The panel can produce similar answers to you.
- If I want to know as the panel chair what the ChatGPT response to selection criteria are, I just produce them. It’s not hard and I will have a benchmark to compare the submitted responses against.

What You Will Never Not Need to Know

You will never not need to know your work examples. Not only for the job application/selection criteria writing part, but interview as well.

It is no use getting an interview based on your AI selection criteria response unless you can have the same AI attend the job interview for you.

Like me doing heart surgery, you’re going to get found out.

This is what I have taught in my Career examples course on highlighting resume achievements for several years now, well before ChatGPT came along. The skills of you knowing what you have done, coupled with the skills of writing a response will never be automated because any AI will never … have personal experiences in the words of ChatGPT.

Tagged artificial intelligence writing selection criteria