Class 08 — The Job-Search Toolkit
Date: TODO · Slides: TODO
Objectives
Section titled “Objectives”- Draft and polish a resume, cover letter, and short professional bio with AI.
- Keep the honesty boundary: AI polishes real experience, never invents it.
- Use AI to prepare for an interview it can’t attend for you.
Agenda (60 min)
Section titled “Agenda (60 min)”| Time | Block |
|---|---|
| 0–5 | Warm-up: the worst resume cliché AI will happily generate (“team player, hard worker”) — hunt it. |
| 5–15 | Mini-lesson: the toolkit — resume bullets (“rewrite this duty as an accomplishment with a number”), tailoring to a job posting, cover letters from real examples, a 3-sentence LinkedIn-style bio. The boundary: AI can’t know you did what it says you did. |
| 15–35 | Fictional-bio practice: everyone works on “Jordan Lee,” a fictional student (their own creation: real-ish jobs, clubs, projects). Draft Jordan’s resume bullets and a cover letter for a job posting we all pull from the same 2–3 listings. Iterate twice. |
| 35–48 | Interview prep round: AI plays the hiring manager for Jordan’s job; student answers; AI gives feedback. Then: have AI generate the 3 questions Jordan should ask them. |
| 48–55 | The honesty audit: swap Jordan’s materials; circle anything the “candidate” can’t defend, and anything the AI added that the bio never said. |
| 55–60 | Exit ticket: one thing AI made genuinely better for Jordan; one thing you’d never let AI do for YOUR real resume. |
Key terms
Section titled “Key terms”- Achievement bullets — verb + task + measurable result.
- Tailoring — matching language to a posting without faking fit.
- Fabrication line — the bright edge between polishing and inventing.
Seven-Question connection
Section titled “Seven-Question connection”Q5 (ethical) and Q7 (own the outcome) — employers run their own checks; “can I stand behind every line as if I wrote it?” is the standard. Fictional Jordan keeps stakes safe while the skill transfers to real senior-year use.
Homework / log entry
Section titled “Homework / log entry”Log the Jordan Lee build: prompts, one revision, the audit result. Optional stretch: start a real “brag doc” — a running list of things you actually did, for the day YOU need a resume.
Teacher notes
Section titled “Teacher notes”- Fictional bio is deliberate: zero risk to a real senior’s application cycle, full practice of the workflow. Students who want to work on their own resume may, but the log audit uses Jordan.
- Job postings: pick a spectrum — retail, office temp, internship, trades apprentice — so it’s not all white-collar.