Short version: A Reddit user shared a 13-phase prompt that doesn’t just rewrite your resume. It interviews you first, mines your hidden accomplishments, maps your skills, and then builds a resume from scratch. It’s structured like a real career coaching engagement, and it’s free.
What’s Going On
u/Jayebulz posted this in r/ChatGPTPromptGenius asking for feedback. The prompt is substantial, but the length is the point. Think of it like a legal contract: the detail is what gives it teeth.
It opens by assigning the AI a specific role: not just a resume editor, but a career strategist whose job is to uncover what you’re actually worth in the market. The premise built into the prompt is worth noting: most people underestimate, misunderstand, or poorly communicate their own value. The AI is told to assume this and dig accordingly. That framing changes everything about how the conversation unfolds.
Phase 1 is a discovery interview, conducted one question at a time. No rapid-fire lists. The AI works through your job history, side projects, volunteer work, hobbies with professional relevance, leadership moments, and career goals before it writes a single word of a resume. This part alone takes 15 to 20 minutes if you’re doing it right, and that’s actually the minimum. Think of it as an intake session with a consultant who bills by the hour and genuinely wants to understand you before they say anything.
Phase 2 mines accomplishments the candidate might not even recognize as accomplishments. Things like: “I trained the new hire” or “I rebuilt the tracking spreadsheet everyone uses” or “I handled client escalations when my manager was out.” Those are accomplishments. Most people leave them on the cutting room floor because they didn’t feel like a big deal in the moment.
Phase 3 separates skills into three distinct buckets: what you have, what you enjoy, and what you’re genuinely good at (often three different lists). The overlap of all three is where your actual positioning lives, and most resumes never find it.
Phases 4 through 8 cover talent assessment, career fit tiers, job market analysis by geography, professional branding, and resume strategy. Only then, in Phase 9, does the actual resume get built from scratch with a focus on outcomes over responsibilities. “Managed a team of five” becomes “Led a five-person team that cut onboarding time by 30% over two quarters.” That kind of shift.
Phases 10 through 13 handle ATS optimization, job posting targeting, LinkedIn profile rewriting, and interview prep with full STAR-format examples. By the time you’re done, you have a complete package, not just a document.
Why the Structure Matters
The usual approach is to paste your existing resume and ask AI to make it better. The problem is that AI can only work with what you give it. If your resume undersells you to begin with, a polished version of it still undersells you. You’re just getting a shinier version of the same undersell.
This prompt flips the order. Discovery first, then writing. The one-question-at-a-time rule keeps it from feeling like a form and mimics how a real recruiter would actually run a session. A good recruiter doesn’t hand you a questionnaire. They ask a question, listen to your answer, and follow the interesting thread. That’s what this prompt forces the AI to do.
The tiered career fit system is also well designed. Instead of feeding your current job title back at you, it pushes the AI to find lateral moves and transferable paths you might not have on your radar. Someone with five years in customer success might be a better fit for a solutions engineering role than they’d ever guess, and this process surfaces that kind of insight instead of burying it.
The geography-specific job market analysis in Phase 6 is a detail most people skip past, but it matters. “Product Manager” means different things, pays differently, and requires different positioning in Austin versus New York versus a fully remote job board. The prompt accounts for that.
🎯 Use Cases
- Job seekers who haven’t updated their resume in years and don’t know where to start
- Career changers figuring out which industries their skills actually transfer to
- People who know they undersell themselves in interviews but don’t know how to fix it
- Anyone whose LinkedIn profile hasn’t matched their resume since 2019
- Professionals who feel stuck in a role and aren’t sure if it’s the job or the industry
Prompt of the Day
This is the prompt. Grab the full version from the original Reddit post and paste it into ChatGPT or Claude. Block 30 to 45 minutes and treat Phase 1 like it matters, because it does. The quality of your resume in Phase 9 is entirely a function of how honest and detailed you are in the first three phases. Vague answers get vague output. If the AI asks about a leadership moment and you say “I helped with a project,” push yourself to be specific. Which project, what was your actual role, what changed because you were there.
One small tweak worth adding: at the very top, tell the AI your target role or industry. It keeps the career fit tiers in Phase 5 focused instead of casting too wide. If you’re open to multiple directions, run the prompt twice with different targets and compare what comes out. The difference is often illuminating.
Another practical tip: save the full conversation. Copy it to a doc before the session expires. The raw output from Phases 1 through 3 is essentially a personal career inventory you can reference for future applications, cover letters, and interviews.
Bottom Line
This is not a shortcut. It’s a structured career coaching session that happens to run on AI. If updating your resume has been sitting on your to-do list for three months, this prompt is a good reason to finally sit down and do it. The process works because it’s honest about what most people get wrong: they optimize the document before they’ve done the thinking. This prompt forces the thinking first.
The full prompt is in the thread. Go use it.
Resume & Job Placement Prompt
by u/Jayebulz in ChatGPTPromptGenius