During his IT career, Mark Quinn went from being approached by Waymo, Apple, and Amazon with job offers to being unemployed and unable to attract the attention of any company.
The IT guy lost his previous job to AI. At the same time, the technology helped him find a new job. Mark now holds a position in AI operations at Pearl, an AI search platform for professional services.
During his IT career, Mark Quinn went from being approached by Waymo, Apple, and Amazon with job offers to being unemployed and unable to attract the attention of any company.
The IT guy lost his previous job to AI. At the same time, the technology helped him find a new job. Mark now holds a position in AI operations at Pearl, an AI search platform for professional services.
Mark Quinn led engineering operations at Waymo. He was then hired by the startup, where he led the core unit responsible for overseeing and managing AI.
"When I joined the team, it already had 500 people, and I was hired to grow it to a thousand. By all accounts, we were doing a very good job. Then GPT-4 came out. After working with it for only a couple of months, we realized that most of the operation that I was scaling, in fact the entire operation, was no longer needed. The technology simply got ahead of itself and the human in the process," Mark told Business Insider.
In the last few months before his dismissal, Mark and his team were building AI agents for specific tasks at the startup. Then, when everything was done, his team was no longer needed: instead of 10 people, there was only one left. The AI layoffs also affected other employees around the world.
After being fired, Mark looked for work for 5 months when he realized he was doing something wrong. Then, as he says, he switched to AI collaboration mode.
The first thing the IT guy did was upload his resume and LinkedIn profile to Google's NotebookLM for an analysis of his career in the form of a podcast, where AI named the brightest professional moments.
"When I did this, I realized that there were wonderful things in my past and experiences that I hadn't told people about because I didn't see or appreciate them, but this tool revealed them."
Mark also used AI to tailor his resume and cover letter to each job opening. To do this, he created the JobHunt GPT chatbot.
“It was a dedicated GPT that understood my background, where I was trying to get into, and the history of jobs I had applied for. So I could come to it and say, ‘Hey, here’s a new job opening. Can you evaluate my candidacy for it?’”
After the AI conducted an objective review of Mark's suitability for the role, it next asked the chatbot to conduct a resume analysis.
“Then I can say, ‘Okay, go through my resume. What do I need to fix?’ He can create an updated resume, focusing on the things that are important for the role. He can write a cover letter and identify key people I should contact. It’s basically like lead analysis and development,” says the IT guy.
Mark also gave advice to job seekers: "Don't wait five months to figure out how to do it right. The world has changed. This applies to everything, but especially if you're looking for a job, you need to use the most powerful tool available, which is artificial intelligence."
