Link: https://platform.openai.com/playground/p/k8ZLFFqUXULG2Vw3yrfB7UBY?model=gpt-3.5-turbo

I generated an “HR” chat bot with the specific aim to assist me in rewriting my cover letter. I played around with the prompts for a while, as I found that the chat bot did not seem to follow all the directions provided in longer prompts or else was overly specific if I did not provide enough details. Eventually, I landed on a simple prompt that generate a response close to what I was looking for:

• Write a 500-word cover letter for a senior product manager using information from my resume.

Initially I had included my current cover letter in the prompt itself, but found that sending my resume details in bullet points as a message and asking it to refer to said message when generating a cover letter proved much more successful. More specifically, I found that it better incorporated the content of my resume into the cover letter. It also highlighted my more relevant experience as a Product Manager and paid less attention to my past positions as a Technical Writer and Proposal Writer.

Once the chat bot was generating a coherent cover letter, I started playing with the Temperature and Top P to see if it liven up the writing a bit (up until this point the text was good at conveying my experience but was not particularly engaging). I did not find much of a difference when adjusting the Top P value but saw immediate changes when I played with the Temperature. For fun, I kicked it up to 2 and found that it crashed after the first paragraph.

I started lowering the value by .25 and the chat bot made it a bit further into the letter before crashing/generating gibberish. What was written, however, was more engaging than earlier iterations of the letter.

At a temperature of 1.25 I received a fairly solid cover letter.

A few other observations from the exercise include:

• The chat bot never actually hit 500 words; the longest letter it wrote was 438 words. I meant the 500 to be an upper threshold for the length, so this wasn’t an issue to me. I am curious as to why it choose to forgo using the extra words to round out the letter. I also increased the maximum length to see if would go up to 500 words but it never did.
• It did a good job of recognizing that a cover letter could be addressed to a number of people/organizations and called out in brackets where I needed to supply additional information. While one of my first prompts did request that the chat bot do this, I found that it was not a necessary instruction. It seems that chatgpt is already familiar with writing cover letters.