Garrett Rice: The AI-Powered Blueprint for Landing Your Dream Job

Kyle James (00:01.016) Hey, welcome to the AI Chronicles podcast. I'm your host, Kyle James. And today we're going to be discussing how a company called Callings AI is using AI inside of their own business. And we'll share the exact steps that you can take in order to implement AI for yourself. Now, before I dive into that, listen closely. Are you looking to implement AI inside of your own company or maybe just struggling to get your AI to stop hallucinating? Speak to GPT Trainer. GPT Trainer literally built out and manages your AI for you, eliminating hallucinations for good. Go to gpt-trainer.com. I promise you, it'll be the biggest time saving decision that you've made all year. Trying to set up AI on your own is like trying to build a house from scratch. Sure, you could do it, but the time of frustration is gonna take you to get it finished. It may not be worth it. It's a thousand times faster and safer to hire professionals. schedule a consultation today. Once again, that's gpt-trainer.com. Today I have with me on the show Garrett Rice, who is the co-founder and CEO of Collings AI, a startup whose AI powered total job hunt platform is changing the way people look for a job. Really excited for this conversation. Hey Garrett, welcome to the show, my friend. Garrett Rice (01:22.858) Thanks, Kyle. Really happy to be here. Kyle James (01:25.066) Yeah man, so give us some background like how did callings AI come to be? Give us the origin story. Maybe a little bit background of like your history before callings AI. That'd be awesome. Garrett Rice (01:34.432) Well, I got bit by a radioactive spider and ever since AI has been in my blood. No. My business partner and I, he's Philippe Caillou, a Frenchman. He and I met while we were, we both had careers in Silicon Valley. You know, I'd been at Apple for almost two decades. He been in places like Adobe and Kyle James (01:37.272) Hahaha Garrett Rice (02:02.909) Roxio and Care Intent. And for the first time in a long time, we were looking for our next job. we met and we were spending a lot of time talking about AI. This was two and a half years ago, three years ago. And we really felt like, we identified that this felt a lot like earlier revolutions in tech. Except we felt it was gonna be bigger. And I think it's true. I think we made that right decision. And at the same time, we were looking for job. We didn't really feel like we wanted to work for somebody else. And at the same time, we saw this opportunity. Fulip had started building tools using AI to help in his job search. And the job market has been taken over by AI on the hiring side. And so we really felt like somebody needed to build a platform to balance the playing field for the job seeker. And that was the impetus for callings.ai. And more than two plus years later, we have what we think is the most comprehensive AI based total job platform that's out there. You know, we have AI across the entire workflow for the job search now and more coming. And so that's how we got into it. you know, once you start down that road, you you look up and years have gone by, your product gets more robust and it's been a heck of a journey so far. Kyle James (03:29.046) Yeah, that's cool. The radioactive spider, that's so funny. Of course, I go back to Spider-Man with that on that one. But I think it's so many people out here, everyone who's probably listening to this podcast, everyone here listening, you got bit by the radioactive spider of AI. Yeah, if you're this deep into the podcast, yeah, you probably so. But I think it's really cool. So one thing you said though was with your business partner, obviously looking for the next job, was it because... Garrett Rice (03:42.185) the Kyle James (03:56.814) Because there's so many different directions you can go with the AI. Was it just because, hey, you were searching for jobs at the time, you're looking for tools? why the staffing and the job resume? Why that industry versus others? Garrett Rice (04:13.331) Yeah, I mean, think first and foremost, it was right in front of us. Second of all, the amount of pain that is growing in the modern job market is just it's extraordinary, right? So, you know, our feeling is and I've been evangelizing this, the modern job market is nothing like like anybody had experienced even even seven years ago. There's been so many changes culturally, technologically that it's just become a nightmare. Most of our users have at least five years of experience in the industry and a lot of great credentials. We're not trying to help people get a job who can't get a job. These are people that are really highly qualified and they're spending six months to a year looking and getting ghosted for literally dozens and dozens and dozens of submissions. You know so ai is in effect essential right now for that you need you need to have an accelerant as you look for a job right now because You know calling three people and asking for a job used to be the way you got a job, but it doesn't work anymore You're competing globally for every role now, you know the the average job post now is has 250 applicants, which means you're in a lottery every time and Kyle James (05:26.924) Hmm. Kyle James (05:38.254) Hmm Garrett Rice (05:38.88) AI is the leveler, right? It allows you to take a very complicated workflow like a job hunt. And people who start a job don't recognize this, but the modern job hunt is all about workflow. It's about volume. It's about building a funnel of job opportunities that you pursue with the hope that a few will trickle down that pachenko machine and bring you an opportunity for an interview. And I'm sorry to be the person to share that if you're looking for a job, but it's best that you understand that this isn't like it was. It's new. On the hiring side, they're using AI to review resumes. Something like 75 % of all resumes that are submitted are never seen by a human being. They're evaluated by either keyword-based or in some cases, AI-based applicant tracking systems, ATS systems. Kyle James (06:10.06) You Garrett Rice (06:35.305) And so, you know, the increasingly companies are laying off recruiters and HR people and replacing them with AI evaluators. And, you know, so those 250 resumes that are applied to and for large popular companies like say Apple, you know, it's thousands of applicants. They're just, they're all processed. They're all processed. And so, you you need to understand that game and understand how you can get a job and Kyle James (06:43.672) Hmm. Garrett Rice (07:02.499) We've built that, you know, so our whole system is, you know, it's a workflow tool. When we looked at the job market, a few interesting things, you know, the average job seeker builds their own spreadsheet to track their job hunt. You know, we built something to replace that because we feel like we could build a better CRM than the average job seeker could build with a spreadsheet. And, you know, and then they need to go through this workflow and, you we track all of that, build all of that. and accelerate all those steps. And an AI is brilliant for that, right? Most of the modern job hunt is text-based, right? It's communication, it's your resume. And again, on the other side, that's been our goal. And I think we've been successful when we talk to our users. They tell us that we... Kyle James (07:53.005) Yeah. Garrett Rice (07:58.973) We accelerate their job hunt up to 65, 70 % over what they had before. The average job seeker historically has used 16 different tools and services and that's not sustainable. So we want to be the place they can live. We're open, you can add jobs from LinkedIn or Indeed, wherever you find a job opportunity, you can add it to our tracker and all of our tools will work with that job post to help you get through the job hunt. And that's where we're at. Kyle James (08:25.656) Yeah. So, yeah. So you mentioned, mentioned one thing, like you talked about it kind of like the lottery of it. Like that's such, that is such a, like a profound word there. Cause I think it's like, that's exactly what it is. Cause like, I, you know, I were coming from, like, I used to work as a recruiter just for like a year, wasn't very long, but like one of the things I saw was like, you had to fling a lot of applications as a job seeker and, a lot of companies too. it's not every company, not every company does this, but I've heard, right. A lot of companies. They intentionally like may not actually be hiring. They're just trying to gather applications to build up their portfolio of people they can choose from. So a lot of times like you're throwing resumes at something that may not even exist. You know what mean? So it's like, it's, very disheartening for people who go six months, nine months, 12 months, God forbid, like that long to get an opportunity. like for in this case, like it's like Collins AI is, kind of helping filter through this, right? Like is that essentially saying, Hey, like we can help you get a job faster versus having to send 100 applications for one week and only getting one. You know what mean? Is that what I'm seeing? Garrett Rice (09:31.646) premise and we're we are convinced that this is just the reality of it is that it's this is a high volume sales process now to get a job and you know it there are people to get a job quickly but increasingly it's not happening and if you look at graduates they're not getting jobs now you know I think I think people are hiding the statistics but you know the hard truth is is that You the job market is absolutely horrible right now. And a lot of it is technology based. And, you know, and that's demoralizing for the job seeker. you know, one thing we know is, you if you want to not be depressed, you have to take action, right? And depression is somewhat being stuck between two choices that you can't manage and being, you know, forced into inaction. And so, So that you know to be successful you have to go out and do this work and what we we do is is Is manage all of that and process it and make it fast for you What we want is it for it to be paint by numbers for the job seeker? so the only thing they need to focus on is this the job I'm interested in and then we try and take care of all the pieces so that the the multiple steps in a workflow are Handled for them, right and the multiple steps are number one Who are you? What are your goals? What do you really wanna do? And be honest about it because there's nothing worse than getting a job you don't want. Number two is finding opportunities. So like you say, there's a ton of garbage out there in the job market. And we're working very hard to fix that. So by the time this podcast airs, we'll have one of the largest inventory of jobs on the market and those jobs will all be validated. And those jobs will all be applied to from the hiring company directly. And so we're working to help sort of suss that out. And if a job has been posted multiple times, we'll know and we can flag it. And then there's the process. have to do research to make certain that this is the company you want to work for. Then you need to customize resumes and cover letters correctly and without hallucination. You mentioned that in your Kyle James (11:31.79) Mmm. Kyle James (11:56.664) Yeah, right. Garrett Rice (11:57.435) Your point about GPT trainer, you can do a lot of the steps that we automate using ChatGPT. The reason we built our platform is when you have to do it for 30 or 40 job applications, it becomes unwieldy to do it manually. And so we've built the automation for that, but the goal is the same, which is to customize your resume honestly so that when you apply for that job, you're telling your true story in the lexicon and parlance that the hiring company wants. you you want your resume to be reflecting of the job post, but not a copy of it and to be reflective of you and your real personal brand and your stuff. And so that's we built. Kyle James (12:41.944) So does that now, okay. So walk me through a little bit here on the, on like, especially for the job applicant or for the, for the job seeker, like what, what is that step-by-step process and like what's happening on the backend? Like what's the AI doing? Cause I think a lot of people right now, they're just, Hey, they're throwing resumes around easy apply on LinkedIn, going to monster or wherever they're going. And they're not seeing the traction, but how is it, how is it helping on the AI side for the job seeker in this case? Like step-by-step, if don't mind. Garrett Rice (13:08.572) Yeah, yeah, sure. No, so, so I mean, we talked about several steps, right? Let's let's start at the let's start at the resume piece because that's the one that people talk about the most, right? And people think of the resume is, you know, that's how I get a job. It's not a resume is your ticket to try and get an interview. That's it. So when you submit your your fishing to get to get an interview, the interview gets you the job. That's you talking to real human beings. The resume though has to get through these applicant tracking systems. And what we do is we look at your original resume or your base resume or your LinkedIn profile and you can onboard on callings using any of those. And that's the starting point. Okay, this is you, right? This tells your story. We ask questions of you if you want. You can just go with your base resume, but we also have an insights function which allows you to learn a lot more about yourself. help you define your personal brand, your statements, because most of the job search is pitching yourself, right? And people struggle to pitch themselves. So we help you develop your elevator pitch, your key benefits, your successes, all of that. And then for every single job, we build a custom resume for that job. And we look at the job post and the company and your resume. And then on the back end, we're using you know several AI services and a lot of carefully constructed prompting that we've done studying the market studying how how people review through ATS systems to come up with resume that is clean readable by the ATS that conveys the information that they want about you and also reflects what they're looking for and excuse me And then we build that resume. Now, unlike some systems that are out there, we don't just fling it out into the world without the user looking at it. We keep the user in that process. they receive their custom resume. We show them what we changed. And then they can accept it or reject it. It's also a four-word processor, so they can make the edits themselves. And the result is a much better final resume for a specific job. And then they apply. Kyle James (15:30.734) so it's tailoring it like almost every single, like whatever job they're applying to, automatically tailors the resume each time. Garrett Rice (15:34.213) Every single. Garrett Rice (15:38.888) That's right. And we give them the final approval option, you know, and then we do the same with a cover letter and then they apply. And as I say, that step right there is only the first step in a job hunt for any specific job. And so we want it to go fast, right? So we make this, our feeling is you could easily apply to, you know, 20 jobs and 10 or 20 jobs a day on our platform. Kyle James (15:41.102) It's very cool. Kyle James (15:56.099) Wow. Garrett Rice (16:07.805) without much stress because we're not asking you to stare at a blank page and write a new resume or write a new cover letter. We will draft all of those things for you and you can just approve them and send them. And again, the companies that do this auto, you know, they're getting blocked. You know, when we're talking to ATS systems and the recruiters, they don't want mass apply. And so they're increasingly adding questions and tests into the apply process to ensure a real human being is submitting that resume. And so we think that's going to be more in the future. And so that's the first step is the apply process. And then once they've applied, the real work begins. 70 to 80 % of all successful job hunts include networking. And so we've built a very powerful networking tool. What we do is we look at the job post in the company, and then we scan LinkedIn, not for people just at the company, but for people who are involved with the particular job post and that particular job. We try and find the hiring manager, the recruiter, people on the team. And we try and give you five to seven names of people that are connected with that role. And then we pre-draft all of the outreach messaging for you so you can, if you want to, just send it out. Because, the outreach message is almost always the same, right? Hey, you know, I found you, I'm really interested in this job, I'd love to chat with you about it. You can, we have a prompting system so you can make changes if you want. If you find out the person's Italian, you can translate it into Italian, whatever you want to do. But again, our hope is you can send those messages out in five minutes. And this is how you get a job. You apply to 10 jobs, you network to 50 people for those 10 jobs, and you hope three or four of them will trickle down and respond to you and give you that discussion. Here's why. There's those 250 to 1000 resumes in a pile at that company. If you can get somebody at that company to say, know, I talked with Kyle, Kyle is really impressive, he knows AI, that's who we're looking for, let's talk with him. They'll take your resume and carry it to the hiring manager and you cut the line. And that is how. That's the fast pass. you know, this, I mean, this is proven over and over again. What I'm pitching is not a. Kyle James (18:24.383) Mmm. It's a fast pass at Disney, y'all. Garrett Rice (18:35.261) not hypothesizing this is how you get a job. And by the way, people at companies oftentimes get commissioned by their company if they helped find somebody. So, know, so the networking, so you're not going out into a black hole when you're networking. There's literally people who are like, well, you know, I can make a thousand dollars if I recommend Kyle for this job. So not always, but, you know, again, you're playing odds, right? And so, you know, so that's another part of our tool. And for that, Kyle James (18:46.542) I'm like an advocate. Garrett Rice (19:04.829) we're using semantic AI to scan LinkedIn. LinkedIn is, they're the granddaddy. They own our social graph. We want to be the best friend of LinkedIn. Our users are going to be in LinkedIn and using it. We're going to just try and accelerate all the things that they're doing. so the result, of course, for our users is they've applied to a bunch of jobs and they've networked to a bunch of jobs. And if they do that, say you only apply to five five jobs every two days, right? If your job hunt, the average job hunt is about five to six months, the more white collar, the closer to a year that is. And the more senior, it can get longer because there's so limited number of those high end jobs. If you're applying every day, you know, to five jobs, and we make it paint by numbers, so there's none of the agony that currently exists, then, Kyle James (19:43.054) you Garrett Rice (20:00.677) You project out and within a couple months you've applied to a ton of jobs the right way and network to dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of people. You're going to have conversations. And then it's up to you. You're pitching yourself. And by the way, of course, we give you the script for all of this using AI as well. So you can continue to tell your story. Hey, I'm a product manager. I was successful in all of these products. You guys want to go according to your job post. You want to implement. you know, a new style of maybe Scrum or something like that. I'm the guy for you, here's my successes. And you know, boom, you're out there, you're pitching yourself, you're in discussions with people, and that's how you get a job. Then we prep, yeah. Kyle James (20:46.446) Yeah. Yeah. I love that. And so I was going to say, like there's, it's not just like a one, a one thing tool, right? It's not just, Hey, resume, even though I think honestly, just the resume piece is probably enough to get people to go, I'm getting success with this, but like it's multiple fat. Like what, do you find? Have you found and feel free to share it. It doesn't have to be just like data side, but like, you have data, great. But like, what have you found? Like job seekers to go, Hey, I need help with this. They jump into it and they make that transition. Garrett Rice (21:07.174) But. Kyle James (21:16.046) What are some of those like, is there like a 10%, 20%, 50 % increase in them getting a job quicker, faster? Like what have you seen so far? And like, what's that? What's something worth highlighting in that? Garrett Rice (21:26.556) Yeah, I think, you know, one of our users, he, you know, he carefully tracked everything he was doing. And what he told us is that we accelerated his jobs on 65 % in the actual tasks. You know, I think it's difficult to track success points. Some of our competitors claim it. I don't believe it because it's very difficult to close the loop on whether somebody gets a job. You know, the That piece is, know, all of the job boards, all of the job hunting tools are blinded to the result. But, you know, when we talk, when we survey our users, what they tell us is, you know, it's the workflow. We accelerate the workflow. And most job seekers don't recognize that, but that is, that's the reality of the job hunt. You cannot get a job unless your uncle works at the company or you're talking internally to a group that already knows you. So that's excluded from this story, right? So if your network is so powerful that you can just call people and they'll hire you, great. But in studying this, our experiences, almost everybody will reach a point in their career where their network, their direct first contact network can't help them for whatever reason, right? Just statistically, nobody's got a job available. And then you're in this game. And, you know, and so you have to expand your network and you've got to go after it. And, you know, our unique thing is all of the tools in one place, not just some of them. And, you know, we haven't got to it yet, but we probably know if you get the interview, which is about statistically only 2 % of submissions are considered on the interview stage to give you a sense of what that lottery really looks like. And if you do that, you know, we provide a very detailed prep system for that as well. You know, it's AI everywhere, right? And, you know, you know, wait, there's more. One of the things that's coming soon, which will be Kyle James (23:29.262) Yeah, actually that's just about to ask you. like, is that, you know, like, you know, shift and go to the next chapter here. Like what, is that upcoming? Cause you talked a little earlier in the podcast, right? Like what is that upcoming AI initiative? Garrett Rice (23:39.847) We never stop working, we're always adding more capabilities. So in looking at our existing users, one of the things that we recognized is we needed to help them understand the job hunt before they recognize the value of our tool. And most people just start by looking at jobs, right? They just go out and they start searching and looking at job opportunities and that gets them pumped up. Hey, I'm qualified for that, I'll apply to that. and so recognizing that by the time this podcast airs, we will have one of the first total AI driven prompt based job searching systems. We'll have something like 8 million jobs a month on our platform, which will put us up there in rare territory with the indeeds and the LinkedIn's of the world. And you'll be able to prompt and search using AI on that entire database. And. you know, once that's out, I think people will be able to start on our platform without fully understanding all the other benefits we provide by simply going and looking at opportunities and they won't have to do what is the de facto standard right now in the job search industry, which is it's all prompt. It's all, excuse me, it's all keyword based. It's all Boolean, right? So if you go to, most of these sites, you know, you, you type in product manager and it will not find anything other than product manager, right? It's, it's Boolean. right Kyle James (25:24.174) We call I call it Chad sometimes I just like I'm gonna bother with Chad James Chad Garrett Rice (25:36.166) you'll be able to add in documents like your resume directly into our prompt and we'll go search for you. And one of the benefits we already provide to our users is we use AI to evaluate the resume and the job post to give them a sense of how qualified they are. So one of our most popular features is our job match score. So on our platform, if you find a job, we will look at you and we'll look at that job and we'll tell you how close you match, what your likelihood is. to get through that ATS system is. And that's been one of the most popular features. People love it because it's very difficult for people to evaluate themselves. And so we're going to take that and run with it. So you'll be able to prompt and we'll be able to show you jobs based on how close they are to the prompt you're looking for. And so all of that's coming and we're really excited about that because it will allow users to try us much easier. Kyle James (26:24.142) That's cool. I love that. Garrett Rice (26:33.541) They won't have to get into a workflow yet. They can just do that. And then we'll be truly end to end on everything. Every single step of the workflow we will provide. then we have some stuff on the drawing board that we think is going to blow people away around helping them tell their story better. So. Kyle James (26:40.974) That's amazing. Kyle James (26:52.824) Yeah, lot, lot's in the works. It sounds like, and like, it's like, I'm just, yeah, it, it accelerates and like, just, love how I get it always goes back to like the initial pain of like, okay, what was it for me or for, for, you know, the business partner or whoever it was is like, man, this is a pain. Like this, it's gotta be an easier way. And then going, okay, how do we build around that and build upon it to make it. Cause that is, it's like, essentially in this case, Gary, like you're building in a way hope for people. Cause it is so, this anyone who's ever like, Garrett Rice (26:55.641) Turns out this AI stuff is amazing, you know. Kyle James (27:22.668) you know, looking for a job, having to wait more than like a month, three, six, I know people where it's over a year. That's like, man, that's hard. It can get, you can get pretty depressed from that. And that's challenging for a lot of people, you know, so you're, providing hope in this regard, you know what mean? Garrett Rice (27:35.739) Hey, if you're a job seeker out there, just understand job seeking is right up there with, know, illness, know, family dissolution in terms of its impact on your psyche. So, you know, first and foremost, if you're feeling really down as a job seeker, it's not you, there's nothing wrong. It's, you know, it's just really hard. And, you know, and our belief is, you know, coaching is valuable. We provide coaching on our site. Kyle James (27:55.502) Hmm. Garrett Rice (28:03.068) live coaching, we have coaching seminars and videos and resources from real human beings. And that's valuable, but the true way to avoid the job search getting to you is to be confident in a workflow where you can take action every day. Because then you can get up in the morning, you can take action, you can apply to your 10 jobs and network to your 30 or 40 people, and then go walk your dog. Kyle James (28:31.82) Yes, exactly. Garrett Rice (28:32.655) Confident that you've done some you know, because a lot of the depression comes from I know I need to do something It's been six months since I've been out of work and I just I can't do it today, right and What we hope is we can make it, you know habit that's very easy It's paint. Like I say it's paint by numbers so you can do it and then you can you can go about your day Confident that you've taken action and then you'll get results right again You know if you reach out to 50 people at least one of those people is probably gonna Kyle James (28:40.462) Mmm. Mmm. Kyle James (29:00.748) Right. Yeah, for sure. Garrett Rice (29:02.469) And when you're in conversations, you're also, you're optimistic, you're cheerful because you have the energy toward a problem that you're. Kyle James (29:07.918) Yeah. Like when you have that hope, you know, like you're knowing, okay, this, like, this is a proven process. I just have to give it time. I got to treat it as if it's my day job for the time and just apply through this. then by, time will tell, right. I'll get the job. And I think that's hope that people need. And, and Garrett, as we start wrapping up and finalizing the last chapter here, like where can people go turn, maybe learn a little bit more about you and then maybe a little bit more about Collin's AI that you'd recommend them check out next. Garrett Rice (29:16.975) That's great. Garrett Rice (29:35.163) appreciate that, Kyle. So for the listeners, it's callings.ai and we'll make a special URL, callings.ai slash GPT trainer. And if you go to that, you can try out our platform for 30 days for free. We'll give you access for a full 30 days. By the way, looking for jobs, saving jobs, and applying for jobs are free always on our platform. If you want the AI tools for some of the other stuff, then eventually we'll ask you to subscribe. But we want you to be in your job hunt on our platform, regardless if you pay us. But so go to callings.ai slash GPT trainer and you can try it out. There's videos on how to use it and resources, as I mentioned to Kyle, to help you in your job hunt. We would love to help accelerate your job. Kyle James (30:27.854) Awesome. Thank you, Garrett. It's great having you on brother. Awesome perspective. I know it's just going to bring a lot of hope to lot of people who, especially who are those who are looking for the job hunt. I can't imagine where it's going to be in five, 10 years with the amount of experience your team has going into this, this, uh, an AI side. Thanks everybody else for listening in. Remember if you're looking to implement AI into your business, please, please, please don't try and do it yourself. The time is just the AI could cause, uh, may not be worth it. So schedule a call with GPT trainer. Garrett Rice (30:41.295) You'll send robots to the interview. Kyle James (30:57.71) and let them build out and manage your AI for you. Once again, that's gpt-trainer.com. Have a great rest of your day. Looking forward to seeing everyone in the next episode of AI Chronicles.