Six Artificial Intelligence hacks contractors can use right now

Since all the hype around AI and ChatGPT, we’ve been hard at work looking into how precisely it can be used as a tool for career advancement, especially how independent professionals like contractors can use AI to win more work, writes Matt Craven, personal branding, and winning-work expert at The CV & Interview Advisors.

So forget the fluff, getting specific with AI is here in the shape of these six AI hacks contractors can use right now.

1. Client prospecting

Now ready for your deployment, there are AI tools capable of analysing social media posts and professional networking websites with the objective of identifying potential clients who might need your services.

You’re no doubt familiar with LinkedIn but did you know that LinkedIn Sales Navigator uses AI algorithms to make lead suggestions? It’s certainly not new, but LinkedIn Sales Nav is a powerful tool for any business that wants to sell its services. Here’s the thing – it’s extremely underused by contractors who want to connect, build relationships, and make themselves known to potential clients.

2. Marketing

AI is a powerful tool for creating and tailoring marketing messages and content tied to your business. For instance, ChatGPT can create sound marketing emails, social media posts, website copy, and even articles and presentations (where those articles/presentations don’t need to draw on anything that happened post-September 2021, or November 2021 if you’re using ChatGPT Plus).

So, need an email to keep current with your old hiring managers, or clients? Simply give ChatGPT the raw data, and some instructions, and it will create content within seconds to promote you and your business.

Emails, posts, copy and articles/presentations are all winning-work formats that savvy contractors put to great use, but if creating the marketing copy has held you back from embracing a more business-orientated winning-work strategy, AI is your new friend.

3. Proposal creation

AI-powered tools exist to create compelling business proposals based on data-driven insights and improving your chances of winning contracts.

Remember, ChatGPT has the ability to summarise information and create new or reshaped content to build out a proposal.

Whether you need a cover letter, supporting statement, or full-blown business proposal, AI can help and save you significant time in the composition process. It’s also great at getting you an answer to the age-old question when sat starring at blank Word document; ‘Where do I start?’

4. Interview preparation

ChatGPT and other generative pre-trained transformers are useful tools for researching clients and even providing you with suggestions to potential interview questions based on a contract or opportunity you’re hoping to land.

Some contractors are using AI to provide concise answers to interview questions. But be careful here – any interview answer you give should (strictly-speaking) come from your own career and experience.

Nevertheless, being able to pre-empt questions, provide you potential answers, and receive feedback could be useful if you need to brush up on your interview technique, especially if face-to-face you easily get bogged down in details or go in too heavy, too early.

5. CV tailoring

It is not advised to use AI to write your entire CV, but if you know how to provide platforms like ChatGPT with the correct instructions, using it to tailor your CV to specific contract roles is possible and very useful.

It’s possible to create a ‘prompt’ (an instruction for the AI platform), and to copy and paste your CV content and the contract brief in order for platforms such as ChatGPT to run a skills-gap analysis.

This makes tailoring your CV for contract roles much quicker. It’s worth mentioning that there could be risks associated with inputting confidential and sensitive data into an AI platform, so that needs to be factored into your thinking.

6. Thought Leadership

Thought Leadership is a powerful tool for raising your profile, presenting yourself as an expert, and winning contract work.

AI can help you research hot topics and questions that people are asking around these topics. You can use that intel to create content that drives interest in you and your expertise. As mentioned before, ChatGPT and other AI platforms can be very useful allies in creating ideas for content and even writing content for you. It’s also a good source of inspiration – for example, brainstorming ideas for names to ascribe to your intellectual property.

Finally, join us this Thursday to learn how AI can help win you more work

If you would like to learn some of the specifics of how to use AI to win more work in the contract market -- and at higher rates, including some of the prompts that work really well, register for our upcoming webinar here:

Thursday July 27th at 12.00PM: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/8740536231463457623

And if you prefer talking to a human than AI, you can request a free CV appraisal here and have one of our team contact you to schedule a 1-2-1 contractor CV evaluation: https://cvandinterviewadvisors.co.uk/partners/contractor-uk