This content was created by Girlboss in partnership with Teal.
You know that one Mean Girls scene where the whole school is fighting with each other after Regina George printed out the pages of the Burn Book? Well, that’s basically what it feels like to look for a job these days. Pardon our French… but it’s a bit of a sh*tshow.
There is so much noise on LinkedIn and TikTok about job hunting do’s and don’ts. How could you not feel overwhelmed? Hiring managers are ghosting, certain resume designs are a no-go, and you need to know someone at the company or don’t even bother applying. Plus, you need to make your application stand out from the pack in the age of AI. And don’t even get us started on how saturated the job market is because so many talented people are getting laid off.
We’re getting frazzled and overwhelmed just typing this…
“If you strip all of that away, all that matters is: Are you presenting the best possible version of yourself to the employer for this specific role?” asks Lia Zneimer, the VP of Marketing at Teal, your personal career development platform.
And that’s exactly what Teal is designed to do. “We don't want to just be an AI resume builder. We want to be your career companion and your co-pilot in this [job] search—and really leveling the playing field for job seekers,” adds Lia. “HR teams have so many tools at their disposal when it comes to tracking candidates and reviewing resumes, but there's no real equivalent on the candidate side. We want to be a consumer-first career tool that will help you every day—from your first internship to the last day of your job before you retire.”
Ashleigh Bergh Duggan, the customer success manager at AI email platform Lavender, is living proof that Teal can help you land your dream job. “It’s a game-changer,” she says.
Here, Lia and Ashleigh walk you through their favorite Teal tools so you can level-up your job hunt ASAP:
Nobody has time to write a new resume from scratch every single time. So, Teal offers you a personalized “career history,” which is the base version of everything you’ve ever done—all of your accomplishments, your achievements and your wins. Then, you can quickly toggle on and off what’s most applicable to the role you’re applying to, or adjust some of those resume bullet points with AI to be more impactful with the right keywords.
“You need to be creating and submitting quality resumes at scale, and so, the more you're able to do that with a tool like Teal, the better,” says Lia.
This tool was especially helpful for Ashleigh’s career because her background was primarily in the non-profit sector before she moved into tech. And the language between the two industries is very different. Thanks to Teal’s Matching Mode (see more below), “I'm communicating the skills that I have, but framed around the person who is reading it and their language,” she says. “I don't necessarily know if [my current employer] would have even looked at my resume before.”
Matching Mode highlights keywords in the job description that are the most important to that role, and then it shows you in your career history where you may already have those keywords. “You want to make sure that if the recruiter is searching for a particular word in their applicant tracking system, your resume is going to come up,” says Lia.
Analysis Mode shows you, structurally, what you could fix about your resume. So, for example, if you have too many bullet point achievements or your professional summary is too long.
Writing a cover letter from scratch for every single job you apply to is so last year—but lots of companies still require them. So, if you want to save hours on your search, use AI to help. With Teal's Cover Letter Generator, you can choose the length and the tone (more formal or more casual, or if you want to match the tone of the job description), and which achievements from your resume you want to highlight. “Instead of starting from scratch, you're clicking a few buttons,” says Lia.
Teal has a free Chrome extension (that works on 40+ job boards), so when you find a job you want to apply to, you can just click the extension and it’ll pull all of the information into your personal job tracker. The link, title, company, salary range (if there is one), the full job description—you name it. It saves you from having a million tabs open, and if you’re like Ashleigh, having to copy and paste the information into your Google Sheet.
“I am a Google Sheets girl till the day I die,” says Ashleigh. “Like, I have a Google Sheet for everything. And Teal was the first product that got me out of using Google Sheets for my job search. It saved me so much time. Teal is the tool that grows with you.”
“It also gave me an actionable workflow,” she adds. “I felt like I could see the progress even if I felt like I wasn’t making progress. I could just open up my dashboard like, ‘Okay, I actually did a lot this week. I applied to five jobs.’”
Another handy part of the Job Application Tracker? You can make note of the date you applied and set up alerts to remind you to follow up if you haven’t heard back. Plus, Teal offers customizable templates so you know exactly what to say in your follow-up email.
Think of this as your own personal CRM—a great place to store your network’s contact info and see who’s connected to each job you apply for. “I didn’t know a lot of people in tech [when I first discovered Teal last year]. I hadn’t nurtured a network of people in similar roles, so Teal was my sidekick,” says Ashleigh.
Outside of the app itself, Teal offers plenty of free resources in their Career Hub—about everything from ChatGPT interview prompts to how to write a LinkedIn work experience section. “It cut out the noise,” says Ashleigh. “I’m not looking at some internet stranger on LinkedIn who’s giving advice… which I did. I definitely learned the hard way—who to follow and who not to follow.”
Lia and Ashleigh debunk the biggest misconceptions about job hunting
Your resume is being rejected by bots or application tracking systems (ATS). “It’s set up by a human,” says Lia. “It’s basically a fancy filing cabinet that recruiters can use, and it does not have the power to auto-reject you. There are knockout questions sometimes that are set by a human, but generally, real people are looking at resumes. Recruiters get so much hate, but they want you to succeed. They want you to land this job. They want to fill this role.”
You need to know someone in the company before applying. “That's not necessarily a guarantee. I didn’t know anybody at my current company. I had no ‘in.’ I wasn’t referred,” says Ashleigh.
You can stop applying to jobs as soon as you get an offer. “Until that offer letter is signed and you get your background check, you should still be applying and interviewing because you just never know,” says Ashleigh. “I was interviewing for a role, and I was three weeks in, and they responded and said, ‘Hey, we had to make some changes and now, filling this role is kind of on the back burner.’ That would have been three weeks of wasted time. But because I had Teal, I was keeping track of all of those conversations.”
The “Open to Work” banner on LinkedIn makes you look desperate. “I don't think it is at all,” says Lia. “We did a little bit of research on it and published the findings on our Career Hub, and it really is not a deterrent in terms of hiring people. There's no shame in using that. It helps hiring managers and recruiters do their job better because they know that the person they're reaching out to is more likely to respond than someone who's totally happy in their job and not actively looking for opportunities.”
And if you’re feeling discouraged in your job hunt, read this.
“My hope is that people walk away feeling more empowered in their job search and more like they are in control and they are in the driver's seat of their career,” says Lia. “You don't have to wait for opportunities to arise in order to take advantage of them—you can create your own. If you don't have the experience you need for a particular role, you can seek it out. You can take a free class. You can build a project of your own or start a website. Job searching is miserable and lonely. It shouldn't have to be like this. So, we're here to support as best we can.”
Ready to enhance your resume, track your job search and land a job you love? Sign up for Teal for FREE or upgrade to Teal+ for only $9 a week and get unlimited access to all of Teal’s resources.
