Prompt details

Tested on

Claude Opus 5.5

Length

626 words · 4 fill-ins

Example input

[Target roles and location]: Data analyst or senior data analyst roles, ideally in marketing or customer analytics. Chicago area, hybrid up to 3 days a week in the office, or fully remote in the US. Salary floor $85,000; my last salary was $96,000.

[Your background]: 5 years as a data analyst. Laid off 3 months ago from Harlow Home Goods (online home goods retailer, about 400 employees) when the analytics team was cut from 9 people to 4. At Harlow (3 years): built the weekly marketing performance dashboard in Tableau that the CMO used every Monday; wrote SQL in Snowflake for campaign and customer cohort analysis; ran the readouts for about 30 A/B tests on email and site changes; built a churn model in Python that the retention team used to pick customers for win-back emails. Before that, 2 years as a junior analyst at Ridgeway Insurance Services: weekly reporting in Excel and Power BI. B.S. Economics, Lakeshore State University. Skills: SQL, Tableau, Python (pandas, scikit-learn), Excel, Power BI, some dbt, Google Analytics 4.

[Your search so far]: Searching for 12 weeks. 140 applications, almost all through LinkedIn Easy Apply and Indeed, with the same resume for every one. 9 replies: 7 rejection emails and 2 recruiter screens. Both screens led to a hiring manager interview (one at a regional bank, one at a health tech startup) but no offer; the bank said they chose someone with financial services experience. I have not asked anyone for a referral. I have about 600 LinkedIn connections, including around 15 former Harlow coworkers who now work at other companies. I spend most mornings scrolling job boards. My GitHub portfolio is 2 years old.

[Your hours and limits]: 25 hours a week, weekdays only. Tuesday and Thursday afternoons I look after my daughter. Severance and savings cover about 4 more months. I am collecting unemployment in Illinois. I would rather not relocate.

Example output

1. Diagnosis

Stage	My number	Rate
Applications (Easy Apply / Indeed, one resume)	140	about 11.7 per week over 12 weeks
No reply	131	93.6% of applications
Any reply	9	6.4% of applications
Rejection emails	7	78% of replies
Recruiter screens	2	1.4% of applications (1 per 70); 22% of replies
Hiring manager interviews	2	100% of screens
Offers	0	0 of 2 interviews
Referral asks	0	no data yet

Your search leaks before the first reply: 131 of 140 applications got no answer, and you earned one screen per 70 applications. Once a person talked to you, you reached the hiring manager 2 times out of 2. Two interviews are too few to judge, and the one reason you were given (financial services experience) points to targeting, not interview skill. The change that matters most is to stop sending the same resume through Easy Apply and use those hours on referral asks to your 15 former Harlow coworkers and tailored applications to e-commerce and retail marketing or customer analytics roles, where your Harlow work is a direct match.

*Assumption: the health tech startup gave no reason for its decision, so I treat that loss as unexplained.*

2. Targets

Titles to search (2 to 4)

1. Senior Marketing Analyst / Marketing Analytics Analyst

2. Senior Data Analyst (Marketing, Growth or E-commerce)

3. Customer Analytics / Customer Insights Analyst

4. Retention, CRM or Lifecycle Analyst

Company criteria

Online retail, e-commerce, direct-to-consumer brands, consumer subscriptions or marketplaces: businesses that sell to customers the way Harlow did.
Runs email or CRM programs and site experiments, so your A/B test readouts and churn and win-back work are directly relevant.
Uses tools you know: Snowflake, Tableau, dbt, GA4 or Python.
Chicago-area hybrid with 3 office days or fewer, or fully remote in the US.
Posted salary band reaches $85,000 or more, or no band posted. Move to tier C any role whose posting asks for banking or financial services domain experience.

Claude Opus 5.5

Job Search Strategy – Job search strategy prompt for ChatGPT and Claude

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Claude Opus 5.5

This prompt plans your job search from your own numbers. Paste your targets, background, results so far and hours; you get a funnel diagnosis, a 4-week plan, a tracking sheet and outreach messages.

What you get

A funnel table from your own numbers that shows where your search leaks
A 4-week plan with weekly counts for applications, referral asks and outreach, sized to your hours
A tracking sheet layout and four messages ready to send once you add names
A weekly review with if-then rules that change next week's plan

How to use it

1
Count your search first
Before you run it, count applications, replies, screens and interviews, and note the channels you used. The diagnosis is only as good as these numbers.
2
Fill the slots with real names
Replace every [company] and [name] with real targets and contacts, starting with former colleagues who now work somewhere you would join.
3
Review at the end of each week
Run the checklist, then paste your new numbers back into the same chat and ask it to adjust next week's plan.

Better results

Paste your real resume into the background fill-in rather than a summary, so the target titles match what you can prove.
After week 1, send: "Here are this week's numbers. Apply the review rules and rewrite week 2."
If you claim unemployment, ask the agency what its work-search log needs and add those columns to the tracking sheet.

Questions

Can ChatGPT help me find a job?

Yes, ChatGPT and Claude can help you find a job by planning the search, not by applying for you. Give them your numbers, background and hours, and they can show where the search stalls, narrow your targets and write referral and outreach messages you then send yourself.

What is the best AI prompt for a job search?

The best job search prompt works from your own results: applications, replies, screens and interviews. That shows whether you need better targets, more referrals or interview practice. This one turns those numbers into a 4-week plan with weekly counts, a tracker and messages.

How many job applications should I send a week?

There is no right number for everyone. Fewer tailored applications plus referral asks and notes to hiring managers usually beat mass applying. This prompt sets weekly counts from your own hours and changes them when your reply rate says the mix is wrong.

How do I ask a former colleague for a referral?

Ask a former colleague for a referral with a short message that names the specific opening, says why you fit in one line and makes it easy to say no. This prompt writes that message from your background, with blanks for the names and the role.

Updated 8 Nov 2026