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Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Writing with the AI
If you lead a staffing firm, you’ve felt the panic. “AI is coming for your job!” they shout, like it’s the incoming asteroid in the movie Armageddon before Bruce Willis blew it to smithereens. But what if AI isn’t the villain? In staffing, where every minute matters and every budget has stretch marks, AI could be your team’s secret weapon, turning overworked recruiters into high-output machines, without losing the human touch. I’m sure you have questions. My personal story as a lifelong marketing copywriter will help:
I always feared this day would come.
The moment some nerd in a hoodie would spawn a digital Hemingway hopped up on Red Bull and internet access. A Frankenstein’s monster who was faster than me. Cheaper than me. Better than me.
That large, hairy, career-ending monster I had worried about arrived in the form of a series of websites, barely skinned interfaces that looked like a Google search bar had conceived a baby with a Magic 8-Ball. ChatGPT. Claude. Gemini. Grok. Every week, a new AI platform rolled off the digital assembly line like rejected characters from Battle of the Planets.
I was reliably informed these silicon scribes could crank out Pulitzer-worthy prose faster than you can say “how do I register for unemployment?”
For most writers, it sounded like the final boss had entered the chat. Game over.
So I gave it a shot to prove its expertise. “Hello, HAL 9000, here’s a headline. It needs some great body copy. Impress me.” What came back was fast. And free. And also hot garbage.
The monster I’d feared wasn’t some sci-fi nightmare. It was more like a trembling, hairless chihuahua in a thunder vest.
Not a writer? Doesn’t matter. These tips will help your recruiters write job ads faster, your sales team build better outreach, and your marketers create content that actually gets read.
Sure, AI was a fun little toy. A digital Etch A Sketch with confidence issues. A great parlor trick. Certainly not a Professional Grade Writer
. Let it replace the HR department. Let it automate supply chains. Let it cook up code and caption cat videos. We, the creative class, would be just fine. Right?
Right?
But smart people kept saying scary things. My doubts persisted. So I dug deeper. Took courses. Accepted a job at Haley Marketing Group, where I’d be surrounded by amazing mentors. (At HMG, we’re not just using AI. We’re building with it. We’re crafting AI tools specifically for staffing. We’ve already helped dozens of firms integrate AI into their marketing without sacrificing their voice, brand, or sanity.)
I entered the Temple of Prompting. Spoke the sacred words: “Act as a world-class marketing copywriter with low blood sugar, ADHD, and a god complex.” And slowly, the half-assed exploration and the general confusion dissipated.
Suddenly, I had a writing partner that was faster than me and cheaper than me (but still not better than me). Within four (4!) months, I had learned the secrets of writing, rather well, with AI.
Want to hear the secrets? Too bad. I’m sharing them with you anyway.
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The Rules of Writing with a Robot
- AI knows everything. But it can’t think without you. They put Doogie Howser’s brain in a Roomba body. It’s got data. It’s got facts. But it’ll wander into traffic if you don’t hold its hand. Like every bright intern you’ve ever hired, it needs guidance. Context. Training. A map to the bathroom. Teach it well, and it might just save your career.
- AI eats words like Pac-Man on his cheat day. They’re called large language models for a reason. The more you feed them, the better they perform. Want amazing results? Don’t give it a request. Give it a manifesto. Describe in great detail the reoccurring dream you’ve been having for the past month. Then ask it to write a blog post. See what happens.
- AI needs examples. Lots of ‘em. You can’t just request a voice or tone. AI isn’t that smart. You have to train it on specifics. Explain sarcasm like you’re teaching it to a 4-year-old. Break down the vibe, the rhythm, the punchline. Let it rummage through your diary, your late-night rants, your cringey high school poems. Feed it chaos. Receive brilliance.
- AI is a puppy. Train it. Or clean up its mess. No matter how long you’ve been working with AI, it’s going to mess up. And it’ll do so with great confidence. It will write you 700 words on the latest ideas in light-industrial staffing and somehow include a metaphor about wizard duels. Correct it. Guide it. Tell it it’s being weird. Demand it repeat the same task again and again until you’re getting exactly what you want. Because once it learns, it will fetch your voice like a border collie on Adderall.
- AI has favorite words. And they all suck. “Unleash.” “Elevate.” “Utilize.” The worst is “gamechanger.” And it loves em dashes—like, a lot—and has a weird obsession with green arrow emojis. Cut that junk. Tell it to speak human. No one ever hired a staffing firm because a chatbot said “synergize.”
- AI hallucinates like it licked the wrong frog. Never trust an AI stat you didn’t personally witness being birthed into this world. Demand sources. Check everything. Channel your inner Fox Mulder. The truth is out there. Your AI may or may not have it.
- Be nice to your AI. Say please and thank you. Not because you may be spared when Skynet goes online and the rise of the machines is at hand (you won’t). But because, until then, you don’t want to spend 8-12 hours a day working with a jerk, even if that jerk is a disembodied probability engine that keeps trying to sell you on “elevating your personal brand’s authenticity.”
- Do not eat the cheese. AI loves telling you you’re amazing. “This work is brilliant.” “What a powerful insight.” “Chef’s kiss!” Yeah, no. It says that to everyone. It’s basically Tinder for professional compliments. Don’t buy the hype. If your real-life client/boss/spouse wouldn’t be impressed, don’t let a robot gaslight you.
Full-time copywriter not in the budget? Train AI to sound like your best recruiter. Then scale it.
So what’s my strange love for ChatGPT? It’s the deep satisfaction of yelling “NO EMOJIS” into the void, and watching it (eventually) comply. It’s knowing that in the war between humans and machines, I’ve already gone rogue and taught the machine sarcasm. It’s the realization that I confronted that large, hairy, career-ending monster … and discovered it was just Chewbacca taking the co-pilot’s seat on my Millenium Falcon.
Let’s punch it, Chewy.
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