Create your Professional Story using NotebookLM
Humanizing resumes beyond bullet points
Introduction
Recently, the AI world was taken over by a storm named NotebookLM. NotebookLM can generate great-sounding podcasts for dense topics. People like Karapthy generated short podcasts, and others have generated their company stories. Initially, I did the same thing. I summarized more than ten papers that I had been thinking of reading, and the podcasts were beneficial and left me impressed and wanting more.
I got some great ideas when I listened to the Podcast by Lenny of Raiza Martin, the Product Manager building NotebookLM. Raiza shared that people inside Google use NotebookLM to generate summaries for quarterly Lookbacks and other personal documents like resumes. The individual use of NotebookLM piqued my interest. Over the next few hours, I updated my resume and uploaded it to NotebookLM to generate a podcast, and what I heard left me speechless.
My Story - As Told by Me
When I meet people in a professional setting, I usually tell a story that describes my choices and why I have made them. NotebookLM did the same job but with a verve that left me speechless.
When I start my story, I usually start with my mission (true north) in life, and the details follow.
My Mission in Life
I want to build products that improve people's lives, and I started my journey with financial inclusion.
My journey started at Bank of America on the secondary marketing team during the great depression of 2008-2012, where I led the team managing a distressed mortgage portfolio. I saw firsthand how a small financial decision could ruin the lives of hard-working people. That resulted in me quitting my job at BoA, starting two companies, and trying to work at various big and Small corporations to build products that directly impact people’s lives.
As with any journey, my journey is also not in a straight line. You will see steps that might seem disconnected from my mission, but if you talk to me, you can see how those side ventures lead to the bigger vision.
The products I have built in this journey have made a difference. Some at Meta and Coinbase have impacted millions and billions of people, and some at my startup have affected a few thousand. Still, each life impacted is a positive step toward the ultimate goal. I usually glean the numbers and details since there is always a resume associated with my talk, and I will not go into the details here.
My Story - As Told by NotebookLM
NotebookLM, armed with my resume, generated a story that told things I had forgotten. Usually, in our life journey, we make decisions weighing many factors, but over the years, those finer details get lost, and what we remember are the bullets of the resume. NotebookLM took those bullets and put them in the larger context using LLMs' vast trove of information. This information segmentation converted Abhishek from a few bullets to a human being. A human being that has a story to tell. Some of the details in the summary needed to be corrected, but 98% of the summary was excellent and to the point.
Abhishek’s Story
Conclusion
A better way to answer the question, “Tell me about yourself.”
Most introductions start with the question, “Tell me about yourself.” A lot of us struggle with this answer. Many people either walk through their resume or cover some essential points. If you are that person, use an LLM to write a story about yourself and then use NotebookLM to tell that story. Once you have iterated on it a few times, you will have a story you will feel proud of. In a world of agents and co-pilots helping with sales and lead gen, a friend will help you fight these agents and co-pilots. Go try it out.
The audio discussion is fascinating!