OpenAI Launching Job Search in ChatGPT?
I found something interesting in ChatGPT's page source - feature flags that suggest OpenAI is testing job search functionality.
Before we start the "job boards are dead" narrative, let's look at what's actually happening in this space. The story is more complicated than the headlines suggest.
The Evidence
Buried in ChatGPT's frontend code is an onboarding flow with five job-related feature flags: jobs-onboarding-career-advice, jobs-onboarding-resume, jobs-onboarding-search-jobs, jobs-onboarding-outreach-messages, and jobs-onboarding-skills-growth.
The experiment is currently inactive, but the infrastructure is clearly there. OpenAI also announced a collaboration with Indeed last year, which indicates where the inventory is likely coming from.
People on X have also shared screenshots from ChatGPT that show a job search UX:
What These Features Probably Are
Career advice: The entry point. "What career paths match my skills/resume?" ChatGPT already does this well - low risk, high engagement, gets users into the funnel and sharing their resume.
Search jobs: The big one. Actual job search functionality. Where does inventory come from? My bet is a mixture of Bing's job index (Microsoft investment) and the Indeed partnership. They're not building a job scraping machine from scratch.
Resume: Resume building or optimization. They have file upload and document generation. Everyone is using GPT to optimize their resume anyway - why not have it in the app, aligned with the job you want to apply to?
Outreach messages: "Write a powerful LinkedIn message to the engineering director at Stripe about this role." The question is whether there's message delivery or just composition. I doubt that there will be more than the actual composition.
Skills growth: Course recommendations and skill gap analysis, probably expanding on OpenAI's plans to provide AI education to job seekers.
No apply flow yet - just job discovery. Does this mean jobs will clickout to Indeed? To be seen.
The Real Losers: AI Tools for Job Seekers
Over the past two years, a wave of AI-powered job seeker tools flooded the market. LazyApply, Sonara, AiApply, EnhanCV, LoopCV, and hundreds of others.
The numbers paint a clear story on adoption for these tools.
- 45% of job seekers now use AI Apply tools
- LinkedIn processes 11,000 applications per minute
- Recruiters drown in thousands of AI-polished resumes
Now you're putting similar functionality into a tool 800 million people already use weekly. Two things will happen:
- Application quality decreases further as more people use AI to generate resumes
- Auto-apply tools that rely on resume customization - without actual apply automation - will quickly die. They have no competitive advantage against ChatGPT.
The only competitive advantage is the actual application delivery and the matching. I doubt OpenAI will build an application collection and delivery inside of ChatGPT anytime soon, and I also doubt Indeed would be crazy enough to grant them unified access to its ATS integrations. Jobs - yes. Apply rails - never.
The Real Question for Job Boards
If you run a job board, ask yourself:
- What happens to your traffic analytics if ChatGPT becomes a significant referral source?
- Can you track conversions from AI Search
- Can you prove to employers that your applicants are real humans with genuine intent, not AI-generated noise?
The "job boards are dead" narrative is great for LinkedIn clicks. Building attribution infrastructure that proves quality - and differentiates you from the auto-apply spam flood - is what actually keeps you in business.
As always, follow me if you enjoy content on HR Tech, SEO, AI and Job Boards.
As a small reminder, Oras and I did a webinar last year on this topic, you can still watch it.
Alexander Chukovski