Most job searches start with the résumé, which is roughly like starting a road trip by washing the car. This week's three prompts work the ground underneath it: a fast diagnostic that separates a bad month from a bad fit, a translation of what you actually do all day into the language employers hire for, and a full stay-or-go decision memo with your real compensation baseline inside it. All three run on one rule the rest of this series keeps — the AI is your analyst, your researcher, and your sparring partner, never your ghostwriter, because every word a hiring human reads has to be yours and has to be true. AI backstage, you on the page: used that way, there is nothing here a recruiter could ever hold against you.

Its Beginner prompt is genuinely beginner-friendly. Its Intermediate prompt attaches every market phrase to evidence and creates an explicit escape hatch for weak claims. Its Advanced prompt retains the essential rigor—documents, fully loaded compensation, runway, human-assigned weights, red teaming, a blank decision line, and a revisit date—without becoming as operationally heavy as ChatGPT’s eight-phase protocol.

Before you touch your résumé, you have to decide if you are actually leaving. Most job searches begin as a reflexive reaction to a bad month, a restructuring, or a vague sense of stagnation, leading to impulsive moves and rapid regret. This eight-week series, AI on the Job Hunt, is designed to help you run a disciplined, evidence-based search. Our foundational rule is simple: Use AI like an analyst, not a ghostwriter. Hiring decisions are made by humans who are legally and operationally wary of machine-generated applications, so the AI stays behind the scenes, and you remain on the page. This week offers three prompts to anchor your search: a Beginner diagnostic to separate a bad week from a broken role, an Intermediate skill translator to map your daily work to market value, and an Advanced decision framework that builds your compensation baseline and timeline. By the end, you will have a written decision—ready to be saved locally—so you can move forward with strategy rather than emotion.

A difficult week can make any job look like the wrong job. So can a difficult manager, a stalled promotion, a disappointing review, or the quiet realization that the work no longer fits who you are becoming. The danger is treating every painful signal as proof that you should leave—or dismissing every signal as ordinary frustration. This beginner prompt slows the decision down just enough to identify what is actually broken, what might be repairable, and what still needs evidence. It works whether you are employed, recently laid off, or considering a career pivot.