Your AI Toolkit: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini & Perplexity
In the last lesson you met the four tools at a glance. Now you'll set them up, learn what each one is genuinely best at, and build the habits that make AI useful for a job search instead of just impressive.
What You'll Learn
- How to create free accounts on ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity
- The specific job-search jobs each tool is best at
- How to keep your job-search work organized inside these tools
- The privacy basics — what to share and what to keep out of a chat
Setting Up Your Accounts (All Free)
You can do this entire course on free tiers. Here's where to go:
- ChatGPT — chat.openai.com. Sign up with an email or Google account. The free tier gives you access to a capable model with limited use of the newest one. Plenty for job-search work.
- Claude — claude.ai. Same idea — free account, generous daily limits. Especially good when you paste in long documents.
- Gemini — gemini.google.com. Uses your existing Google account. Integrates with Gmail and Google Docs if you enable it.
- Perplexity — perplexity.ai. Free account; no login needed for basic searches, but signing in lets you save threads.
Bookmark all four. You'll bounce between them — that's normal and good. Using the right tool for the task beats forcing one tool to do everything.
What Each Tool Is Best At
ChatGPT — the all-rounder
ChatGPT is your default for most writing and brainstorming. Use it for:
- Drafting and rewriting resume bullets
- Cover letters
- Brainstorming answers to "why do you want this job"
- Running mock interviews where it plays the interviewer
- Quick reformatting and cleanup
It's conversational and fast. If you only used one tool, this would be it — but you'll get better results by mixing.
Claude — careful writing and long documents
Claude shines when you give it a lot to read. Paste in a full 3-page job description plus your entire resume and ask, "Where am I a strong match, where am I weak, and what should I emphasize?" — Claude handles that gracefully. It also tends to write in a more natural, less "AI-sounding" voice, which matters for cover letters and LinkedIn copy.
Use Claude for:
- Comparing your background against a long job description
- Writing cover letters that need to sound human
- Editing your own writing to be clearer without losing your voice
- Working through anything that involves a big block of text
Gemini — the Google native
If you live in Gmail and Google Docs, Gemini is convenient. It can summarize, draft, and (with permissions) help inside your inbox and documents. It's also handy for quick research because it's connected to Google Search.
Use Gemini for:
- Drafting follow-up emails inside Gmail
- Summarizing long articles or company pages
- Quick fact lookups when you're already in a Google app
Perplexity — sourced research
When you need facts you can trust — what a company actually does, who its competitors are, what the salary range is, what happened in their last earnings call — Perplexity answers with citations you can click and verify. This is the antidote to AI making things up.
Use Perplexity for:
- Company research before an interview
- Salary benchmarking
- Recent news about a company or industry
- Anything where a wrong fact would embarrass you
A Simple Side-by-Side Test
Pick one job posting you're interested in. Paste its text into ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini with this prompt:
Here is a job description. List the top 8 skills and keywords this employer clearly cares about, and tell me what kind of candidate they're really looking for.
Compare the three answers. You'll quickly develop a feel for which tool you trust for which kind of task. There's no single right answer — there's the tool you work best with for that job.
Keeping Your Job Search Organized
A scattered job search across ten browser tabs is a job search you'll abandon. Use the tools' built-in organization:
- ChatGPT — name your chats ("Resume — Acme Co", "Mock interview — PM role"). Use Projects (if available on your plan) to group related chats.
- Claude — use Projects to keep a "job search" workspace with your master resume always loaded in the project context, so you don't re-paste it every time.
- Gemini — keep a single ongoing chat per company.
- Perplexity — sign in and use Spaces or Collections to save research threads per company.
One more habit that saves enormous time: keep a plain text file with your "candidate context" paragraph — your name, target role, years of experience, top 3 strengths, key tools/skills, and location. Paste it at the top of any new chat. Every prompt in this course works better when the AI knows who you are.
Privacy: What to Share and What Not To
These tools are useful precisely because you give them real information about you — that's fine. But be sensible:
- Safe to share: your resume, job descriptions (they're public), your skills, your career goals, draft emails.
- Be cautious with: your current employer's confidential information, anything under an NDA, other people's personal data.
- Never paste: passwords, bank details, government ID numbers, or login credentials.
- Check each tool's settings — most let you turn off using your chats for model training. If you're privacy-conscious, do that.
Key Takeaways
- All four tools — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity — have free tiers that are enough for this course.
- ChatGPT is the all-rounder; Claude excels at long documents and human-sounding writing; Gemini is best in the Google ecosystem; Perplexity gives sourced, verifiable research.
- Name and group your chats so your job search stays organized — and keep a reusable "candidate context" paragraph to paste into new chats.
- Share your resume and job goals freely; never paste passwords or confidential employer data, and consider turning off training on your chats.