Nikita Gupta. (LinkedIn Photo)

As layoffs continue to ripple through the tech sector, a new Seattle startup is using AI to help people land their next gig.

The job cuts are driving a surge of interest in CareerFlow, which optimizes resumes and LinkedIn profiles and keeps track of job searches.

Nikita Gupta co-founded the company after trying to land a job after immigrating to the U.S. in 2020. She started to get more active on LinkedIn and discovered many others who had difficulty securing interviews.

CareerFlow initially consisted of mentors who manually reviewed LinkedIn profiles and resumes, and provided 1-on-1 career guidance. The model was successful but was not optimized to scale, Gupta said.

Now the company is taking advantage of AI technology, including Open AI’s GPT software, to automate its services.

CareerFlow’s job seeker tool lets users organize their job search. (CareerFlow Photo)

The company’s products are mostly free to individual users. It plans to generate revenue by selling to universities, individual career coaches and bootcamp services. Since launching, the company has served more than 20,000 candidates.

CareerFlow has raised more than $100,000 in pre-seed funding.

It faces a number of competitors including Rezi, Teal, Grammarly and ResumeBuilder. OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot can also can edit lines in a resume.

Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, which is seeing increased engagement due to layoffs, also offers its own resume builder.

Gupta, who has nearly 160,000 followers on LinkedIn, currently works as a full-time senior technical recruiter at Uber and previously was a senior technical recruiter at Amazon Web Services. She teamed up with co-founder Puneet Kohli, a former senior computer vision engineer at Apple.

The startup has 12 full and part-time employees.

Gupta advised job seekers not to pin their hopes on securing a job in the tech industry at the moment, as many companies are not actively recruiting. She suggested that they explore other options, such as fields like pharmaceutical consulting that are hiring.

More than 500 companies have laid off nearly 140,000 workers across the tech sector this year.

Amazon this week said it would slash an additional 9,000 jobs, on top of a 18,000-person layoff announced in January. Job listing platform Indeed announced Wednesday it was laying off about 2,200 employees.

Gupta said job seekers should also consider adding a highly sought-after skill to their repertoire, increasing their chances of standing out in the current job market. She pointed to AI as a skill that’s currently in demand.

“That’s going to give you a leverage in the current market,” she said.

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