I've talked about this ad nauseam. During my job search, LinkedIn posts were my biggest source of job leads, and nothing else was close. Not applications. Not outreach. The numbers from my postmortem:
Outbound: 166 applications, 21 got an interview (12.7%), 9 reached a hiring manager. Inbound: 84 opportunities, 31 got an interview (36.9%), 17 reached a hiring manager.
Inbound came from my posts and my profile. I've never wanted to cold email people or be a salesperson, I've lived that life, and the posts meant I didn't have to.
Here's what I haven't said. I didn't write most of those posts from scratch. I couldn't have. I was interviewing, building tools, and running a job search full time. What I did was come up with the idea, talk it out, and let AI write the first draft. Then I rewrote it. Usually 15 to 20 percent of it. The rest already sounded like me.
The goal changed when I started my new role. I'm building followers, a newsletter, and my own platform now, not hunting for leads. But the constraint got tighter, not looser. I have maybe three or four hours a week for all of it. If a post took an hour, I'd post once a week and then quit.
So a post takes about 15 minutes. One or two drafts with AI, then my pass.
I know how that sounds. So I ran my last five or six posts through Pangram, which is scary good at catching AI writing. Every post came back 100% human. The only thing it flagged in any of them was a quote I'd pasted in from somebody else. It caught that and nothing of mine. I'm not saying detectors are the point. I'm saying the gap between this and "let ChatGPT write it" is wide enough that a detector can't see across it.
The difference is a skill. I'm giving it to you, and you can modify it for whatever you need.
How I start
I don't start with a blank page and I don't start with a prompt. I start by talking. I dictate the idea, the story behind it, the thing that annoyed me, whatever it is, and I tell the AI what the post is for. Then the skill takes over. It's the document the AI reads before it writes a word, and it holds everything about how I write, sentence by sentence. Not what to write about. How it reads.
I built it by reverse engineering my own posts. I fed in a batch and had the AI pull out what they had in common: how I open, the rhythm of the sentences, what I do with a number, a story, a joke, how I close. I write the banned list. Partly so it doesn't sound like AI, and partly because there are plenty of words that are just off-brand for me.
Three things I think about for every single post, before the AI touches it:
Who am I talking to? One person, not "my audience." If I can't picture them, the post isn't ready.
The hook. The best line goes first. If it's sitting in paragraph three, it moves to line one. No warm-up.
The CTA. What do I actually want this person to do? A real question for them, a link, or nothing at all. Never "Thoughts?"
But the skill isn't why it works. What makes it work is a loop. Every time I rewrite a draft by hand, I feed both versions back and ask what I changed and why. The answer becomes a rule, with a date on it. One from mine:
Draft: "So I built things." What I published: "So I built things I would actually use." Rule: don't stop at the mechanism. Finish the thought.
Small. Specific. Mine. The loop ran every day for months and the skill got long enough that I had to have the AI tighten it up. You'll want to do that too, every so often. It gets unwieldy and it eats tokens.
And to be clear, I don't want you to sound like me. Sounding like me only works for me.
How to build your own from scratch
(Or skip this and steal mine. It's below.)
If you'd rather start clean, here's the whole process. Six steps, and the sixth is the only one that matters.
- Step 1. Pull 10 to 20 of your real posts. If you don't have 20, use what you've got and add anything else with your fingerprints on it. Emails you wrote fast. Slack messages. A talk you gave. Anything that sounds like you and not like a deck.
- Step 2. Ask your AI to reverse engineer the voice. Shape, openers, rhythm, vocabulary, punctuation habits, how you tell a story, how you close. Have it write findings as rules, not observations. "She opens with the most surprising line" is an observation. "Put the most surprising line first" is a rule.