How recruiters can use gen AI

Gen AI revolutionizes recruitment by streamlining processes, improving personalization, productivity, enhancing candidate experience, and supporting internal mobility.

I’ve been using AI for a while now, and I want to share how generative AI is transforming talent acquisition, making a real difference at nearly every stage of the process.

Let me walk you through some practical ways to incorporate generative AI into your recruiting efforts so you can see the incredible potential it brings to the table.

Optimizing the hiring process with automation

Automation is reshaping the hiring process. By streamlining time-consuming tasks like candidate sourcing and initial screenings, HR professionals can dedicate more time to strategic and impactful initiatives. AI-driven tools efficiently analyze resumes, identifying key skills, relevant experiences, and keywords to create a shortlist of candidates in minutes, achieving in seconds what used to take hours.

Crafting job descriptions and postings

You can easily use AI to rewrite job descriptions for better clarity and create more appealing job postings. For example, you can use a prompt to, for example, ChatGPT like this:

“I will provide you with a job description, and I’d like you to rewrite it to be more [exciting], [catchy], or [inclusive] for [engineers].”

Alternatively, you can ask it to “make it more persuasive,” “add urgency,” or “use inclusive language.”

To create a new job posting from scratch, you could prompt:

Compose a compelling job advertisement for a [senior Business Development] role at a fast-growing e-commerce startup. The ad should include an exciting headline, an overview of the role, key responsibilities, necessary skills and qualifications, and the benefits of working at our company. Use language that is inclusive and appealing to a diverse audience.

While AI can help significantly, always edit and customize its outputs. Incorporate the brand voice, check for errors, and include SEO-friendly keywords to improve online visibility. Authenticity is key, AI-generated content works best when it feels genuine and aligns with your brand.

Adding a human touch

Candidates expect authenticity in their interactions with recruiters, hiring managers, or anyone involved in the hiring process. This includes how they perceive your content and their overall experience during the process.

AI is a great tool, but it rarely gets things perfect on the first try. Always review and refine AI-generated content. Once published, pay attention to candidates' or applicants' feedback. Such feedback is invaluable for understanding whether your content makes a great impression and identifying areas for improvement. Lessons learned can inform future prompts and strategies.

When a sought-after candidate responds positively to your message, don’t hesitate to ask them what caught their eye. It’s a great way to gauge which outreach messages work.

Integrating AI with human interaction

AI should enhance human engagement. While AI excels at data analysis, it lacks the nuanced understanding that comes from personal conversations or face-to-face interviews. Human oversight is essential for evaluating AI-generated shortlists and ensuring empathy throughout the hiring process.

Sourcing candidates

When it comes to sourcing, GenAI processes natural language to identify people with specific skills.

For example, you can type: Find me people in New York who have recent experience implementing marketing automation platforms like Marketo or Mailchimp, and you’ll find people who possess the skills you’re looking for, along with adjacent skills that help identify additional potential candidates.

It’s important to have a basic understanding of the roles you’re sourcing before contacting and engaging with them. AI tools make researching roles and industries easier than ever.

For instance, if I’m unfamiliar with the cybersecurity industry or a specific cybersecurity domain, I can ask ChatGPT for a list of major competitors for a specific company and receive results within seconds. This gives me a starting point for further research. Similarly, for example, if you’re looking for account managers in Amsterdam or Rotterdam, you can ask ChatGPT for synonym titles, alternative job titles for "account manager," and a list of relevant communities in Amsterdam. From there, you can build a Boolean string tailored to your search.

You can also create a list of industry terms or keywords relevant to the role. These terms appear frequently in resumes, job descriptions, and websites. Familiarizing yourself with them will help you better understand candidates’ profiles, their current and past work, and their motivations. This knowledge will be invaluable when following up with candidates and presenting them to hiring managers effectively.

Enhancing the candidate experience

Chatbots and AI-powered scheduling tools have changed how candidates interact with employers. These tools provide quick answers, personalized messages, and prompt follow-ups. This makes things better for both candidates and employers, creating good experiences that improve the company’s reputation and help attract more talent.

Interview questions and insights

Collaborate with hiring managers to use AI in creating pre-screening questions and interview questions. AI can also enhance the candidate experience by keeping them informed about their progress.

Tools like ChatGPT can significantly reduce the time spent researching and drafting role-specific interview questions to assess a candidate’s knowledge and skills.

Before recruiters begin generating interview questions, they should provide ChatGPT with details about the position and the qualities that define an ideal candidate.

Then, for example, you can copy and paste the job description and the candidate’s resume into ChatGPT, then ask what questions should be tailored for that specific candidate.

Here’s a prompt you can use:

"Create a list of five technical interview questions for a digital marketing specialist position. The questions should focus on the candidate’s proficiency in SEO/SEM (search engine optimization/search engine marketing), email marketing, social media marketing, and their familiarity with marketing analytics tools."

Transcription and summarization

There are software tools that can transcribe, summarize, and highlight interviews, allowing you to focus entirely on your conversation with a candidate instead of taking notes. Just ensure you obtain the candidate’s consent before recording.

Onboarding process

Once an offer is accepted, AI can transform onboarding by delivering highly personalized experiences. From crafting customized learning paths to providing tailored resources, generative AI streamlines the process of setting new hires up for success.

By leveraging AI, companies can design onboarding programs that adapt to each new hire’s unique needs, role requirements, learning pace, and preferences, creating a seamless and impactful integration into the organization.

Facilitating internal mobility

Let’s see how generative AI can assist recruiters by promoting internal mobility and improving retention, thus reducing the need for external recruitment to backfill roles.

While many organizations offer employees access to an internal job board to explore opportunities, this approach often falls short of providing an ideal experience. It is limited in scope and inefficient. The basic search functionality only allows employees to find roles using keywords, which may not help them discover all the positions that align with their skills, interests, and career aspirations.

Gen AI can enhance the experience for employees by improving search and matching. With its natural language processing abilities, generative AI can understand user queries at a conceptual level, allowing employees to search in a more intuitive way. Also, AI can recognize adjacent skills, enabling employees to explore roles they may not have initially considered but that could be a good fit based on their profile.

Moreover, generative AI can proactively suggest roles that align with employees’ profiles, eliminating the need for active job searching. Employees can receive job recommendations tailored to their qualifications and interests.

To further improve the experience, AI can be used to simplify the profile-building process, making it less tedious and more engaging. By offering personalized suggestions based on an employee's past work experience and prompting them to share their career goals, AI can help employees create a detailed, data-rich profile. This, in turn, will result in more relevant job recommendations.

Employees can also use generative AI to explore a variety of potential career paths within the organization, receiving personalized information on different roles, responsibilities, and opportunities for growth. AI can conduct skill gap analyses between an employee’s current profile and the roles they’re interested in and recommend a customized learning and development plan to close those gaps.

This plan could include training programs, workshops, projects, or mentorship from employees who have taken similar career paths, all aimed at enhancing the employee’s skills and making them more competitive for the desired role. As employees work through their development plan, AI can provide feedback on progress, assess achievements, and suggest adjustments to help them stay on track with their career goals.

These are just a few of the ways generative AI can facilitate internal mobility, leading to improved employee experience, higher retention rates, and reduced pressure on recruitment teams to fill roles.

Challenges and ethics