How ChatGPT Will Impact Recruiting and Hiring
What if I told you there is a free AI tool that can write and improve your candidate outreach messaging, your job descriptions, and your recruitment marketing content, help you develop persuasive language to work with unrealistic hiring managers, and generate appropriate interview questions? And that’s just the tip of the iceberg!
If you haven’t already heard about OpenAI’s ChatGPT, it is an AI model that you can interact with in a natural and conversational way. While some people are calling it a chatbot, I think it’s an amazing multipurpose tool. I highly recommend you learn more about it on their website and start testing it yourself when you’re ready.
Some people think it will reduce the need for or even replace some people in many skilled jobs, including software engineering, marketing, paralegal work, data entry/processing, and even content creation.
If that sounds like crazy talk, you haven’t tried ChatGPT, a tool that The New York Times called “a highly capable linguistic superbrain.”
I’ve been wondering about how ChatGPT will impact recruiting . . . how can we use this exciting new tool to take on the more repetitive, laborious parts of the job? Can it tackle recruiting fundamentals like writing job descriptions and emails and scheduling interviews? Can it open up more time for people to focus on the more strategic and profoundly human aspects of recruiting? Will it create the space for you to focus on building relationships, advising hiring managers and C-suite leaders, or negotiating with your best candidates and making the close?
And the more I thought about it, the more possible recruiting use cases I conjured up — asking ChatGPT to create interview questions for specific roles, facilitate hard conversations with hiring managers, craft Boolean search strings, screen resumes, draft candidate outreach messages, explore salary benchmarking data. The list goes on and on and is mostly limited by your imagination.
I feel it’s up to recruiters to determine whether AI is our ruination or, just perhaps, our salvation.
So, hop on ChatGPT and give it a spin. I did. And you can see the results below of my earliest recruiting experiments with ChatGPT.
5 ways to use ChatGPT for recruiting
1. Script a conversation with an unrealistic hiring manager
I saw some people asking ChatGPT to create dialogues so I asked ChatGPT to “create a dialogue between a hiring manager with unrealistic expectations and a recruiter who is trying to explain to the hiring manager that they need to be flexible in their hiring requirements given talent and supply dynamics.”
What do you think?
If only all unrealistic hiring managers were this easy to influence!
Although I asked it to create a dialogue, I could also ask it to write a compelling argument in support of hiring managers being more flexible in their requirements, and I could even be specific about skills, locations, diversity, and other parameters.
2. Craft job descriptions
I asked ChatGPT to make a random job description I found on Google Jobs “more interesting and exciting.”
Here’s what it came up with.
What do you think of the result?
In my opinion, what ChatGPT created was better than the original on many fronts and was essentially how it should have been written originally. All key elements are summarized in a more engaging, shorter, easier-to-read format and tone.
3. Write emails to candidates
Then I asked ChatGPT to “write a very compelling email from a technical recruiter that would earn a response from a software engineer who typically doesn’t respond to recruiters.”
Yes, ChatGPT committed the cardinal sin of hoping that the email finds the person well.
In that sense, ChatGPT is very similar to the average recruiter.
And, yes, the email is pretty generic and fluffy. But let’s keep things in perspective: ChatGPT wrote the content for an email from a single sentence, and it was a very basic request without specific details about experience, company, industry, and job. That will be my next test.
Having delivered a great many training sessions with sourcers and recruiters on effective candidate messaging, I can honestly say that, in general, most of the email above is about as good as the average pretraining messages I’ve seen. And, of course, whatever it generates can be improved upon by you. Ideally, you should never send a non-personalized message to anyone.
4. Write Boolean search strings
I began to wonder if ChatGPT could write Boolean search strings.
OK, while that was a pretty basic list of terms and a simple query, I don’t think ChatGPT will be replacing human sourcers or recruiters any time soon when it comes to writing Boolean search strings.
While the search above was syntactically correct and it would “work” and return results in an internal database/ATS/CRM and LinkedIn, it wouldn’t return all of the potentially qualified talent available. There are many ways people could represent financial services experience in their resumes (the same goes for JavaScript and node). And while it made a “mistake” by expanding software engineer to (software OR engineer OR developer) — “software” and “engineer” are semantically too generic and would result in some false positives — I do think it’s pretty cool that ChatGPT did include a term I didn’t explicitly ask for (developer) that is somewhat synonymous with “software engineer.”
5. Generate suggested interview questions
If you’re looking for additional ideas for relevant phone screen or interview questions, ChatGPT has you covered.
That’s a solid list from a very generic prompt. If you interview and hire recruiters, maybe you already ask all of these questions or you may not find all of them relevant. However, I think ChatGPT makes an interesting sounding board of sorts for anyone who interviews people. You can use it to discover additional questions you might like to use or to create more questions specific to your needs. And you can always ask it for additional questions (it will produce more than 10).
I decided to ask ChatGPT to create a list of questions focused on JavaScript that could be used to interview a software engineer, but they seemed pretty basic. I wondered if ChatGPT could produce more challenging questions . . .
I ran the above questions past my longtime friend who is a software engineer with significant JavaScript experience and he said the first one isn’t challenging, but he “hopes no one asks me all of those questions because I can only answer half.”
Granted, there’s no context to the questions I generated, and there’s no reason to come up with questions just to try and stump candidates during the interview process. However, this capability of ChatGPT could be useful when used in conjunction with the requirements of specific jobs and working with the hiring manager and team to come up with relevant questions of varying complexity.
There is, however, a flip side to this equation.
Candidates can use ChatGPT to answer any interview question, and there’s quite a lot of buzz on social media about the need to be aware of and compensate for this. Sure, software engineers have been able to Google or use Stack Overflow to answer interview questions for quite some time now, but that requires searching and reviewing results or answers. With ChatGPT, it produces a single, typically concise answer, often with decent explanations.
So, if you recruit IT professionals, start thinking about how you’re going to address the ability for people to use ChatGPT to answer your screening and interview questions.
Final thoughts: What can you come up with?
It is still very early days for ChatGPT, but I am extremely intrigued and excited. This kind of technology is going to fundamentally change many aspects of our work and personal lives.
Will ChatGPT and similar technology reduce the need for or replace people in certain jobs? It’s possible, even likely, but technology has been doing that for more than 100 years, so that’s nothing new. In my opinion, the real opportunity and what we should focus on is how technology like ChatGPT can help people with their needs and augment their capabilities.
Already, on the other side of the recruiting equation, some people are experimenting with ChatGPT to help them prep for interviews and improve their resume and LinkedIn profile content.
I encourage you to explore ways in which ChatGPT can be used to positively benefit you and those you work with.
If you want some additional inspiration, just run a search on Twitter for ChatGPT and scroll, and if you come up with some creative and beneficial use cases and example results, please share.
This post was originally published on LinkedIn.
[ChatGPT wrote this bio of Glen] Glen Cathey is a strategic thinker and global keynote speaker with extensive experience in talent acquisition and leadership. He is passionate about making a difference, developing others, and solving problems. Glen has served as a thought leader for sourcing and recruiting strategies, technologies, and processes for firms with over 2 million hires annually. He has played a key role in implementing and customizing ATS and CRM systems, and has hired, trained, and developed large local, national, global, and centralized sourcing and recruiting teams. Glen has spoken at numerous conferences, including LinkedIn Talent Connect, SourceCon, Talent42, and Sourcing Summit Europe.
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