AI Recruiting: How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Hiring

Artificial intelligence (AI) is growing in prominence, thanks to the introduction of free and publicly available chatbots, search tools, and task managers using this technology. It’s often talked about as a great disruptor, upending the way we do work in nearly all industries—recruiting included.

While the dawn of AI doesn’t signal an overnight change to recruiters’ jobs, it is an increasingly useful piece of digital transformation technology that can help make the hiring process more efficient for all parties.

If you’re a recruiter and feel that AI seems unfamiliar, potentially intimidating, or just plain confusing, you’re in the right place! Together, we’ll go through some of the basics you need to know about how artificial intelligence may change the recruiting process.

Table of contents

• What is AI?
• How AI recruiting works
• The benefits of AI recruiting software
• The challenges of AI recruitment
• The importance of a human touch

What is AI?

When we talk about AI, we’re talking about software that’s been trained to understand—and emulate—how humans think and work.

AI software learns by reviewing immense amounts of data produced by humans. In the case of one of the most popular and widely talked-about AI systems, ChatGPT, the AI learned by reviewing content published online before 2021.

The AI learns facts, figures, data, historical events, and—most importantly for recruiting—how people speak, write, and think about different processes. Through machine learning processes, the AI can then begin to understand what new content means, produce content that sounds human, and draw conclusions from information.

How AI recruiting works

When used in the talent acquisition process, AI can take many forms, including:

• Intelligent chatbots that can respond and create connections in a humanlike way
• Programs that can write paragraphs of copy—or questions for the interview process—based on a few simple prompts
• Smart software that can scan applications and make decisions about how to move top talent forward in the pipeline

While the world isn’t quite at the point where you can have a sentient robot handling all of your interviews, you can begin using AI to speed up some data-heavy processes and repetitive tasks.

1. Writing job descriptions

As any HR professional knows, writing job descriptions for multiple requisitions is a time-intensive process. AI content writing tools can potentially help to ease this burden.

When using AI to write a job post, you’ll start by giving the tool a prompt that includes essential details about the job. The more details you can provide, the better.

Here’s a prompt I fed to ChatGPT:

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Because ChatGPT, like a number of other AI tools, has been trained with information that’s online, it can pull together a relatively good job description.

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The AI continued to do well when it came time to define general responsibilities.

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However, because I didn’t give the AI many details about a company or the role I’m trying to fill, it guessed at job requirements.

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I’d need to edit this section in order to have a usable job description.

That said, the whole process was faster than if I’d sat down to write a job description in its entirety by myself. And, once I have a job description I like, I can tell the AI to modify it to suit other roles within the same organization.

2. Writing interview questions

If you’re using a content writing AI tool to help craft job descriptions, you can also try using it for help with interview questions.

Here’s what ChatGPT came up with when I asked it to write five questions for the same marketing manager role referenced earlier:

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The questions are a little on the general side, and I’d want to personalize it more if I were going to use them in an actual interview. Still, it’s a solid starting point and could help to speed up the interview prep process—especially if I had to come up with new questions for multiple roles.

3. Screening candidates

Implementing AI can help with the candidate screening process in several ways. Depending on how deeply AI tools integrate into your ATS, you may be able to:

• Use AI to create prescreening questions
• Guide applicants through a prescreening chatbot flow that asks different questions based on candidate answers
• Train the AI to review candidate resumes and cover letters for specific parameters, categorizing applications accordingly
• Rely on AI to narrow the talent pool to the best candidates and create a shortlist for human recruiters to review

By using AI in this way, you can potentially speed up the screening process, make it easier for candidates to move through preliminary questions, and reduce the amount of time you spend manually reviewing responses.

While an AI tool that’s deeply integrated into your ATS will probably provide the best results, you could use general AI tools to help you develop prescreening questions. This is how ChatGPT responded when I asked it to develop a prescreening questionnaire:

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As you can see, there’s some overlap with the interview questions that the AI generated for this same role; I’d take some time to customize the queries before entering them into an ATS.

4. Scheduling interviews

Chances are, your applicant tracking system (ATS) of choice already allows you to set up workflow automations that help with tasks such as scheduling. A classic example of a workflow looks like this:

1. The recruiter moves a candidate in the ATS from “review” to “interview” status
2. As soon as the status updates, the ATS sends a scheduling email to the candidate
3. The candidate then must follow the steps in the email to schedule their interview
4. If the interview is successful and the candidate is hired, the system automatically closes the job opening

While the ATS is initiating one action on its own (sending the email), the entire operation is still very manual. And if the candidate has any trouble scheduling the interview, the ATS can’t help. They’ll need to get in touch with the human recruiter.

Now let’s look at the same scenario, but consider how it might be enhanced by AI—a computer system that can more independently interact with the candidate:

1. The recruiter moves a candidate in the ATS from “review” to “interview” status
2. As soon as the status updates, the ATS sends a scheduling email to the candidate
3. The candidate follows the steps in the email
4. When the candidate runs into trouble scheduling their interview, an AI-powered chatbot assistant pops up and offers to help
5. Rather than redirecting the candidate to a human recruiter, the chatbot is able to ask and answer a series of questions that helps the candidate troubleshoot their issue and schedule an interview
6. If the chatbot is unable to help, the AI will redirect candidates to a human recruiter or hiring manager
7. If the interview is successful and the candidate is hired, the system closes the job opening

The use of an AI assistant can reduce a significant amount of back-and-forth, freeing up both the recruiter and the candidate to focus on other responsibilities.

5. Interviewing candidates

AI can even be used to actually conduct interviews with candidates. Known as Automated Video Interviews (AVIs), this process involves an AI tool asking candidates different questions and recording their responses.

Sometimes, this is the end of the AI’s involvement, and all of the videos are sent to a human to review. But the AI could be more involved, too—analyzing videos for keywords, expression, and tone before deciding which candidates to pass on to the recruiter and which to reject.

6. Extending offers

While many existing ATS systems allow recruiters to save templated offer letters and pull candidate data to generate an offer, this can still feel like a fairly manual process.

By incorporating AI into the offer process, you could potentially:

• Have offer letters generated automatically once a candidate is moved into the “hiring” stage in an ATS
• Use AI to draft unique offer letters based on company specifics and information from the candidate’s file
• Deploy an AI assistant or chatbot to make the offer via email, answer candidate questions, and begin the negotiation process before looping in a human recruiter

However, because accuracy in offer letters is essential—and AI tools can make mistakes—it’s still a good idea to have a human involved in the drafting and review process.

Once again, I turned to ChatGPT to generate an example of what an AI-drafted offer letter might look like. Here’s the prompt I provided:

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The AI tool returned this general offer letter:

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I wanted the AI to extend an offer for a Marketing Manager role, with the hire working remotely. The system didn’t quite understand that, and instead titled the job “Remote Marketing Manager.” I had to give it an additional instruction prompt to get a better result.

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If I were going to make a real offer to a candidate using this text, I’d probably treat it as a template—not the final offer. I’d need to do some more editing and personalization in order to make sure it aligned with the actual offer I wanted to extend for my company.

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The benefits of AI recruiting software

Speed and time savings aren’t the only potential benefits of using AI for recruiting. Other potential benefits of using AI in recruiting include:

• Data-driven candidate sourcing
• Personalized job searching
• Candidate communication

Data-driven candidate sourcing

Sometimes, candidates may apply for a job that interests them—but it isn’t actually the one they’re most qualified for. A properly trained AI tool could review job applicants and tag them for you to consider for other open positions.

For this use, the AI would need to be integrated into your ATS system, so that it could work independently of your feeding prompts into a chat window.

Personalized job searching

Similarly, an AI tool could show job seekers the roles that are best suited to their skill sets. This could include personalized recommendations via email or even a chatbot that guides applicants through a series of questions before matching them with the best fit role.

Faster candidate communication

When you’re interviewing multiple candidates for a large number of open positions, communication takes up a lot of time. According to one study, 58% of job applicants want to hear back from a recruiter within a week—so a quick response time is vital when trying to hire the right candidate.

By using the help of AI chatbots and writing tools, you could potentially speed up response time and improve the candidate experience through emails and chats. As a result, applicants may feel more seen and heard—not lost in the pipeline.

The challenges of AI recruitment

As with any new technology, there are also some potential challenges to be mindful of when integrating AI recruiting tools into your workflow, namely:

• Training the AI model
• Avoiding bias in recruitment
• Checking for factual accuracy

Training the AI model

AI tools learn through exposure to existing information and data. For an AI recruiting assistant to be most effective, it’ll need to be trained on a wide variety of data sets. You’ll want to carefully evaluate different AI tools to make sure they offer the level of intelligence that you need for effective recruiting.

If you’re building and training a proprietary AI tool internally, this will require time and access to vast amounts of data. And, if you’re accessing an existing AI tool—either through an application programming interface (API) or by buying a product license—you’ll want to invest in one that can prove it’s been trained well.

Avoiding bias in recruitment

Humans have bias. And, when humans train AI, the software can begin to adopt human biases and biased language.

Natural Language Processing (NLP), which is the system used to train AI on human speech patterns, has shown bias related to a number of factors including race and gender. When incorporating AI into recruitment, it’s important to identify potential bias in the algorithms—and select AI tools that have been trained with ethics and bias in mind.

It’s also a good idea to conduct periodic human audits, where a person reviews the actions taken by an AI and evaluates the results.

Checking for factual accuracy

AI is not sentient, and it isn’t capable of exercising decision-making skills or understanding when it’s wrong. In a recent article for the MIT Technology Review, author Melissa Heikkilä summed this problem up well:

“…The AI doesn’t know what any of it means. These models work by predicting the most likely next word in a sentence. They haven’t a clue whether something is correct or false, and they confidently present information as true even when it is not.”

While AI may be able to fact-check itself one day, we aren’t there yet. If you’re creating content that will represent an official communication from your company, you’ll want to review it and make sure it aligns with the message you’re trying to convey.

The importance of a human touch

While it’s possible that one day, someone may try to manage a hiring process entirely through AI (or at least handle all those time-intensive phone screens), that day hasn’t yet arrived. By itself, AI isn’t a fully formed alternative staffing solution.

AI can’t pick up quite the same level of nuance in conversation—written or verbal—that a human can. And, while AI tools seem to “think” and understand what people are saying, their perceived comprehension is only as good as the data on which they were trained.

A human touch is still required in recruiting.

Human-focused recruiting made easy

All in all, it’s true: The use of AI in recruiting can help you save time. But turning to machines isn’t the only way to make your recruiting work easier and more effective.

By outsourcing to an experienced recruiting expert, you can rely on a trusted (human) partner to take time-consuming recruiting tasks off your plate, screen resumes, find the best talent for your role, and help you fill open positions faster. Unlike an AI tool, independent recruiting consultants can make hiring decisions and act as an integral part of your human resources team.

Upwork makes it easy to get help from skilled recruiters. Simply post a job or review independent recruiting professionals in Talent Marketplace™ to find the right fit. You’ll be able to communicate with your chosen professional over message and video call to make sure they’re the right fit. If you want to hire a full-time recruiter, that’s an option too.

And if you’re leading a large company in need of support from a full recruiting team, Enterprise Suite is the answer. Support for classification and payroll in more than 180 countries means you can tap into a literal world of talent—and our team of recruiters can help you fill key roles in as little as three days. Talk to an Enterprise Suite expert to get started.

Disclosure: Upwork is an OpenAI partner, giving OpenAI customers and other businesses direct access to trusted expert independent professionals experienced in working with OpenAI technologies.