Artificial Intelligence in Recruiting: Can AI Help You Hire the Best Talent?

Machine learning technologies, including generative artificial intelligence, have the potential to help companies, especially small- to medium-size businesses, fill open jobs faster. Many recruiters already use AI to generate job descriptions, pre-screen candidates, and automate candidate searches.

But AI isn’t a magic solution for all recruiting woes. If it’s not used mindfully, it can create more problems than it solves. To get the most out of AI in recruiting, you need to understand both how it works and what its limitations are.

Is AI the future of recruiting?

While generative AI isn’t replacing human recruiters in talent acquisition, you’re likely to see machine learning technology becoming more prevalent in recruiting tools.

Machine learning tools can rapidly process and sort data, but generative AI is only a predictive, statistical technology. AI doesn’t make machines truly intelligent. Even tools like ChatGPT’s “reasoning” models aren’t actually thinking like a person. The AI is just moving through specific predictive algorithms. 

AI-powered tools also can’t always pick up on subtle nuances in body language, detect when someone is joking or being ironic, or assess how well a candidate will fit into existing corporate culture — all relevant parts of a face-to-face interview.

That said, machine learning is well-suited to help human resources teams with several routine and time-consuming tasks in the candidate sourcing process. By identifying the right uses for AI apps in your recruiting team’s workflow, you can potentially free up more of your time to focus on work that requires a human touch. This is particularly beneficial for small teams of HR professionals that may not have a dedicated recruiter to focus on new hires.

On the other side of the talent acquisition process, AI technology can even improve the candidate experience by:

• Helping jobseekers find the right position
• Making the application process more engaging
• Delivering automatic status updates
• Scheduling interviews

These benefits alone can help you fill more open requisitions, as a streamlined application process can encourage prospects to accept a job.

Pros and cons of implementing AI in your recruitment process

Despite its benefits, using AI in hiring comes with some risk, too. Recruiters need to understand potential tradeoffs in data security and machine errors when deciding whether or not to use this technology as part of their decision-making process. 

Pros of AI in recruiting

1. The use of generative AI and automation technology can help reduce time to hire by streamlining communication, optimizing the resume screening process, and improving engagement.
2. Recruiters can leverage the natural language processing (NLP) capabilities of a tool like ChatGPT to quickly create job posts and other assets in a specific company voice.
3. AI-driven job boards and candidate-facing chatbots can help to direct applicants to the right positions, making it easier for hiring teams to find the right fit in their recruiting tool of choice.
4. Easier application, assessment, and interview scheduling processes can give qualified candidates a positive impression of a company, even if they don’t get the job. 

Cons of AI in recruiting

1. Overuse of AI in the application process can leave job applicants feeling like they’re just a data point, not a person you’re interested in hiring.
2. There may be information security or even ethical concerns about sharing candidate information with AI algorithms. Many AI companies use customer chat data to further train their underlying machine learning models. 
3. Generative AI tools can hallucinate false responses; asking about a candidate could lead to made-up information about their cover letter or resume. 
4. AI tools can display bias in their outputs. This is due to how the models are trained: if an AI’s training data sets are discriminatory toward a group of people, for example, this same discrimination may come through in the AI’s chat outputs. This could lead to the accidental rejection of quality candidates or open your company up to legal risk.

6 ways AI can help to improve your hiring processes

If you feel ready to start exploring how AI can improve your recruiting workflows, give these six uses a try. 

1. Candidate persona development

Getting your candidate personas in order can help you connect with the right applicants — and it’s a task that AI can help with.

A candidate persona should include details about your ideal hire’s:

• Experience
• Hard and soft skills
• Qualifications
• Career path and goals
• Communication style
• Work style

There are purpose-built AI persona tools, like Delve, on the market — but you can use a free ChatGPT or Claude account to do this, too.

If you already have candidate personas, then you may want to use AI to help you spot any inconsistencies between your descriptions and your actual hires or applicants. Custom GPTs are a great way to give an AI specific datasets — such as resumes or metrics from an applicant tracking system (ATS) — and explore patterns and stats with natural language. 

Just make sure that you’re compliant with any company, industry, or regional privacy policies regarding sharing this information with an AI system!

2. Job post generation

Once you’re confident that you know what kind of professionals to hire, you can use AI to speed up the process of drafting job posts. 

This is another great use for a custom GPT — upload your employer brand style guide and previous job posts, then ask the GPT to draft a new one that includes specific details. 

Uma, Upwork’s mindful AI™, can help you write job posts when you’re using our platform. Uma is trained on context from Upwork, so it’s purpose-built for tasks just like this — and Upwork is confident that you’ll get a better result, faster, than when using a generic generative AI chat tool.

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Tip: To get the most out of Uma, you’ll want to sign up for a free Business Plus membership. Business Plus gives you access to every recruiting-focused AI tool powered by Uma, from solutions for job post generation to streamlining the candidate screening process.

Always make sure to check over the final description and give it a human touch, though.

3. Resume sorting 

When you have 30 open roles with 100 applicants each, reading everyone’s resume becomes highly time-consuming. 

Many ATS platforms already leverage machine learning for keyword-based candidate filtering, and these tools’ accuracy continues to improve with the development of generative AI solutions for hiring managers. 

If your ATS doesn’t include AI features, or you’d like to go further, a tool like Uma Recruiter (available to Upwork Business Plus customers) can help you narrow down your applicant pool by reducing or eliminating manual tasks including:

• Sorting through applications to pick out resumes with specific keywords
• Organizing the talent pool by experience level
• Reading cover letters

This process can be fast, too — Uma Recruiter can screen and develop a list of candidates for you to interview in as little as six hours. 

Uma evaluates candidates based on factors like:

• Skills
• Seniority and experience 
• Upwork reputation
• Timezone overlap
• Proposed rate alignment
• Language proficiency 
• Cover letter quality
• QA answer quality

Remember, though, that AI tools can make mistakes. Be sure to look at any AI outputs and suggestions with your own experienced eye before making a final decision to interview, hire, or reject a candidate.

4. Interviewing

AI can also be extremely helpful in scheduling and conducting interviews. Gone are the days of playing phone tag with someone or waking up at five am to conduct interviews with people in a different time zone. 

There are a few ways to use AI in the interview (and scheduling) process. If you’re only interested in using AI for scheduling, you could pair your existing website chatbot with Calendly to create a conversational flow that guides candidates through your calendar availability. If you want to offer completely AI-driven interviews, then you’ll need a tool like Uma Recruiter.  

With Uma Recruiter, Business Plus customers can enable an instant interviews feature that lets interested freelancers conduct an interview with Uma as part of their proposal. Interview questions are based on your job description, or you can create custom questions for each interviewee to answer. 

Uma will then prepare a summary of each interview for you to view. If you’re interested in talking with a freelancer further, you can send them a message and set up a time to chat one-on-one. 

5. Onboarding

AI can continue to help you through the offer and onboarding phases, too. It may be useful for:

• Quickly generating offer letters based on existing templates 
• Creating personalized welcome videos for new hires 
• Translating onboarding materials and videos into different languages 
• Creating new training videos from scratch with tools like Synthesia
• Building custom voice-based AI training agents with a platform like GreetAI
• Removing mistakes, dead air, and coughs from existing training videos quickly and easily 

6. Continual improvement

There are other ways AI can help your recruitment strategy, too, including:

• Developing interview questions for new positions 
• Recalling older resumes that may be a good fit for current roles
• Improving potential candidate engagement during times when you aren’t actively hiring
• Automating new, repetitive tasks that become relevant to the recruiting process

You could even work with a machine learning engineer to develop a custom chatbot that collects job candidates' feedback on what it was like to interview with your company — and then use this data to keep improving the process.

Business Plus customers will continue to benefit from new Uma tools and features as Upwork rolls them out. 

What to look for in an AI recruitment tool

Remember that feeding candidate and company data directly into an off-the shelf AI tool may not be legal or appropriate. Your company or country may require that you adhere to certain guidelines — such as HIPAA in the U.S. or GDPR in the E.U. This, in turn, may take some AI platforms out of the running … or require you to build a custom solution that processes data in specific ways or regions of the world. 

When considering the use of AI in your hiring decisions, ask yourself the following questions: 

• Was this tool built for a specific purpose? An AI tool meant for U.S. healthcare professionals may be more readily HIPAA-compliant than a free chatbot. Trying to force a generic AI tool to suit your needs may result in more problems than solutions. (The fact that Uma was built specifically for freelancers and clients on Upwork makes it a good choice for remote, independent work projects.)
• How does the AI company use data that you provide? Many AI chat tools, including the free version of ChatGPT, turn users’ data into training material to improve their machine learning algorithms.
• What data sets were used to train the AI? Transparency about AI training data is important when you need to be cautious of potential bias in the AI’s outputs and processes.
• Is the AI company forthcoming with compliance information? Understanding how a company approaches legal and ethical issues is also important. For example, AI video interviewing company HireVue publishes information about its bias audits and compliance with relevant laws in New York City.
• Can you or a third party audit the tool? While guidelines around AI auditing are still a work in progress, the ability to have an expert evaluate an AI’s outputs for errors, bias, and more can help you find a high-quality solution. 

What’s the best AI recruiting software?

Many companies will find that a purpose-built, hiring-specific AI tool meets their needs best. 

Uma is a great example of how AI technology can be transformed to suit the very specific needs of a hiring team. The tool draws upon today’s most powerful AI models, but is trained with the context of Upwork data — so it’s ready for use right away. You don’t need to spend time trying to configure Uma to work in a specific way. The tech is ready for you.

No matter what AI tool you choose, though, remember that you’re still a critical part of the entire process — from drafting a job post to issuing an offer letter.

When you need to hire talent with specific skills, quickly, the combination of Uma plus your human expertise can’t be beat. Experience it yourself by signing up for or upgrading to a free Upwork Business Plus account now. 

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This article is intended for educational purposes and should not be viewed as legal or tax advice. Please consult a professional to find the solution that best fits your situation.

Upwork is not affiliated with and does not sponsor or endorse any of the tools or services discussed in this article. These tools and services are provided only as potential options, and each reader and company should take the time needed to adequately analyze and determine the tools or services that would best fit their specific needs and situation.