In line with the pace of change in AI technology, HR professionals are realising the potential of generative AI in recruitment. Tools that can generate original text, video and audio content are powerful, inexpensive (or often free), and popular among recruiters and candidates.
In a time when the global talent shortage shows no signs of slowing down, recruiters can benefit from any tool that can allow them to do more with their existing resources.
As the technology gets more sophisticated and users become more skilled, artificial intelligence in HR will become even more widespread.
Generative AI is already making its mark. A 2023 Gartner study on AI in recruitment and HR found 81% of HR leaders have already implemented or are exploring generative AI recruiting solutions at work, and a survey of 5,000 jobseekers from Canva showed almost half have used the technology to enhance their CV.
But even though many leaders are curious about applying artificial intelligence in HR, not all of them are sure what these applications could be. In this article, we’ll break down the recruitment process into its most basic stages and give just a few examples of how generative AI can be applied (or avoided) in each of them.
working with AI to identify the skills and labour gaps in your company
The very first stage of successful recruitment is understanding what your company actually needs. Where should you make improvements, and what important skills are currently lacking in the workforce? You should also weigh up your options — do you need a new permanent member of the team, or a temporary resource to help in a single project?
At this stage, the correct answers will come from inside the company. Generative AI tools can be powerful when given the right prompts, but they’re not oracles. Many of them are trained on publicly-available information scraped from the internet, and don’t have access to the inside knowledge they would need to accurately define your company’s needs.
Even so, public LLMs can still be useful as a source of inspiration, or a sounding board. Prompting a generative AI chatbot with some basic information about your company’s situation and asking it to suggest some potential skills gaps could be a good starting point for internal discussions — but you shouldn’t rely on everything it has to say. AI recruiting solutions still can’t completely replace an expert recruiter with deep knowledge of the company.
However, some platforms are starting to enable connections with company systems that enable them to have company-specific context beyond just the external data they've been trained on, which makes their output especially relevant and valuable.
formulating the job description
Once again, the basic elements of the job description need to come from internal experts at your company. Only you and your colleagues know details like the job’s salary, key responsibilities and required qualifications — although using generative AI tools as a source of interactive feedback could be useful.
Generative AI really comes in handy when it’s time to package these basic details into an engaging, attractive job description that attracts top talent. Hand the details over to a generative AI chat tool and give it some guidance on tone of voice and other requirements like inclusive language, and it’ll instantly create an AI-generated job description. The output will require analysis and tweaking, but using AI in recruitment in this way can improve the speed of creation and the quality of your job descriptions — especially if the recruitment team is short on writing skills.
Generative AI can also be used to perform job analysis and help identify skills, education, and experience that would be useful in the role, expanding your talent pool. It can also be useful to leverage generative AI tools to help create outcome-based job descriptions, which can drive up the quality and quantity of candidates. Both of these use cases can be performed by recruiters, the HR team, and hiring managers.
searching and matching talent
This is the stage where recruiters distribute the job on relevant platforms, reach out to their own candidate networks, and start receiving applications. General-purpose, free-to-use generative AI tools might be tempting to use in this stage, but consent and privacy considerations mean you shouldn’t use them for resume screening. However, using private, secure AI recruitment tools for candidate screening can significantly augment manual searching efforts.
Tools that allow you to search through passive candidate profiles and filter them based on your requirements have existed for years. But the advanced language skills of today’s AI tools makes them much better at creating accurate matches for candidates that may have slipped through the net.
Large language models (LLMs) understand natural language input, whether typed or spoken, which allows users of LLM-powered search and match solutions to enter queries in their natural language. This makes Boolean searches easier and gives experts another way to articulate their talent needs and return a higher quantity of relevant results.
Just make sure that AI is used to complement your manual talent search, and not replace it completely. Many developers still struggle with fixing algorithmic biases present in their AI tools, which can lead users to unintentionally discriminate against certain candidates.
However, this serious issue may be less of a problem in the future. For example, an LLM-powered matching solution built by a global financial services company outperformed 3 commercial (non-LLM) matching solutions in tests for hidden biases. Intelligently, the company removed names and other demographic information from applications before passing candidate data to the LLM.
A study from AI research company Anthropic showed similar results. By simply telling their LLM it is illegal to discriminate and instructing it to ignore demographic data, they came close to eliminating bias entirely.
preselection and screening of top candidates
Working with AI can help when it’s time to filter out unqualified applicants and narrow your list down to only the top candidates. Chatbots are more than capable of handling simple screening questions — for example, asking applicants if they have a driving licence, or if they have the necessary academic qualifications for the role. However, traditional, non-LLM powered chatbots feel impersonal, and can be difficult to communicate with for some applicants.
Integrating generative AI into existing chatbots can increase their responsiveness dramatically, and many recruitment tool providers are already working on it. Rather than just understanding responses to binary questions, these AI chatbots can now understand a broad range of responses in multiple languages, provide more ‘human’ responses, and handle complex tasks — even booking interviews in automated phone calls with candidates.
conducting job interviews
Generative AI tools can provide support throughout the recruitment process, but most leaders still want a face-to-face interview before committing to employing someone — even though AI can be used to automate interviews entirely, a practice that has been criticised by applicants and media.
However, using AI for job interviews can provide instant feedback and fresh ideas when you’re preparing to meet candidates. Incisive, thought-provoking questions that are relevant to the candidate’s background can be challenging to develop alone. Some simple prompts can provide you with a long AI-generated list of questions to rework and adapt to your needs, as well as provide candidates with the ability to practise for interviews by role-playing with AI.
onboarding new hires
Generative AI has some interesting use cases even once the interview stage is over and the successful applicant starts work. First impressions are important, but the onboarding process can be time-consuming and challenging, especially for candidates that work remotely. Creating a generative AI virtual assistant that’s trained to be an expert on your company’s internal processes, policies and structure gives new hires a reliable and personalised guide who can answer any question, connect them with the training they need to complete, help them fill out necessary forms, connect them with their work buddy, and set up meetings for their first weeks on the job to help them settle in.
This kind of AI onboarding agent can be a great support for new hires, serving to complement their designated human mentor, not replace them.
discover more generative AI use cases
If you’re looking for more AI recruitment solutions and additional ways to integrate generative AI into your process, we’ve created a guide to the most compelling use cases in recruitment. Download it below, and find out how this technology could boost performance in your own organisation.