There were two significant events that occurred late last year that set off compounding impacts across the tech community. The first was Twitter abruptly laying off nearly half of the company and setting off a series of deeper cuts across the industry. The second was the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which quickly became the fastest-growing consumer software application in history… until Threads launched this year that is. The net impact for many recruiting leaders has been the expectation that their teams will need to do more with less. As with prior tech cycles and platform shifts, a burst of new tools have come into the market while existing vendors are racing to innovate. All with the promise of driving higher quality and greater efficiency across the recruiting process.  

We hosted a recruiting community event earlier this month where we explored the impact of AI on recruiting and how leaders are thinking about building AI into their broader recruiting strategy. Here’s what we learned:

Three pieces of advice to recruiting leaders as they build their talent strategy and roadmap with AI in mind:

• Start by defining your core principles as a recruiting team: Get really clear and align with internal stakeholders on what you want to be known for and how you’ll prioritize. These will drive all downstream roadmap decisions and how the team operates.
• Build your processes around these core principles: For example, if following “The Golden Rule” is your core principle, then everything will be centered around providing the best candidate experience, sharing timely feedback, and building lasting relationships.
• Prioritize tools and automation that are in service of the processes you want to run: If delivering the best candidate experience is an outcome that aligns to your core principle, then select the tools and automation solutions that enable that - personalized messaging for ‘every’ candidate, automating interview notes and feedback, and developing nurturing campaigns to build long term candidate relationships.

Three ways recruiting teams are applying AI to their processes:

• Automation: Automate routine tasks in recruiting through training autopilot systems, relieving recruiters of repetitive work. Example: Are there activities that you already do on autopilot that you could train up an AI tool to do for you?
• Detection: AI systems have the ability to extract valuable insights from vast amounts of data and have the ability to identify important patterns and information. Example: You’ve just run an interview and you know you didn’t cover the third competency. AI can be used to intervene and let the next interviewer know that it needs to be asked.
• Decisioning / Intervention: There is ongoing debate and caution regarding AI's role in decision-making. Example: Using ChatGPT to make a job description. You are still responsible for the quality of the JD and there is still a need for human ownership and review.

We’re excited about the potential of AI to help recruiters do more of the things they love to do. Many teams are still very much in the experimenting phase with new tools, and existing ATS, CRM, and sourcing vendors are adding in more and more automation capabilities. Going into the second half of the year and thinking ahead to 2024 planning, leaders will need to start evaluating priorities and balance their investments across the recruiting tech stack. If you are looking for a partner, Growth by Design has helped companies through this process from design, development and implementation. Let us know if you’d like to learn more!

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