Recruiters' Perspectives on AI in Job Application Content

People are quickly discovering AI as a powerful way to augment and accelerate their job search efforts by overcoming the often mechanical and robotic application process. Brilliant! Good for them. Recruiting functions are being overwhelmed by applications and the threat of potential bot applicants. Predictable but legitimate and understandable challenge. To combat this trend, a growing number of companies are looking for AI to filter out candidates suspected of using AI in their applications. Wait, WHAT!?! If you’re considering this at your company, please take a strategic pause. Few things to consider. First, if someone or something is making it all the way to offer without a legitimate human interaction, you may want to scrap your entire TA approach and start over. Second, trying to detect AI specifically trained to mimic human behavior and language will leave you eliminating more qualified human candidates than it is catching AI criminals. Finally, consider why you would legitimately want to eliminate a candidate already demonstrating one of the most critical job skills for the modern age: AI problem-solving. Here is some additional food for thought. If you’re legitimately getting overwhelmed by what you believe are AI applications, it’s an indication your application process is far too robotic today, which is why it’s such an easy target. Accept that the robotic parts are what they are: a check-the-box activity. Make them quick and easy for a human and move on. After that, explore how you can augment your robotic process by using AI to assess skills versus someone’s head knowledge or ability to fill out a form. AI is making realistic job simulations scalable. Wouldn’t you rather have a better indication of the person’s ability to perform the job anyway? From there, ensure you maintain plenty of human oversight in your process. I agree AI can automate and speed things up, but in the AI age, interpersonal and human skills are what you need from humans, so make sure you have humans involved in hiring other humans for human work. The AI future has so much potential for good, but not when we use it as a quick fix to plug cracks in a broken dam. Instead, we need to see how it can reimagine solutions to the root problems. #BigIdeas2024

Recruiting leaders in our community have wrestled with how to balance AI-enabled candidates. We worked with a team that's hiring a data analyst to develop an approach to assess for SQL skills. Here's how we structured the process to try to balance the very likely possibility of candidates using AI tools. First, making use of new tools has always been disruptive to recruiting and is the exciting part of moving our collective work forward. On the one hand, when you have someone join your team you want them to be resourceful and efficient. This is a really positive and great thing! On the other hand, you also want to make sure they understand how things work and use their individual creativity to think of new and novel solutions. Here's the process we're trying: Take-home assignment Data: we provided the database schema and sample set of data of typical recruiting data - jobs, applications, offers Questions: we asked a series of questions about the data for common use cases to test both recruiting intuition and hard skills. For example, calculating offer acceptance rates test for their intuition on anchoring to the appropriate date, handling candidates with multiple offers, and joining tables to get to a good answer. So yes, candidates can and will likely use some 'assistance' but AI responses are only as good as the prompt. Assuming the logic and explanation make sense, you can then dig deeper at onsite. Onsite interview Test their understanding by continuing to build upon the take-home assignment in a live interview. For example, pull up a candidate's response to calculating offer acceptance rates and ask them to adapt it to group by each department. If they didn't write it or understand their initial take-home response, it will be very evident in the live interview. However, someone that understood the result and just used AI to build it faster could demonstrate how to make the adjustments Curiosity - a characteristic of a high performing analyst is their level of curiosity. When given a dataset they can't help but explore it beyond the prompt. It's like an artist with paint and a canvas, the possibilities! So a great open question to assess for both curiosity and recruiting domain knowledge is to ask what other questions they have about the data, the process that drives the inputs, or other metrics that could be derived. What techniques are you trying to find a healthy balance to assess AI-enabled candidates?

Dear #candidates: HOW you use AI to apply for the job . . . tells me a lot about how you will use AI in the job. Dear #hiringmanagers: I'll assume your inbox is flooded with clearly #AI-generated outreach from candidates. Don't get me wrong . . . I love AI! I value people who use AI when applying for a job. Just don't abuse it. Here's my do's and don'ts, what would you add? Do: ✅ Use AI to summarize and dig into financial reports to ensure you deeply understand their business goals. ✅ Use AI to understand your prospective employers industry - who are their competition? What are the top 3 things keeping up execs in that industry? ✅ Use AI to practice interview questions, and ask it to really critique and refine your answers. Don't: ❌ Use "apply with AI" and allow AI to decide what is in your application submission. ❌ Use AI to tailor your resume to the job role automatically, and then apply using it - without checking it. ❌ Use AI to send hundreds of messages to hiring managers that are clearly one-click templates. If you're looking for a role - applying for a job is your opportunity to demonstrate your mastery of this incredibly powerful tool! 📈 Multiply your impact using the power of AI! Anything else is just first-impression mediocrity at scale. PS - I wrote this all by myself. :)

I recently polled yall about using AI in the job search, and I was surprised by how many of you messaged me wondering if it was a trick question - and if recruiters are actually okay with folks using AI in their job search. My response is both - yes, you can (and maybe should!) use it - BUT - you should strike a balance between leveraging AI assistance and showcasing your authentic voice. Here’s my take on using AI with writing support (since that had the most votes!): AI can be an excellent tool for: 🔹Overcoming writer’s block: Bard (I prefer it to Chat GPT for writing advice!) helps me get started with my writing, and this could be a good starting point if you don’t know where to begin with your resumes or cover letters 🔹Making your writing more inclusive: AI can suggest ways to improve your word choice and representation. 🔹Shortening your writing: Bard gives me some ideas on making my writing more concise (and Bard really hates my use of hyphens & parentheses - but I can’t quit those!) 💭However, AI shouldn’t replace your own thoughts and experiences. When reviewing applications, I want to understand your unique perspective and how you can contribute to the role. If you just copy and paste AI-generated content, it doesn't allow me to assess your true skills and genuine interest in the opportunity. Here are some flags that I see that might indicate a candidate is using 100%AI-generated content: 🔺Overly verbose sentences with excessive adverbs (Chat GPT loves a multi-adverb sentence!) 🔺Lengthy bulleted lists with generic statements (I see this a lot under our application questions “Why are you interested in working at Merit America? Why this role?") 🔺It has an unnatural tone and style that doesn’t sound like a human wrote it 🤖(ie - overly formal or stiff language, repetitive sentence structures, and a lack of personal anecdotes or opinions) Chat GPT/Bard, when used responsibly, can make the hiring process less intimidating; however, it’s important to remember that these tools are supplements, not replacements, for human judgment and authenticity. So, yes, feel free to use Chat GPT or Bard to your advantage - but don’t let them become your sole voice - AI shouldn’t overshadow your unique perspectives. As a hiring manager, I want to hear your authentic voice 🤍 #AIinHiring #AuthenticityinJobSearch #JobSearchTips #FutureofRecruiting #JobSeekerTips #Hiring #Recruiting