Beyond Basic Prompts: How GAI Can Help Make You a Better Recruiter
In many ways, generative AI is like an eager new assistant, showing off all it can do and the ways it can help. The new technology has proven it can write and carry on a conversation; find, match, and reach out to talent; and screen applicants. In the short time it’s been publicly available, it’s learned to do much more than that, and will soon be helping with even more new tasks.
“So recruiters and talent professionals like you need to be thinking about how this kind of technology will affect your current role and career path,” says Glen Cathey, senior vice president of talent advisory and digital strategy at Randstad, “and how it will reshape the talent acquisition process and experience for everyone involved, applicants, employees, and hiring managers included.”
LinkedIn Recruiter, for example, can help talent professionals with AI-assisted messages, follow-ups, job targeting, job posting, and search, as well as insights that compare key hiring metrics for InMail, jobs, and usage. Already, candidate outreach messages drafted with AI-assisted messages have seen a 40% increase in InMail acceptance rates compared with messages that AI didn’t touch.
There’s a big wide world of things that AI can do to help talent pros, which Glen elaborates upon in his LinkedIn Learning course Generative AI, Recruiting, and Talent Acquisition. His course covers everything from the different forms of GAI to how GAI can boost internal mobility. To learn more about how you can use GAI beyond basic prompts, read on.
1. Familiarize yourself with all the AI tools available
By now, most people have heard of ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and Claude. You’ve probably also tried the AI-assisted features in Linkedin Recruiter. But what about Synthesia, Midjourney, and HeyGen? These AI solutions can help with a variety of tasks, such as image, music, and video generation.
There are literally hundreds of GAI models in existence, including large language models (LLMs) (which is what ChatGPT is) that can be custom-developed by HR tech providers or your own IT staff. “The LLMs specifically customized for HR-related use,” Glen says, “can perform better than general models for certain tasks.”
But publicly available tools still have plenty to offer. Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, for example, can turn simple text into stunning images. Synthesia and HeyGen can generate videos of human-looking avatars, complete with voiceovers in more than 100 languages.
You might want to try these tools to create personalized images or videos the next time you reach out to a candidate. And, of course, if you’re sending a note or quick message, turn to LinkedIn’s AI-Assisted Messages. Most likely, you’ll increase your chances of getting a reply.
2. Use GAI to refine tricky job descriptions
While job descriptions seem like the low-hanging fruit of GAI tasks, you may be surprised at how helpful the technology can be.
With LinkedIn’s AI-assisted job descriptions, recruiters can provide basic information such as job title, job location, company, workplace type, and job type — and AI will help craft a job posting. You can also enhance your job description by choosing someone in your network who has similar skills to what you’re looking for and incorporating these skills into the job description with one click.
If you need to refine job descriptions even further — or you need to write a job post for a role with complex challenges — you can lean into generative AI such as Copilot or ChatGPT.
Sunkee Lee, an associate professor of organizational theory and strategy at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business, explores this in a recent paper, using the example of a (theoretical) Pittsburgh company that needs to hire engineers for a self-driving car software startup. The task seems straightforward, except that Pittsburgh doesn’t have enough of the computer vision engineers needed to develop this kind of software.
So, after Sunkee asks ChatGPT to write a basic job description, he refines his request further with this prompt:
There is a limited pool of computer vision engineers already residing in Pittsburgh. I would like to tailor the job description above to emphasize the advantages of relocating to Pittsburgh, thereby enticing talent from other geographical areas. Especially, I want to hire talent who currently live in the Bay Area in San Francisco. Could you rewrite the job description for me?
In its reply, ChatGPT offers a new job description that highlights the advantages of living in Pittsburgh versus the Bay Area. These include a thriving tech ecosystem, better cost of living, work-life balance, and the city’s cultural and educational offerings.
3. Ask GAI to generate interview questions and skills assessments for jobs that are new to your company
Because everything is changing so quickly in the workplace, companies are hiring for roles that they’ve never had before — and in some cases, didn’t even exist until recently. How do you write interview questions for these roles, when you’re just learning what the job entails?
Ask GAI for help. Continuing with the example above, Sunkee suggests a prompt for ChatGPT:
I am a manager at a self-driving software company. My company is trying to hire a computer vision engineer to develop self-driving software. You are an HR expert. What are the 10 interview questions that I can ask candidates to better assess their skills and knowledge for developing self-driving software?
ChatGPT responds with a list that includes everything from asking the candidate to explain the “fundamental concepts of computer vision as it relates to self-driving software” to the question, “Can you explain the role of lidar, radar, and cameras in a self-driving car’s sensor suite?”
Sunkee then prompts ChatGPT to suggest a coding task that could test a candidate’s ability to develop self-driving software. ChatGPT’s reply: Ask the candidate to develop a Python program that can process a video stream from a vehicle’s perspective and perform the tasks of lane detection and vehicle tracking.
It’s a great suggestion — and one that may not be obvious to someone just learning about the role.
4. Encourage hiring managers to use GAI for their recruiting tasks
“What if hiring managers could use technology to perform nearly all necessary recruiting tasks in as little as 15 minutes per day? Glen asks in his LinkedIn Learning course. “Well with gen AI and intelligent automation, it may actually be possible.”
Glen suggests that GAI could offer a “conversational interface” that allows hiring managers to quickly create and post job descriptions, and change them as needed, based on talent supply and diversity insights. The interface could also help hiring managers assess applicants, schedule screens and interviews, and craft and negotiate offers — all with a few clicks.
While it may sound wildly futuristic to negotiate offers via AI, Walmart has been using AI chatbots to negotiate terms with vendors for a while now and has found that 75% of suppliers prefer working with AI than with a human. “Using AI in the negotiation process,” Glen says, “helps to avoid unconscious bias, contributing to more equitable outcomes and pay. AI also compensates for the fact that most people aren’t negotiation experts, and it can address differences in negotiation styles across gender and cultural lines. This ensures a fairer, more consistent approach to offer negotiations, leveling the field for all candidates.”
5. Enlist GAI’s help to promote internal mobility
“While some companies have a well-meaning approach to internal mobility by offering employees access to an internal job board for them to search, this is a far from ideal experience,” Glen says. “It’s also quite limited and inefficient.”
But GAI can improve the experience. The technology can have a “conversation” with employees as they build their internal job board profiles, recommending content based on an employee’s past and current work experience, and prompting them to share their interests and career growth aspirations.
Then, Glen says, the tool can use these profiles to suggest “hyperpersonalized and hyperrelevant” job recommendations. It can also perform a skills gap analysis between the employee’s profile and the roles they’re interested in, and recommend a personalized learning and development plan to bridge those gaps.
LinkedIn’s recently launched Next Role Explorer does exactly this. Next Role Explorer recommends potential roles inside an employee’s company based on their current title and career goals. It then offers customizable “role guides” to help employees understand the specific skills they need to succeed in a role — and suggests learning plans to close their most critical skills gaps.
Final thoughts: Recruiters still play a crucial role
As AI helps talent pros with more recruiting tasks, Glen says, one way to future-proof your career is to specialize in high-demand, low-supply talent, where talent acquisition professionals will continue to play a crucial role. But even without specializing, human recruiters still have plenty to offer.
The best recruiters excel at taking the time to figure out what motivates a candidate or matters to them most. And even though GAI can emulate empathy, humans are much more able to develop the caring, back-and-forth relationship required to make a high quality hire. “That,” Glen says, “is still the domain of humans.”
