AI in Recruiting

Greetings, fellow industry leaders! (Sorry, that was written by ChatGPT. I asked it to infuse a little “thought leadership” into this month’s newsletter, but that kind of lead-in was decisively not what I was going for. I decided to scrap its input.)

These days, Viget’s Slack channel devoted to sharing AI updates lights up a couple times a day: funny AI-related tweets, internal experiments with generating Terraform code, chilling deepfakes, and of course, hot takes. During Pointless Palooza last week, one team explored how DALL-E could help generate character ideas for Vigety comics; for a separate project, the team trained an AI to think, act, and respond like a honey-loving Viget-aware bear named Pointy.

Depending on the article or experiment being shared, the majority of AI things fall into the categories of “this is scary,” “this is cool,” or “I’m excited to see how this will eventually manifest in my work.”

On the recruiting side of things, it’s already manifesting.

Job applicants are increasingly leaning on generative AI in their workflow – it’s showing up most obviously in cover letters, though candidates have shared their enthusiasm for leveraging AI in other aspects of the search. (One candidate proactively shared an example of how they used DALL-E for a personal project – it was fabulous and trippy.) And why shouldn’t candidates be leveraging tools like ChatGPT to ameliorate the process? The job search is tough, and increasingly so in the current market. What we want to see more than anything is that applications are honest, informative, and reflective of what a candidate will bring to the table.

Outside of cover letters, I’m eager to uncover more ways that AI might help improve the candidate experience and our own workflows – without sacrificing accuracy or humanity.