AI And Recruiting: 7 Key Takeaways From Our Recent Webinar

One of the first things our speakers discussed was the rise in demand for AI talent, which is growing every year. According to Evie-Rose Deighan, Talent Director for Alphabet, a recent LinkedIn Insights search revealed that there were 3,500 people in the US with “AI engineer” or “AI researcher” in their job title. Demand for this talent is deemed “extremely high”. 

While Evie stressed that we should view this data with skepticism, it’s undeniable that demand for AI talent is growing fast. In fact, a recent Reuters report found that generative AI-related job postings in the US jumped by 20% in May 2023. 

Evie also pointed out that the last AI boom, between 2011 and 2019, created more jobs than it destroyed. Going forward, we’ll likely see more and more jobs related to AI opening up —  meaning competition for this talent will be fierce.

According to Elena Stefanopol, Director of Recruiting at Labelbox, the AI revolution will see the talent marketplace divided into two groups: those who embrace AI tools, and those who don’t. The first group will leverage tools such as LLMs (large language models) to become more efficient in their work. But the other group, who are more resistant to change, will likely be left behind. 

“I don’t think that’s going to go super well for that group,” Elena said. “My recommendation is to embrace it, and see things through a lens of curiosity and exploration.” [09:07]

Business Insider reported in May that some companies are now paying up to $375,000 per year for “prompt engineers”. These professionals — many of whom don’t come from a tech background — work with AI chatbots such as ChatGPT to improve their responses. 

There’s no doubt that AI will continue to create new roles as the technology develops. But that doesn’t mean that tech recruiters need to be looking for AI skills for every role.  Elena stressed that the principles of recruiting remain the same, whether or not AI is in the mix. Instead of getting distracted by the new “shiny thing”, recruiters should stick to the methods that have always worked. 

“My recommendation for hiring generally is to really take a look at what you need. What you have on the team already, and the gap between that and what you need to be able to deliver on your product roadmap.” [11:51]

According to the Wall Street Journal, AI startups received $12.7 billion in venture funding in the first five months of 2023, compared to just $4.8 billion in all of 2022. These days, there are new AI startups popping up every week. And many of them offer tools that recruiters can use to enhance their processes. 

But with so many options out there, both Elena and Evie think talent leaders should think carefully before adding new tools to their tech stacks — AI or no AI. 

“As a talent leader, I need to make sure that my team has everything they need to be successful and not overwhelm them with all the stuff out there,” Elena said. “I need to be the curator for them, make sure that everything connects well, that it doesn’t break, and that we don’t lose candidates — and that we have a great candidate experience.”

Elena also mentioned the time commitment that working with too many AI tools can represent: “We worked with someone who was at the ideation phase for a product for recruiting. It was an interesting experience, but it was a lot of time invested.” [35:27]

Not every recruiter will embrace AI in the same way. Some are naturally resistant to change, while others just lack the time to spend learning about new tools. But having an AI advocate on the team can help get more reluctant colleagues on board. 

At Labelbox, Elena’s team included one person who was an early adopter of ChatGPT, and who spent time figuring out how they could best put it to work before taking their ideas to the rest of the team. This person even held a session for other recruiters on the best ways to use ChatGPT, specific to the team and the projects they were working on. 

“It’s been a very cool thing to see my team sharing and learning from each other,” Elena says. And Elena also shared a neat trick for learning about AI technology: ask ChatGPT! “You can say, ‘Explain large language models to me like I’m five’. And it simplifies it so much! It’s interesting: you can use these tools that you might be skeptical about to learn how things work.” [21:36]

It’s not just recruiters who are using AI to gain time and meet their goals — candidates are catching on too. In fact, Elena and her team at Labelbox have had to adapt their interview processes after realizing that some candidates were using ChatGPT to formulate answers. 

“We took all of our interview questions and asked our interviewers to go through those exercises with ChatGPT,” Elena explained. “We ended up eliminating a few of them just because they were so easy, ChatGPT immediately got it.”

In short, it comes down to redesigning processes to ensure that you’re asking questions that only a human can answer. 

“You need to go deeper and ask lots of questions,” Elena said. “Investigate how they think about answering the whole question. What’s their thinking process? What’s their approach? What’s their structure?” 

And, both Elena and Evie agree that recruiters shouldn’t judge candidates harshly for using tools such as ChatGPT — especially if they’re honest about it. 

“Ultimately, you want your employees, your engineers, to be most efficient with their work,” Evie said. “So it seems counterproductive to say ‘you can’t use these tools to get the job’.”

Elena agrees: “Let’s embrace it. Let’s not pretend we’re better than everyone else, because we use the same tools.” [30:01]

AI is undoubtedly a powerful tool. But both of our speakers were clear on one thing: AI is not about to replace human recruiters. 

“The human touch is one of the biggest, most important things in hiring,” Elena said. “Because we can automate, we can bring all the tools that we need, but people are still going to work with people. And they need to get an idea of what that would look like if they were to join your company.”

Of course, what AI can do is automate many of the repetitive admin tasks that currently take up a lot of a recruiter’s time. This gives recruiters back the time they need to focus on their candidates. 

“Recruitment is really about understanding what a human wants,” Evie said. “What they want in their life, their work… and that’s something that’s really exciting, because the more time that we can spend in understanding a person, being able to talk to them more, it’s going to increase our ability to hire the right people, and impact other metrics that are important to us, like quality of hire.” 

The bottom line is that, while AI tools will be a welcome addition to many recruiters’ belts, there are some things that only a human recruiter can do. 

“Being human can mean a lot of different things,” Elena said, “But I think that empathy is really hard to automate”. [40:08]

To find out more about how AI tools are impacting recruitment, check out our recent article on six ways recruiters can start using AI to enhance their processes and improve their results today.