Four ways to use ChatGPT in IT recruitment [Practical Tips]

At the start of 2023, when discussions about ChatGPT were everywhere, our IT talent advisor Karolina Numminen started thinking about whether it could be useful for recruiting, and, if so, how.

“I was sceptical about dystopian predictions of how AI will replace us, but I saw great potential in ChatGPT to help me be more productive in my day-to-day work.”

Karolina attended a few webinars on the topic, started to use ChatGPT regularly, and identified four key areas where she sees tremendous value in using ChatGPT as a recruiter:

1. Jumping off point

Writing is a surprisingly common part of a recruiter’s job, be it a job ad, outreach message, email, or even a blog post (wink wink). Since my thesis-writing days, I have had a deep-rooted hatred for staring at a blank page, unable to type a single letter. ChatGPT can do wonders to cure this paralysis. Give it a few prompts regarding what you need and take it forward from there. Word of caution: your touch is required here if you don’t want to end up with a generic message that will not get the result you are after. Remember, it’s a jumping-off point, not a way to outsource all your communication.

2. Getting a second opinion

Related to the previous point, getting a second opinion on a text you produced is another handy use case. You can ask for improvement suggestions, or tell ChatGPT to incorporate the changes directly into the text. For example, when your outreach message is not getting as many replies, you can copy-paste the message to chatGPT and ask for an opinion or ways to make your text more engaging, easy to read, and stand out, etc. I also found out that it doesn’t hurt to flatter ChatGPT a bit. Strangely enough, this does actually produce better output. You can, for example, start your prompt with ‘imagine you are the world’s best recruiter who always gets a 100% response rate’.

3. Playing around with the output and tonality

If you struggle with the 1900-character limit in your InMails, you can let chatGPT do the dirty work of word-cutting. This is especially useful if you are like me, and can’t shake off the feeling that every single word in your InMail is a pure gem that couldn’t possibly be left out (ChatGPT will prove you wrong within seconds). You can ask to adjust the length (a specific number of characters, words, sentences, or paragraphs). Additionally, you can check your message’s tonality to ensure your text is inclusive and appeals to a diverse range of candidates.

4. Learning about technology and understanding the lingo

Even though we have all been told that ‘there are no stupid questions,’ some of us might still feel a bit iffy about asking the difference between frontend and backend developers after years in IT recruitment. Well, guess what, for ChatGPT, there literally are no stupid questions. I am proud to admit that ‘explain it to me like I am a child,’ ‘explain it to me in one paragraph using a simple language,’ and ‘explain it to me using a simple metaphor’ have been rather common in my late afternoon discussions with ChatGPT.

On top of understanding the different technologies, engaging in these discussions with ChatGPT can help you learn how to talk about technology. This can be very useful in drafting outreach messages, screenings, or interviews to sound more natural and have better discussions with candidates

Practical tips:

• Have a tab with ChatGPT open at all times, and try to test it out in as many cases as possible.
  

• Give yourself time to learn how to write the right prompts to get the desired result. Try asking the same questions in several different ways. Using ChatGPT for your hobbies, such as asking for recipes, book or movie recommendations, or travel itineraries, can also be helpful. This can make you more comfortable chatting with a robot.​
  

• Use the OpenAI Playground instead of ChatGPT if you experience frequent outages​.
  

• ChatGPT ‘remembers’ your discussion within the same session, so you can follow up on the previous topic and ask for additional tweaks to any prior output.​
  

• The amount of information on this topic can be overwhelming. Yet it’s vital to keep up to date. Pick a few reliable resources (ideally related to using ChatGPT in recruitment) and check them regularly. Here are 3 that I would recommend: Robin Choy, Cassie Kozyrkov, or José Kadlec.​
  

It is natural to feel some resistance to adopting this new technology, and you might argue that you can do just fine without ChatGPT. But remember that this is not a competition of humans vs. machines. To judge the quality of the output, you need to have a strong background and knowledge of recruitment processes and best practices.

This technology can help make you faster, and more efficient, freeing your time and mental capacity for more value-adding activities, such as improving the candidate experience. 

There is a lot of ongoing debate regarding the use of ChatGPT, but two things are for sure: this technology is here to stay, and the speed of progress is staggering. Luckily for us, jumping on the train is still relatively simple. 

So why not sit back and let machines take over just a little bit?

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