Launched in November 2022, ChatGPT is an exciting new prototype Artificial Intelligence Chatbot developed by an organization called OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research laboratory co-founded by Elon Musk.

ChatGPT is a next-generation conversational AI that distinguishes itself from the more superficial chatbots you may have prior experience with, by being able to provide a very realistic and human-like conversational experience. In simple terms, you type in questions, and it gives informed answers which seem like they were written by a human. It has been widely lauded as the main competitor to the Google search engine, with the concept that when you get the answer to your search question, most users stop searching and clicking, bringing into question google pay per click revenue model.

A Guardian newspaper tech journalist reviewed it and noted it gave ‘impressively detailed’ and ‘human-like’ text responses to random questions. It appears to offer more than Bixby and Siri which answers questions by simply reading out text from other search engine sources.  ChatGPT actually constructs an intelligent answer appropriate to the question, using information from its knowledge base.

Excited by the potential of this tool our burning question is how ChatGPT can be used to augment, automate, and transform the hiring process. So, we put it to the test!

12 Ways ChatGPT can help with recruitment and sample use cases

1. Create an interview question bank by role or interview type

For example, you simply type into ChatGPT a question like, ‘Create a list of 20 questions for my interview with a CFO?’, and it will provide 20 CFO position-specific questions, covering a range of dimensions, suitable for use in a CFO interview, (see image). You can modulate the question for more specificity: for example, you can ask for 20 behavioural questions or ask it to provide questions that are specific to a banking sector CFO, and it does that perfectly well. Some of the best results we found were for competency or situational judgement tests. A real time saver for busy hiring managers and an opportunity to level-up your interview approach.

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2. Candidate Searching

Write Boolean search strings

Creating a Boolean string is another application of ChatGPT in recruitment. From our testing, we got the best result with the below prompt, not overly sophisticated but none the less of value to non-technical recruiters looking to save time.

Prompt: Create a Boolean search string for LinkedIn to identify a financial analyst with experience in large multi national financial institutions. The financial analyst should have experience in Fintech and be based in London. Also include alternative ways in which people may enter their experience as a financial analyst in their LinkedIn profiles.

Result:

Where we found real value was when we combined an element of research within the Boolean search string in ChapGPT, for example we asked it to come up with the names of the top 50 nursing homes in the UK and put these into a string, see example below. This could be a great assist for recruiters doing the initial groundwork for a particular role seeking similar professionals across an industry.

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Get a list of Keywords for a job description

Next, we wanted to add a list of keywords for a job description that we could then use for our candidate search in google.

Prompt: "Act like a researcher. Give me a list of keywords for a job description I will provide you with that I can use to find a candidate for the position. Act like an expert in this field, include additional keywords that may not be in the job description."

The results were very comprehensive and provided us with a list of keywords we can then use in our search.

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3. Write candidate outreach copy

With ChatGPT you can also script an outreach email to engage passive candidates. We added our request, added a link to the job description, included our candidate qualities and below you can find the end result. With some minor tweaking its a decent cold outreach email ready for use.

Prompt:

"I will give you a job description and you will write an email trying to engage the candidate. Begin with their potential interests in career growth, then present the job opportunity. Outline the benefits and use a convincing tone. Use industry terminology. Keep it short, do not use unnecessary words. Be friendly and human in tone. Use call-to-action, add a sense of urgency.
Job: <we pasted from an open role we have Occupop Sales Consultant>

ChatGPT:

Dear [Candidate],

We at Occupop are looking for a highly motivated and driven individual to join our sales team. We are a fast growing tech company that sells cutting edge recruitment technology to clients in Ireland, UK and the US.We believe you have the perfect skillset to join our team and help us to continuously define business sales processes to acquire new users and create leads. You will be responsible for sales prospecting, cold calling, sales demos, networking, relationship building and qualifying prospective clients across the Irish and UK market.

At Occupop, you will have the opportunity to work side by side with highly experienced professionals in a fun environment. We use modern sales tools like Hubspot to enable you to do your job more efficiently. You will also have the chance to learn the ins and outs of software sales with excellent training and mentoring.We offer a dynamic and hands on work environment with lots of opportunity to grow with our 5 level sales progression path meaning promotion is possible every 6 months. Plus, you will be part of our journey as Occupop is a fast growing international start-up recently listed in Ireland's top 100 Start Ups.

If you are interested in joining our team and taking advantage of this great opportunity, please get in touch with us as soon as possible.We look forward to hearing from you soon.

Best Regards, Occupop Team

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To expand on this we also wanted to test out multiple email subject lines to maximise the candidate click through rate. Results of this test are not going to win any recruitment marketing copy awards, but with some tweaks they may have some value.

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4. Conduct hiring market research

We asked ChatGPT to provide us with a market outlook for hiring in the UK for 2023 to help with strategy. You can see in the sample response provided that in our opinion it sounded informed and credible, and the text was well-constructed and read like it was written by a low-level research analyst. Depending on your use case, it will probably require more in-depth research but could provide a good starting point.

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Like what you see here? Check out our full ChatGPT Prompts for Recruitment Library! Browse ChatGPT prompts for hiring managers you can simply copy and paste into ChatGPT. ‍‍

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Create candidate summaries or "write ups" to speed up the candidate shortlisting process

We cut and paste a CV into ChatGPT and it gave us a more easily digestible one-page summary which you can see in the sample. This should be a great time hack for recruiters that need to summarise the experience or give an overview of each candidate on a shortlist.

6. Write job advertisements

We asked ChatGPT to write a job ad for a CFO position in a B2B SaaS Company, and as you can see it delivered a pretty much, ready-to-publish CFO job description that looked like it had been prepared by an HR professional. It also included some sector requirements, e.g., ‘experience in B2B SaaS Industry and the ability to work in a fast-paced environment’. If you are time-pressurised and need to get a good quality job ad up fast, or working as a recruiter but not a natural writer (and those with dylexia) ChatGPT is a very useful tool to have.  

That being said, it does have a generic feel to it, and we would recommend personalising job advertisements to really showcase your employer brand and your company mission values and tone which are of course, unique to you. With this in mind a better approach could be to ask ChatGPT to create a job ad outline and then you could specifically write in the details under each of the headings, as per the below example.

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On further testing, in order to make the job ad more unique, we improved the prompt after seeing the first result and fed it specific context about the company, culture, and role, and ended up modifying a few things to further differentiate it. It sped up our process and the end result was much improved.

7. Writing email templates for recruitment

We asked ChatGPT to write a reply to a rejected applicant’s question about why they didn’t get the job and to do it in a professional and empathetic way, which we think was achieved in the example shown. Admittedly, a human-written autoreply message could also achieve the same end, arguably.  We then asked it to write an empathetic candidate rejection email which was also of a standard matching a human-written autoreply message.

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8. Breakdown a job description complexity

For many non-technical recruiters working in a technical field, it can be quite difficult to get a good understanding of the open role in question, never mind how to interview candidates for these positions. To help with this, we copied and pasted a job description of a Software Engineer into ChatGPT and requested it to "Explain this job description to me like I am a 16 year old". A very handy way to get a better understanding of the role you are interviewing for, fast.

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9. Candidate Assessment

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Assess a candidate against a job spec

Next, we wanted to experiment with different ways we could use ChatGPT for candidate assessment. Our first prompt was to ask Chat GPT to assess a candidate against a job spec, and breakdown his/her suitability against the job spec into a list of pro's and con's.

Prompt: "I will give you a candidate and a job brief. Assess the candidates suitability for the job with a list of 10 pros and cons."

We then copied and pasted the candidate information and the job description into Chapt GPT. See the results below.

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Extract questions from a job description

We then asked ChatGPT to extract questions from a job description. We used the following prompt.

Prompt: "I will give you a a job description. Extract interview questions from this job description to ask a candidate in an interview."

Again using our software engineering job description we got the below results. This proved to be another really good time hack for busy recruiters that may be interviewing across multiple roles at once.

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10. Candidate engagement

We wanted to see how ChatGPT would respond to a disappointed candidate’s request for information on future similar openings at the company. Again, as you see a good, empathetic professional response was given and it felt like the generic reply that a typical HR administrator might provide.

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Want more prompts like these, specifically for talent acquisition? Check out our full ChatGPT in Recruitment Prompt Library here! Browse ai prompts created by hiring managers, for hiring managers.

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11. Employer brand EVP

Next, we wanted to see how well it could create an ‘employer-brand EVP for a software company, and it did it well enough! The EVP it created was detailed, convincing, and inspiring and met the standard of the typical middle-of-the-range EVP we’d see out there. You could use it as is at a stretch, but most likely you would use it as a starting template, and this could save time in the hiring value chain.

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12. Missions and values statement

Finally, we tested Chat/GPT to see how well it could respond to our request to develop a company mission and value statement. Again, it produced a statement that would pass as a human-written statement for most companies, as you can see. Job done? Maybe not quite. You could use it as is, but most likely you’d want to do a lot more strategic research and refinement before coming to this end point.

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13. Write a hiring themed radio jingle

Finally, just for fun we requested ChatGPT to script us a jingle for a radio recruitment advert. The results below speak for themselves!

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Benefits of ChatGPT for Recruitment

A.    Automation of recruitment processes & Tasks

ChatGPT can automate some of the simple HR admin tasks extremely well. For example, when creating interview questions, doing CV summaries, writing job ads, and writing email templates ChatGPT pretty much passed the Turing test: it wasn’t obvious this was AI-generated copy. Some of the more advanced content tasks on EVP and mission statements work great as automated templates but would need refinement by a strategic HR professional.

B.     Improved candidate experience

This tool can enable time-pressurised managers to quickly populate autoresponders with professional and empathetic responses, providing incremental gains on candidate experience. Once its code is actually integrated into an autoresponder, ChatGPT will be able to automate candidate communication in a humanistic way.

C.     Increased efficiency

ChatGPT’s ability to create high-quality copy templates for specific parts of the hiring value chain will eliminate/minimize manual HR writing tasks and increase efficiency. Again, once incorporated into an autoresponder it can automate candidate experience and increase efficiency.

Challenges of Using ChatGPT for Recruiting

A.    Cost

ChatGPT is a raw Opensource product now which is still in the beta stage. While it has some immediate practical applications it is not ready to be fully incorporated into the real-life hiring process. As it stands it would need a costly bespoke integration with an autoresponder to fully automate the candidate experience.

B.    Lack of human interaction

Rejected candidates may be quick to judge if they feel they are being denied the dignity of a human rebuttal and feel they are being fobbed off with a heartless AI.

Recruiting must think carefully before taking candidate experience down that AI rabbit hole: a naturalistic recruiting chatbot adding interaction-appropriate responses where none previously existed is arguably value-adding.

But overuse of ChatGPT in situations where human interaction is desired and appropriate and where its responses are notably inferior to a human will cause frustration and diminish the candidate experience.

C.     Potential for bias

Reports such as this one in Fortune Magazine, entitled AI’s Bias Problem, have highlighted that although AI can imitate human interaction it can amplify human prejudices. AI-powered apps developed by the likes of Microsoft (Tay) and Google (image recognition technology) are an example of two AI-powered apps that have been shown to exhibit racial bias.  There are two ways that bias enters the system according to Andy Mauro, Co-founder of Automat another conversational AI tool. “There’s the programmer path where the programmer’s bias can leech into the system, or it’s a learned system where the bias is coming from data. If the data isn’t diverse enough, then there can be bias baked in. It’s a huge problem and one that we all need to think about.”

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For more prompts like these, join the ChatGPT for Recruitment Community on LinkedIn! A great repository of ideas on prompts, test results, hacks, resources and discussion on using ChatGPT in recruitment.

Conclusion

Although still in beta testing ChatGPT is an exciting tool that nonetheless has the functionality to automate the production of administrative tasks to drive the hiring value chain. We do not expect it, at this stage with GPT 3.5, to be anywhere near replacing people or work, with many of the tasks still best left to humans, but it most definitely has a huge opportunity to make us all more efficient. We think some of the tasks we tested such as creating a hiring question bank, candidate outreach, job ads, Boolean searches, can provide huge starting points for many hiring managers at the very least.  

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‍Meet Occupop

Occupop is a beautifully simple recruitment software built for small and mid-sized businesses. We empower our customers to become great at hiring through our smart hiring technology and suite of solutions that almost anyone can use. So whether you're a team of five or fifty, it only takes a few minutes to onboard your team members, set permissions, and start recruiting. Try Occupop, the recruitment software for small business today with a free 14-day trial. We’ll have you up and hiring in hours, not days.

Want to know some of the advatages of investing in an ATS system like Occupop? We'll let ChatGPT answer for us!

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 Make sure to join our community of hiring managers sharing recruitment use cases prompts and browse the library of prompts for recruitment here.

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