Employers are embracing automated hiring tools, but prospective employees have AI-powered techniques of their own.
What’s new: Job seekers are using large language models and speech-to-text models to improve their chances of landing a job, Business Insider reported. Some startups are catering to this market with dedicated products.
How it works: Text generators like ChatGPT can help candidates quickly draft resumes, cover letters, and answers to application questions. But AI can also enable a substitute — human or automated — to stand in for an applicant.
- Services like LazyApply, SimplifyJobs, and Talentprise find jobs, track and sort listings, and help write resumés and cover letters. London-based AiApply offers similar tools as well as one that conducts mock interviews.
- Tech-savvy interviewees are using speech-to-text models to get real-time help as an interview is in progress. For instance, Otter.ai is an online service designed as a workplace assistant to take notes, transcribe audio, and summarize meetings. However, during an interview, candidates can send a transcription to a third party who can suggest responses. Alternatively, tools available on GitHub can read Google Meet closed captions, feed them to ChatGPT, and return generated answers.
- San Francisco-based Final Round offers an app that transcribes interview questions and generates suggested responses in real time. For developers, the company is testing a version for coding interviews that captures a screen shot (presumably presenting a test problem) of the current screen and shares it with a code-generation model, which suggests code, a step-by-step explanation of how it works, and test cases.
Behind the news: Employers can use AI to screen resumes for qualified candidates, identify potential recruits, analyze video interviews, and otherwise streamline hiring. Some employers believe these tools reduce biases from human decision-makers, but critics say they exhibit the same biases. No national regulation controls this practice in the United States, but New York City requires employers to audit automated hiring software and notify applicants if they use it. The states of Illinois and Maryland require employers who conduct video interviews to receive an applicant’s consent before subjecting an interview to AI-driven analysis. The European Union’s AI Act classifies AI in hiring as a high-risk application that requires special oversight and frequent audits for bias.
Why it matters: When it comes to AI in recruiting and hiring, most attention – and money – has gone to employers. Yet the candidates they seek increasingly rely on AI to get their attention and seal the deal. A late 2023 LinkedIn survey found that U.S. and UK job seekers applied to 15 percent more jobs than a year earlier, a change many recruiters attributed to generative AI.
We’re thinking: AI is making employers and employees alike more efficient in carrying out the tasks involved in hiring. Misaligned incentives are leading to an automation arms race, yet both groups aim to find the right fit. With this in mind, we look forward to AI-powered tools that match employers and candidates more efficiently so both sides are better off.