6 Ways to Use ChatGPT for Recruiting Today

Even if you have been living in a cave, you’ve heard about ChatGPT by now. The viral sensation reached 1 million users within five days of going live. There are endless conversations about the impact of AI but very few concrete examples of how exactly this will change things.

To that end, I’d like to share with you some of the things you can use ChatGPT for today to help you become a more efficient TA professional. First, it is important to understand what exactly ChatGPT is.

In its own words: “ChatGPT is a language model developed by OpenAI. It is a type of machine learning model that has been trained on a large dataset of human-generated text, and is able to generate text in a similar style. It can be used for a variety of natural language processing tasks, such as language translation, text summarization, and text generation. ChatGPT can be fine-tuned to specific tasks or domains, and can also be integrated into other applications, such as chatbots or virtual assistants.”

It is important to note that while it is free for individual users, the tool itself is not free. However, only businesses using the API to make a large volume of calls will pay, and even then the cost is nominal, but it is important to note that it is not a free tool.

Because you have a million things going on you probably missed that Microsoft has recently announced 10 billion additional investments into the company. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was recently interviewed by Wall Street Journal Editor-in-Chief, Matt Murray at the World Economic Forum and indicated that Open AI would be included in all Microsoft products going forward. He had a lot to say about the future of knowledge work as well. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth a view.

If you have yet to check it out, you can start here. Log in with your Google account or create a new one. I’ve always believed more in show than tell, so without further ado, here are some of the ways to use ChatGPT in your work today.

1. Write an Outreach Email

Now that didn’t seem too… impressive to me. It seems like this is a standard outreach email, and that is the beauty and trick of using ChatGPT effectively. As a best practice, I recommend including three things when you ask ChatGPT-3 to write for you.

One specific, what you want to write, in this case, an outreach email to a python developer. There are two other things that you can ask the AI to do when you get it to write for you. You can also specify the length and “voice.”  While the above email seems generic and plain one extra command can make a difference. Interestingly it can remember what you asked previously, so I added the following command next.

You can tweak and change the email as you want. The interesting thing is that ChatGPT understands things like making it shorter, making it lighthearted, in the voice of Einstein, etc. The only limit is your imagination. I’ve even asked it to write emails in iambic pentameter.

2. Develop a Resume Summary

I put the entire text of my resume in the system, but I will not include the entire text here, within three seconds I had the following from ChatGPT-3:

3. Write Up a Candidate Pitch

The chat also remembers the last thing you asked, so once you have the candidate summary you can use the AI to write the candidate pitch.

4. Write a Job Description

In the first prompt, I asked the system to write a job description for an Oncology RN,  then I asked the AI to modify it and make it shorter, and in the voice of Yoda, this was the outcome.

5. Write and Answer Interview Questions

Yeah, it’s that simple. See just how with this video tutorial.

6. Write a Boolean Search String

While not yet perfect it potentially saves time and requires only a few minor tweaks to be used. I for one am not going to miss out on creating extremely long search strings. The AI took about three seconds to generate this list.

The more specific you are in your request, the better the output will be. You can be prescriptive in what is produced. Some examples of phrases to use include:

• Use strong, persuasive language
• Ask questions between paragraphs
• Speak directly to the reader and make it personal
• Include a call-to-action
• Define the length (In 3 paragraphs, 256 words, shorter, etc.)
• As types of poetry (Sonnet, haiku, iambic pentameter)
• In the voice of, (Steve Jobs, a professional recruiter with 20 years of experience, Yoda)
• Set the tone (Make it funny, light-hearted, sarcastic, foreboding)
• Include or mention (“This specific thing”)

There are a number of good videos being produced on YouTube as well that share additional insights and use cases I strongly encourage you to spend 30 minutes in the next week looking at some of the material available.

Bonus Tip!

Sometimes ChatGPT refuses to cooperate and sometimes it is busy. The system will give you a clever message that the servers are busy and to check back later. When that happens, you can actually go directly to open AI’s playground. It doesn’t have the same restrictions and is much less likely to be unavailable due to traffic. It also allows you to make changes to the parameters that the system answers with.

Final Thoughts

ChatGPT is here to stay, and it is the first in what promises to be a host of AI and large language model tools. As many times in the past, I believe this new technology will change our industry. If you have been in this industry for more than two years, this has become a familiar cadence.

Like tools in the past, the best approach is to learn how to use them rather than to resist them. Undoubtedly we are at the beginning of a new age of AI-powered tools and as years of SCUBA diving have taught me, you can swim in the ocean, but you can’t change it. My advice for anyone reading this article is that it’s time to learn how to swim in the ocean, which is AI. We can’t change what is coming, all we can do is position ourselves as expert users.

Authors

Mike Wolford

Mike Wolford has over 15 years of recruiting experience and is currently the Director of Analytics at Wilson HCG. He has worked with such companies as Allstate, Capital One, NPR and Twitter. Mike has also published 2 books titled “Becoming the Silver Bullet: Recruiting Strategies for connecting with Top Talent,” and “How to Find and Land your Dream Job: Insider tips from a Recruiter.” An active member of the recruiting community, In 2022 Mike spoke both at SourceCon and HRTX in an effort to help elevate the level of professional skills. Follow Mike on Twitter, or connect on LinkedIn.