How will ChatGPT impact hiring and the recruitment industry?

So, if you haven’t used it yet, or (alas!) even heard about it, OpenAI ’s ChatGPT is a chatbot model which interacts in a conversational way. OK, so it doesn’t necessarily sound that ground-breaking. But, once you start interacting with ChatGPT, you suddenly get a glimpse of what the future looks like. To put it simply, you ask questions or start conversations, and ChatGPT is able to give informed answers and responses as if they were written by a human. The dialogue format makes it possible to answer follow up questions, admit its mistakes and reject inappropriate requests. Wowsers!

I must admit, I’ve been a bit addicted to it… sometimes when the right sentence or phrase isn’t coming to mind, and you need a bit of a nudge with some marketing content – it’s certainly got the right ideas! But, it got me thinking, how will this affect such a human to human process such as hiring, and more specifically the recruitment industry?

In a forever developing technical world, we are still worshippers of the “CV”. It’s more than likely the first impression you have of a candidate, and decides whether you think that person is skilled or qualified to do the job and whether you are going to interview them. Particularly if organisations are not partnered with a recruitment agency or do not have a dedicated in-house talent team, they will usually be reliant on someone from HR picking out key words and phrases. But when you have ChatGPT to compose you a word perfect CV, I think it is going to make shortlisting candidates extremely difficult for those without the time or expertise to screen them efficiently. I asked ChatGPT to write me an introduction for my CV as a “Compliance Manager” – and it is pretty impressive! *copies and pastes to CV immediately*

Will this therefore make the recruiters role even more fundamental in the hiring process? Yep, I think it will. Having that dedicated team to screen candidates face to face or via video call is going to be even more paramount when we have some seriously impressive CVs coming in to our inboxes and who are not necessarily the right fit for the organisation.

On the flip side, I think it could be a fantastic tool for recruiters and hiring managers to utilise on a day to day basis. Administrative tasks are probably a recruiters nemesis. In the absence of large back office functions to compose searches, write job adverts and produce your branded marketing copy, this stuff usually is a chore for the average recruiter. That’s where ChatGPT can suddenly step up. I asked ChatGPT to compose a basic Boolean search string for me based on a few key bits of information. Again, impressive!

The possibilities with this are endless.

Need a quick email that you can send to a hiring manager? ChatGPT has got your back…

I think in summary, it could really transform the life of the day to day recruiter; assisting with the more administrative sides of the role such as writing job descriptions, composing marketing copy and giving you the starting point to some very good email drafts amongst others.

However, when it comes to hiring for organisations, it’s going to also make their lives that little more difficult. I think this will be the end of remote technical tests (Yep, ChatGPT delivers some spookily “human” responses when provided with the most obscure questions), and will create a greater need for hiring managers to prepare robust screening questions at face to face/screen to screen interviews.

Will it replace the recruiter? No, I think it will do the opposite; it will highlight the need for organisations to partner with a specialist recruiter who really knows their stuff, and who can dedicate time and their expertise in to proper screening methodologies.

It’s still early days for ChatGPT, so lets watch this space!

Silvana Hawkes , Compliance and Operations Manager, DigiTech Resourcing Limited