At The Customer Show Sydney recently we chatted to hundreds of people who visited our stand. The most popular topic everyone wanted to discuss was ChatGPT and AI. How will AI and automation change the contact centre and the way we interact with customers and deliver CX?

The next most pressing concern was how to recruit quality CX and contact centre talent in Australia’s tight job market – which looks like it’s going to persist for some yet despite a slight increase in the unemployment figures recently.

So, we thought we’d put both of these topics together and take a look at how you can use ChatGPT – right now, for free, without buying any new software – to help you with your recruitment process.

1. Write Job Descriptions more quickly

Not all JDs are the same but, after a while, most follow the same pattern. You can save time writing new ones by getting ChatGPT to do the first draft for you.

Open a ChatGPT session and start by giving it some context. Tell it who you are what kind of role you’re recruiting for. Copy and paste some of your existing job descriptions into the chat and ask it to read them so it understands the structure.

Next, describe the position you’re hiring for in short bullet points, and ask it to write a JD. You can give it a word count to hit if you need to meet a character limit.

Here’s the prompt we gave the free ChatGPT 3.5 model and the JD it wrote for us in about 5 seconds:

You can prompt it to use UK / Australian spelling, but as you’re probably just going to use this as a template to edit and personalise, it’s a pretty good start.

2. Write persuasive job ads

First, we asked for a list of keywords we could use to target people who might be interested in this role with our job ads on SEEK, Google and social media. It gave us a comprehensive list including SWPP (Society of Workforce Planning Profession) Certification!

We then asked it to write a compelling job advert for SEEK with several different versions of an attention-grabbing headline, job title and above-the-fold information. Do you think any of these would help your job ad stand out?

3. Search for candidates on LinkedIn

If you’ve ever used LinkedIn and SEEK to search for candidates, you’ll know that you can add umpteen parameters in the search box to narrow things down for you. Unfortunately writing these types of searches with AND and OR statements (what’s called BOOLEAN searches) can be quite a chore. So just tell ChatGPT what you’re looking for in normal language, and it will write the search statement for you.

You might have to reformat the query for different websites but ChatGPT has at least given you the logic here - and you get as complex as you like without having to write the code yourself.

4. Get a summary of candidates’ CVs

One thing ChatGPT and other generative AI Large Language Models do extremely well is summarise information. Copy and paste a candidate’s CV into ChatGPT and it will give you a bullet point or one-paragraph summary of their experience, strengths, and weaknesses.

This can be useful if the shortlisting decision involves numerous people as it will reduce the time they need to spend reading through CVs.

You can even go a step further and paste your job description back into ChatGPT, then paste a candidate’s CV into the chat, and ask the AI to assess the candidate against the JD. ChatGPT can spit out a list of the pros and cons of each candidate.

5. Help with candidate outreach and follow-up

Depending on who you speak to, response from job ads on SEEK and other channels can be as much as ten times less than it was pre-pandemic. This means you need to be more proactive than ever to uncover great candidates.

ChatGPT can help with outreach by drafting email copy you can send to qualified candidates on SEEK and LinkedIn, or by email if you have them in your database of past applicants. Here’s an example of an outreach email we asked ChatGPT to create:

The future of recruitment

All the above are just a few examples of how you can use the free version of ChatGPT right now to help speed up your recruitment workflows. If you pay for a subscription to the latest ChatGPT 4.0 model you get access to multiple apps that enable it to access websites, documents and videos, and integrate with other tools.

This means you could build your own workflows in whatever applications you use. There are also plenty of third-party tools built on ChatGPT coming to market. These help talent professionals identify, assess and reach out to potential candidates more quickly and efficiently than ever before.

As useful as this technology is, it's worth putting it in context. Recruitment is and will always be a people business. If candidates think they are being assessed and rejected by an algorithm – which they increasingly are, when it comes to volume recruitment – they may react negatively to your company. The human touch goes a long way.

As far as possible, every candidate should have some human contact. Precisely because the job market is so tight right now, you need to make the most of the candidates you do find, and give each of them the chance to shine. You never know where the gems are hiding. The CV that your AI cast aside because the candidate had little relevant experience may have been for someone whose personality and attributes made them a perfect fit.

Remember, attracting and retaining the right staff is still predominantly about the quality of your recruitment process and your Employee Value Proposition.

At Tenacity CX we are finding more of our candidates than ever from our extensive network of contacts and via referrals from candidates we have successfully placed. This is one of the major advantages of working with a recruitment partner that focuses exclusively on your sector – contact centres and CX – and has a reputation for quality and relationship building.

If any of that sounds helpful to you, or if you’d like further insights into how to build an Employee Value Proposition and recruitment process fit for today’s tight job market, just give us a call or drop us an email.

Free Report

Download our latest free report "Employee Engagement and Retention in the New World of Work" for a deeper dive into these topics.