It’s no exaggeration to say that Artificial Intelligence has become the predominant hot topic in the world of work in the past 18 months. Despite its ubiquity in industry and national press headlines though, it feels like many of us have yet to feel its positive impact (beyond perhaps wording that tricky email!)
As 2025 opens, we’re looking at the different use cases for generative AI platforms like Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude, and we’ve come up with 5 situations where large-language and computational models could help revolutionise the way you run the talent function in your business - and assess whether the current crop of tools is ready for prime time.
Let’s take an honest and unvarnished look the potential AI has to offer – and some of the risks that might make you think twice.
1) AI-Powered Job Description Optimisation
As we’ve not yet reached the point where AI can do all of the work for us (thank goodness!), it’s safe to say that job descriptions will continue to play a big role in recruitment.
Optimising JDs has always been a personal bugbear of ours. Communicating the details a candidate needs while being concise and snappy, switching codes or registers based on role seniority or sector, keeping them fresh when you’re recruiting for a large number of roles, not to mention navigating the sometimes rough waters of DEI - they’re deceptively difficult to nail consistently.
Thankfully, this is the sort of job that generative AI is really good at. Free options like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude will respond really well to the following prompt:
“Take the following job description and condense it, losing none of the information a potential candidate would find important, matching tone to the level of seniority and making it as clear and attractive as possible. Screen for potential discriminatory biases and advise me accordingly. [Insert your JD here!]”
The output from this will give you a great base to work from – and you can either work with the AI to tweak it or take it away and make any adjustments you need yourself.
The benefits? Your first contact with a potential candidate is slick and magnetic, your applicant pool is more focused and relevant, your time to hire is reduced and, as an employer branding bonus, your prospect gets a positive impression of what your company is all about. But, risks also abound…as more and more people come to rely on generative AI, model-generated text is getting easier and easier to spot. To give the impression of authenticity, you’ll need to invest time in both your promptcrafting (the art of writing a great AI prompt) and copy editing skills to truly stand out from the crowd.
2) AI Enhanced Candidate Sourcing and Screening
Picture this scenario: you’ve identified a pressing need for a very specific role in your business. You know that slotting this function into your team is the missing piece of the puzzle – the one thing that’s holding you back from hitting your goals. The problem is, the role is so specific – or, so removed from your area of expertise – you’re not sure where to even start looking for the right candidate, never mind what questions to ask of them.
Instead of wasting time manually searching through candidate profiles, LinkedIn and your old Rolodex, bring your friendly AI pal into play. Premium, recruitment-focused AI platforms like Skillate and Olivia can help to automate your search by doing the heavy lifting, identifying key candidates from a vast array of job boards and networks using your newly-generated job description along with any other criteria you might choose.
These tools are so smart, they can even conduct initial screening interviews for you, asking questions and running assessments on their newly-minted talent pool and refining it before it even hits your inbox.
The benefits here are obvious – you spend less time doing low-level work and more time focusing on reaching your goals – but the costs are also not to be sniffed at. These premium tools can come with pretty high setup and ongoing costs, and there’s no guarantee that they’d do better than a human in finding the right fit for your role – and some of their most useful features are locked behind even more expensive service tiers.
3) Personalised Candidate Communication
You might have come across the term “attention economy” in the past few years – essentially, it’s the idea that each person has a limited attention span that’s actively competed over by different forces in their life, be that family, work, politics, or advertising. In this economy, how do you cut through the rest of the noise and ensure you’re at top-of-mind with your ideal candidate when it matters?
Personalisation was a big trend in marketing in 2024, and we don’t see that changing in 2025. By targeting and personalising every aspect of your application and onboarding process – through personalised emails and messages, custom answers to dynamic questions, and automated scheduling and follow-up communications – you can close the perceived gap between your business and your prospect, immediately seizing more of their precious, precious attention and by making them feel cared for and catered to.
As we’ve explored before, ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini can all help you in personalising your static communications, but what about live communications? What’s out there that can respond to candidate queries in real-time?
Well, you could try creating your own custom GPT – OpenAI provides this option through their extended ChatGPT tool suite – but solutions like Paradox and Arya offer off-the-peg options that can be trained on your company’s data in a matter of minutes and be up and running, talking to candidates in a matter of hours.
Great candidate experiences count for a lot and can even result in better retention rates down the line – and while it’s great that tools have started to emerge that can help to bridge the communication gap, there’s something to be said about the loss of the human touch at the core of the process. People like talking to people – that’s why generative AI chatbots are so popular…but they’re ultimately not human, and using them is giving up a degree of control over your hiring process.
4) AI-Driven Interviewing and Assessment
None of us are perfect blank slates going into interview processes. Consciously or unconsciously, we bring with ourselves our own preconceptions, ideas, experiences and, yes, biases. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – knowledge moulded by life experience is a powerful, emotionally intelligent tool in your recruitment arsenal – but it’s definitely a double-edged sword. Are you sure that you’re giving every candidate you take to interview or assessment a fair shake, or are you letting your subjective assessment kill off their chances before they’ve even begun?
Luckily, there’s an AI that can help – several, in fact. Hirevue and Willo both offer automated, AI-driven video interviewing solutions that cut you out of the process almost entirely, even down to crafting insightful and interesting questions on your behalf, and both have a suite of integrations so they can join seamlessly with your existing ATS.
On the surface, automated interviewing feels like a no-brainer, particularly for the early stages of a process – you cut down on subjectivity, increasing your talent pool while not having to deal directly with the resulting increase in application load, because the system will take care of first-stage interviews for you. However, for some hiring managers, this may result in them feeling too far-removed from the process, or without a firm grasp on what the candidate is like as a person beyond what’s reported by the AI or captured in a handful of curated video clips.
5) AI-Generated Employer Branding Content
Let’s be real – we’re not all amazing creatives. Even if we are, many of us don’t have the time or the budget to invest in high quality resources that will boost the attractiveness of our brand to potential candidates.
So-called employer branding is becoming more and more important in the attention economy (there’s that phrase again!) as a means of communicating what your business is, what it does and why someone should work there to potential candidates. Most of us are engaging in some form of employer branding in our everyday recruitment activity without even thinking about it, but putting a serious plan behind those efforts can be a serious distraction from your core business activities.
Generative AI platforms with image creation capabilities, like Gemini and Midjourney – can quickly and easily create images to your exact specifications.
Combine that with easy design options from platforms like Canva and some tailored text from Claude or ChatGPT and you’re well on your way to having the basis of a cracking employer branding package.
But…this is a real situation where you don’t know what you don’t know. Building an effective employer brand is about more than just how you look and sound, it’s about making a genuine connection with the outside world of work. How effectively you can achieve this without the guidance of an expert is up for debate.
Conclusions
Bottom line – there are lots of options out there for employing generative AI in your recruitment efforts. At Evolve we truly do believe that they represent the future of where talent sourcing is heading…but we also feel that a lot of the tools available are yet to prove their return on investment, or be truly accessible enough to be universal. Until such a time, you can rest assured that your normal way of working – and ours! – will be going nowhere.
