Recruitment hasn't changed for over two decades. The introduction of LinkedIn changed recruitment at scale and with huge impact. 

But during LinkedIn’s reign, in the past 20 years not much has changed.

Recruiters are still very dependent on LinkedIn, source primarily manually and are mostly badly equipped to use the technology that should help them with their job.

Not the recruiter’s fault, but it’s like the entire recruitment industry has been stuck and there wasn’t enough competition and differentiation to do something about it.

But now we enter an entirely new era for recruitment,

With the arrival of generative AI driven by language models, the recruitment industry is set to transform.

Generative AI platforms like ChatGPT (from OpenAI) can analyze big data sets intelligently and create new information from minimal input.  

You can for example ask ChatGPT to analyze the information on a LinkedIn profile from candidate, ask it to match that information with your own job description and on top of that generate a highly personalized message. That’s basically recruitment in a nutshell. 

And there are many other use cases of this new technology for now still manual recruitment related tasks.

Technologies like ChatGPT are basically language models, algorithmic models that predict which text should come next after a certain word or string of words.

Recruitment is eminently positioned to be transformed by this language technology because language is the primary driver for recruitment decisions. 

Across the entire recruitment cycle language is leading, take a look at for instance:

• Job descriptions: act as the written instruction manual for recruiters to start sourcing
• Candidate profiles: are full of written contextual information and keywords about skills, interests and personality indicators
• Outreach: the effectiveness of outreach is defined by how well a recruiter translates the candidate’s characteristics to the available job
• Employer brand: is typically articulated in written form (next to visuals)
• Internal communication: is driven by back and forth communication, typically in written form as in emails, chat messages and candidate status updates

With today’s technology, all this language can be interpreted, summarized and even generated on complete autopilot.

Language models and other AI tools do not only make sense out of all this data but also make it actionable.

Have a look at this list of all the steps of the recruitment cycle which are today still primarily manually performed by recruiters.

• Identify hiring needs
• Create job description
• Define target candidate profile
• Research recruitment channels
• Select channels
• Build search
• Execute search on different channels
• Screen resumes
• Rank profiles
• Cross reference profiles with other online accounts
• Find contact details
• Verify contact details 
• Write outreach message
• Personalize message
• Send message
• Send follow up
• Review replies
• Communicate next steps
• Administer outreach effectiveness (like reply and open rates)
• Schedule interviews

It’s a miracle that recruiters find the time to do this for so many different candidates. Especially if you look at certain niche roles that require the recruiter to reach out 500 times to get to a successful hire. 

Most of these actions are still entirely manual; job descriptions are written manually, searches are created with manual boolean strings, outreach messages created manually, sending messages manually…

Looking at the current state of recruitment, the remarkable thing is that literally every single step in the list can be almost completely automated with today’s technology.

That makes recruitment one of the most well positioned professions to be fully autonomous.