Understanding ChatGPT

ChatGPT is the fastest growing consumer application in history. It has reached more than 1 million users in just the first 5 days of launch in November 2022, a feat that took Netflix 3.5 years, Facebook 10 months and Instagram 2.5 months to achieve. 

The name ChatGPT stands for “Generative Pretrained transformer” designed to chat. Developed by Open AI, a company founded by Sam Altman, Elon Musk and a few others, its core capability is to generate human-like responses for all kinds of queries, even to those it is not capable of answering—instead of giving you “Error 404”, it will politely explain why it could not generate an answer. The current version, however, cannot interpret recent data for it is trained on a knowledge base that ends in September 2021.  

What is ChatGPT capable of doing?

Everyday there is about 13 millions ChatGPT visitors trying to explore what this application is capable of. Among the more common text-based tasks such as composing a message in different style, explaining a difficult concept, spitting out fun facts, roleplaying, creating exam questions, writing stories and poetry, giving fashion style suggestions, having conversations with, it is also powerful in codes or code-based visuals. For examples, spotting errors in codes, generating wireframes, SVGs and HTML codes.

How could a recruiter make use of ChatGPT?

With its wide-ranging capabilities, ChatGPT can be applied in the hiring process as follows:

1. Candidate search: ChatGPT could help with candidate searching by writing Boolean search strings for LinkedIn or other hiring interfaces helping recruiters to identify suitable candidates. 
2. Writing job advertisement, outreach emails to employers and candidates, candidate summaries: When provided with job details, ChatGPT could generate all writings in a professional manner. It could also provide feedbacks to improve writings, as well as rewriting texts in a specific way. 
3. Preparing interviews: ChatGPT could generate a list of interview questions by role and by interview type for the recruiters to prepare the candidates for job interviews. 

What a recruiter is left to do when AI transformed the industry? 

Unsurprisingly ChatGPT will take away many jobs in the future, especially for jobs that involves communication and language processing, be it human languages, technical languages or computer languages. For example, customer service officer, translator, content creator, technical writer, legal counsel and programmer. That does not mean that human will be left idle, but the job nature will be shifted, and human will be focusing on tasks that is quintessentially human.

When ChatGPT is helping recruiters to work more efficiently, a recruiter will have more time and energy to do the following: 

1. Understanding and defining job requirement: Recruiters will need to understand employers’ needs and define what essential skills and experience are required. 
2. Assess candidates beyond their resumes: candidates appearing great on papers are not necessarily suitable for the job. Recruiters will still need to assess the candidate’s soft skills, attitude, cultural fit, and growth potential to match what the company needs.
3. Relationship building: AI cannot replace a real person in terms of comradeship. Recruiters will be empathetic to understand what the candidate needs, their aspirations and ensure that the candidates are having positive experience in their job-hunting process as it could be extremely stressful and full of ups and downs. 
4. Job negotiation: When the hiring process comes to the negotiation stage, recruiter’s role is critical in helping both parties get what they need. As Chris Voss, a former FBI hostage negotiator, suggests, one of the most important skills in negotiation is empathy as it leads to trust, which is something AI is not wired to do. Being the go-between person, a recruiter needs to have a holistic understanding of the situation as well as trust from both parties in order to facilitate decision making.