As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more prevalent in the workplace, it’s increasingly influencing both sides of hiring. According to a recent Resume Builder survey, nearly 70% of companies are expected to use AI in their hiring process by the end of 2025. It’s no surprise that candidates also are increasing their use of AI.

How Candidates Use AI

We have seen candidates use AI in both subtle effective ways and blatant misused ways. When a resume incorporates key terms from the job ad to describe their matching experiences, we applaud it. When screener questionnaires are returned with the ChatGPT search phrase still copied at the top, we cringe. Our talent acquisition team is seeing a dramatic increase in applicants using AI in these ways:

1. Crafting resumes and applications
2. Answering written pre-screening questions
3. Creating cover letters and emails

Setting Guidelines

What is acceptable? The decision is yours. Consider what makes the most sense for your culture, processes, and preferences, in addition to if and/or how to appropriately communicate that.

Managing AI Use

Consider these strategies and how they may help your organization.

1. Publish an Acceptable Use Statement: Clarify how applicants can and can’t use AI by providing this transparency on your application. Guidelines should reflect your company’s style and what you see as acceptable.
2. Define Limits Carefully: If you want tech-savvy new hires who can efficiently use AI, you may not want certain limits ruling out resourceful candidates who are finding creative (yet appropriate) ways to use AI. However, wrongfully assuming everyone uses AI or requiring its use should be avoided as well because that may exclude those who don’t have AI-optimized resumes that meet your ATS criteria.
3. Conduct Live Interviews: Get to know the candidate’s qualifications versus AI-embellished resumes and prescreen answers. Consider a phone interview, then live virtual video interviews, followed by in-person whenever possible. Keep in mind, you can request that candidates turn off applications such as CoPilot during video interviews as well.
4. Leverage Behavior-Based Questions: These questions are harder to embellish with generative AI if you’re correctly probing beyond the initial question with follow-up questions and scenarios. Mix in these questions to learn about the candidate’s past behaviors which also predict their future performance in similar scenarios.

AI is undeniably transforming talent acquisition. The key is to strike a balance between leveraging its benefits and maintaining the integrity of candidate evaluations and equitable practices. By establishing these clear guidelines and practices with candidates’ use, and always verifying applicant capabilities through interviews, organizations will improve hiring and navigate the evolving recruitment landscape.