AI is getting incredibly powerful. Today, we trust AI to recognise our speech when we ask Alexa to play our favourite music, drive our cars autonomously, and even help doctors identify signs of cancer in patients.
There are also plenty of AI tools out there that claim to be capable of writing high quality written content for blog posts and website copy, and they’re gaining a good following for it.
For recruitment companies, there's only really one thing they want to know about AI – can it help their consultants be more productive by writing job ads for them, and would those ads be more effective than those that take manual crafting?
Research by HRSG found that for the majority of HR professionals, it takes two hours or more to write a job description from scratch. Needless to say, time is valuable, so could AI help speed things up?
The Platform
To start our experiment we found the most accessible and free tool we could. That tool was Rytr – a web-based AI content writing tool based on the GPT-3 language prediction model.
Rytr is free to use to generate up to 5000 characters per month and comes with lots of predefined templates for different use cases such as ad copy, blog ideas, outlines and - the one we’ll be trying, job descriptions.
The results
To put it to the test we started off by selecting the “Job Descriptio”’ template. It prompted us to select a tone of voice, so we went for ‘Inspirational’ as that seemed most appropriate for a job opportunity, and then asked to select a job title, so we typed in “Recruitment Consultant” and hit the submit button.
After a couple of seconds of thinking, the AI produced this:
A recruitment consultant is responsible for sourcing, interviewing and placing candidates into roles. They are often the first point of contact for candidates, either to find out more about a company or to provide information on the company.
Responsibilities:
Understand the needs of both employers and candidates to make a perfect match
Source candidates via various methods including job boards, social media and networking events
Conduct successful interviews with candidates to assess their suitability for the role in question
Coordinate offers and contracts with employers
Provide support and guidance to new employees once they have started their role with the company
Maintain good relationships with both employers and candidates
Perform other duties as required by management.
*Salary: £25000 – £35000*
So, maybe the tool is not the best for coming up with content from scratch, but maybe it can help improve your existing job ads?
Instead of giving it a blank canvas to work from, we took the first Recruitment Consultant ad we could find on Indeed, removed the company information and used Rytr’s Rephrase & Continue Writing functionality to flesh out and reword the existing text. The results? Rather interesting:
Job Opportunity
We are looking for employment advisers with a passion for assisting people find work. You will be responsible for your own caseload and want to go above and beyond to help them find a job.
The potential role includes assisting participants for overcoming consequences to employment by interfacing with them, setting up and evaluating SMART action plans for them, and recognizing them durable employments.
Expertise:
Excellent communication skills to build rapport with individuals quickly and with the ability to listen, understand and coach
Ability to motivate individuals and challenge them
Strong minded with the ability to working with challenging people with a variety of personalities
Ability to share and facilitate best practices for individuals and team
Excellent follow-up skills, excellent working time management skills with focused attention to detail
Credentials:
Masters in Business Administration from Northeastern University with emphasis in Operations Management
We’re Disability Confident and are committed to equal opportunities.
The grammar is all over the place, and it still feels very generic despite the original copy being much more specific. It should be noted the requirement for a very specific qualification from a very specific university was completely made up by the AI – the original ad had no qualification requirements.
Having not yet produced an ad that’s usable from the Job Description tool, we decided to try the more flexible “Magic Command” feature, which allows you to specify any writing prompt you like for the AI to work from.
We asked it to “Write a job advert for a Recruitment Consultant at a Construction Recruitment Agency and mention the benefits of working in the Recruitment industry", keeping the tone of voice as “Inspirational”. It then returned the results below:
We’re looking for a Recruitment Consultant to work within our Construction Recruitment Agency. You’ll be in charge of sourcing and placing candidates into roles, marketing the company to potential clients and negotiating the contracts with clients.
– Competitive salary
– Pension scheme
– Shares in the company
– A variety of flexible working hours to suit you
– Work for a company which is committed to help grow your career
– Recruitment is a rewarding and interesting industry which offers plenty of opportunity
– Great company culture with lots of social events
– We work with a variety of different sectors including construction and engineering
– Plenty of progression opportunities for career development
– Friendly, helpful and likeable team
Our client is a highly reputable recruitment firm which places candidates in roles across construction. With an experienced team to help you learn the ropes, you’ll grow your experience by working within the company. “
Conclusion
Whilst there are definitely less refined manually-written job ads out there, we’d struggle to recommend that recruiters use AI to write every aspect of all of their ads just yet.
That’s not to say, though, that tools like Rytr aren’t useful writing aids for adverts. They could definitely be helpful for fleshing out and rewording small sections of copy when recruiters are suffering from writer’s block, or providing a framework for them to work from.
Like all technology, these tools will only get better over time and despite the results not necessarily being usable, we still came away pretty impressed by what AI is able to do already.
Maybe in another few years, you’ll be able to trust all your job ad writing to the robots, but for now, your consultants should primarily stick to the status quo – themselves, the human author.
3 Tips for Using AI to Write Job Ads:
- Use AI as a starting guide, with a pinch of salt: AI is great for writing a framework or template for your ad to get started with. But if you expect an AI to cook up the perfect ad from start to finish with a garnish at the end, you're likely to be disappointed.
- Use AI to refine manually-written ads: AI can also be helpful for refining content you've already written, but be sure to check through the content that is generated to remove any generic tones and phrases, and correct any grammatical issues.
- Re-humanise the work: As great as AIs are, they don't know the ins and outs of your client's company, and may not be able to connect with the candidates they are trying to attract. Be sure to add that human touch to any AI-generated content.
