ChatGPT in HR: De-biasing your recruiting process & creating AI policy

Bias in a recruiting process is not only detrimental to an organization’s diversity efforts; it also has business implications. According to McKinsey, companies fail to choose the candidate with the right talent for management roles 82% of the time. Why? Because systemic, unintentional and pervasive biases mean the employer team is relying on opinions, rather than fact.

There are a number of core principles for de-biasing a recruiting process – and AI has the potential to be disruptive to that process in both positive and negative ways. When de-biasing the recruiting process, we begin by walking through from beginning to end, and understanding where decisions are being made and how biases could shape those decisions.

Organizations integrating AI into their recruiting process should take AI prompts and outputs into consideration as part of that walk-through. It’s possible (and in many cases inevitable without careful prompt writing) for AI to introduce bias into a process, so thinking critically about how AI is being used and what outputs it’s generating is key. Organizations should consider DEI efforts as part of their training on how to write effective AI prompts, because AI does have DEI data integrated.

HR organizations that are using AI as part of their recruitment and interview process should start by developing policies around how it will be used and training on proper prompts. Using AI across the organization is inevitable, so if you have not started thinking about how to integrate it into your department, now is the time. Here are some of the biggest opportunities – and challenges – in using AI for hiring.

De-biased job descriptions

ChatGPT is useful for writing job descriptions, but the output is only as good as its prompts. ChatGPT has DEI information built in, so you can ask it to write a job description that is equitable, inclusive and gender neutral. When integrating AI tools into the recruiting and hiring process, proper staff training on writing prompts is an essential part of the overall work. Building AI prompts that speak to DEI will create more inclusive outputs.

Better interview questions

Many companies recycle interview questions repeatedly, but AI offers an exciting, efficient way to build an entirely new toolbox of interview questions that truly address the job skills you want. For example, if you want collaboration as a key skill because you’re trying to fill that gap, you can put a prompt into ChatGPT to generate the top 50 questions that help hone in on a candidate’s collaborative skills. Instead of hours of back and forth with the team, you have a library of relevant questions in minutes.

But simply integrating those questions into the interviews isn’t enough. Teams need to use them as jumping off points, taking them, tailoring and repurposing them to create questions that are relevant for the role and organization. Critical thinking and filtering is key.

Increasing efficiency while maintaining critical thinking

HR is often responsible for the policies around new tools like ChatGPT or AI, and the time to start thinking about how you’ll approach these tools with employees is now. If you’re on the fence about whether to create policies, know that employees are likely already using the tools.

The biggest caution around AI in hiring or any process is ensuring that it supplements – but does not replace – critical thinking. While AI tools can be effective in the recruiting process – and often can reduce the human biases we see around name bias or location bias – there’s a fine balance. Some steps to reduce issues include increasing peer reviews and tracking to ensure that the outputs from your well-intentioned AI recruitment process do not carry bias. Even the largest tech companies in the world have run into this issue; five years ago, Amazon scrapped an AI recruiting tool that was favoring male applicants due to the historic dominance of men in tech roles.

Related: Navigating the hype of AI tools in HR

If you’re not using AI in your recruiting and hiring process yet, it’s time to start having the discussion and figuring out how to incorporate these tools with a lens on equity and inclusion. Companies should be taking the time to have these conversations, and they shouldn’t be done in a vacuum. Talk to your employees, find out how they are already using AI, and come up with a collective policy that is both inclusive and informed.

Christie Lindor is the founder of Tessi Consulting, a Certified B Corp DEI strategy-centered firm focused on partnering with organizations that want to create diverse, high performing, and inclusive cultures.