From recruiting and retention to company culture and the latest in HR tech, HR Brew delivers up-to-date industry news and tips to help HR pros stay nimble in today’s fast-changing business environment.

HR Brew

Sam Blum

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Employee sitting at desk with laptop, resume in the background

Why ChatGPT writing résumés might not threaten the hiring process

Despite the popularity and sophistication of the AI chatbot, ‘We still can’t fake the human element’ of recruiting, says one director of talent acquisition.

ChatGPT writing résumés and cover letters needn’t be feared, HR pros say

A woman wearing a button down shirt speaking into a smartphone 

PwC_NativeAd2_Sep23

One-way video interviews are impersonal, candidates say, and raise privacy concerns

 Automated interviews are used by 61% of organizations globally, according to new research. 

Susanna Vogel

What does an “audit” for bias in automated hiring tech really mean?

In conversations with automated hiring vendors, we learned that processes for bias audits vary widely.

artificial intelligence robot with gavel and scales in front of a wall of binary code

Mikaela Cohen

AI is going to change everything in HR! (...is what we’re hearing everywhere nowadays.)

While many HR pros are using AI in their work, the tech will continue to disrupt their processes. That’s why Google’s recruitment team has positioned itself somewhere between actively using and continuing to experiment with AI, according to Brian Ong, Google's VP of recruiting.

“There’s a lot of tasks in the recruiter’s day job, and more and more AI can take care of some of those tasks in different ways,” Ong told HR Brew.

When interviewing international candidates, Ong said recruiters typically brush up on geographical and cultural differences. Nowadays, Google recruiters use the company’s AI language learning model (LLM), NotebookLM, to educate themselves, inform interview questions, and improve the candidate experience.

Recruiters also use Google’s chatbot, Gemini, to role-play conversations with candidates and hiring managers before having them face-to-face, Ong added.

“[When] all these little tasks go away, the administrivia goes away, and now I’m spending more time getting educated, but I can get educated faster too,” Ong said. “The combination of those two things that make me more impactful as a recruiter. It’s less task orientation and more value orientation.”

Google’s AI-enabled applicant tracking system helps recruiters identify candidates who, based on information from previous applications, might be “more likely to respond” to outreach, Ong said, before offering an example of a time when a recruiter on his team reached out to a candidate designated as likely to respond, and they did, in just five minutes.

“We’re trying to reach out to them for roles they are a better fit for…which means they go further down the pipeline,” Ong said. “It just makes sure that we’re making better use of our time, instead of just reaching out to tens or hundreds. We can reduce that amount of reaching out.”

How AI will continue to impact recruiters. 

Recruiters often have to chase down hiring managers and interviewers for candidate feedback, Ong said. He wants agentic AI to take over this task.

“It seems nominal, but, if you multiply it by the number of times somebody has to do that over the course of a week, it really starts to add up,” Ong said. “It frees recruiters up to do other things versus this administrative nudging type thing that they’re kind of stuck doing.”

Ong said he hopes to reduce the amount of applications recruiters have to sift through by giving candidates access to an AI-powered feature that will match them with roles based on their résumés.

“The breadth of tasks that AI continues to pull away will increase, and what that will then do for the recruiter is they’ll continue to move up that value stream,” he said. “Whatever percentage of time they’re spending on all these administrative things continually gets closer and closer to zero. The time that they’re spending with humans increases.”

Ong said he wants his recruiters to be more like “internal mobility coaches,” focused on improving retention and the employee experience.

“Recruiters, who have already played with things, are sharing with each other different ways to use AI in the day job, as well as explaining things that we might see on the horizon,” Ong said. “That exposure and having evangelists that do it as a day job should help with adoption over time, rather than this feeling like some semblance of, like, an imposition.”

Google logo with binary code and ai elements

How Google recruiters are using and experimenting with AI tools

Brian Ong, VP of recruiting at Google, shares with HR Brew how his team is currently using AI—and plans to in the future.

An illustration of a photo of HR Brew reporter Paige McGlauflin.

Paige McGlauflin

, and recruiters are trying to make the most of it.

Talent acquisition teams have reported an 

 as job seekers have a harder time finding new gigs. This trend is captured in a 

 from recruitment tech platform Employ, which found that two-thirds of recruiters are netting more applicants per role, with 65% reporting netting between four and 50 applicants an opening.

However, despite the higher volume of applications, Employ’s report suggests recruiters are dissatisfied with the quality of their talent pools.

Recruiters cited a lack of qualified candidates as their top job stressor, followed by competition and anticipating more open roles. So, then, perhaps it’s not surprising that getting more candidates (52%) and improving candidate quality (47%) are their top two priorities for 2025.

As many companies have scaled back hiring in recent years, job searches have taken longer, making candidates increasingly desperate to land an opportunity. More are relying on technology to help get their foot in the door, including using 

 to dozens—if not hundreds—of job openings (often embellishing qualifications to make job seekers look better to ATSs). The consequence is recruiters spending more time sifting through applications, looking for candidates who are actually qualified. Employ’s survey found that 43% of recruiters said they interview more than half of the applicants they receive for a role.

“Recruiters are getting more applicants, but the increase often, especially nowadays, is spam or bots or unqualified submissions, because people are spraying out applications,” Stephanie Manzelli, Employ’s CHRO, told HR Brew.

While it may seem odd that recruiters, inundated with applicants, want more applicants, Manzelli said TA pros are taking a more strategic approach to sourcing candidates, such as targeting specific talent pipelines, instead of casting a wider net.

“I think they’re focusing on filling the funnel to improve the odds of finding stronger candidates. And I think that’s what our findings really dictated to us,” she said. “And I think the emphasis on quantity is really in an effort to solve the persistent problem of quality, which is what we’ve seen for the last two years.”

TA pros can improve their sourcing of quality candidates by revamping their tech stack, Employ’s report argues. The majority (76%) of respondents plan to “replace their primary recruitment system” in the next one to two years.

Two-thirds of respondents expect to increase spending over the next six to 12 months, and 52% plan to invest in new recruitment technology and processes specifically, namely AI recruiting tools, CRM systems, and ATS platforms.

Respondents said several critical aspects of the recruitment process—including time to hire, candidate experience, and recruiter productivity—were hindered because of their current tech stack.

They’re not alone: 65% of the more than 900 recruiters 

 by recruitment platforms Findem and Recruiter.com blamed their shortcomings on technology or related recruitment data. And when asked why they thought qualified candidates voluntarily withdrew their application, 42% hypothesized it was because the hiring process was too long or convoluted, while 32% pointed to poor candidate experience.

dissatisfaction with clunky recruitment tech systems

 isn’t new. But, as more solutions come online, particularly generative AI tools, recruiters have a good reason to scrutinize their tech stack.

“Hiring strategies have evolved, and I don’t think that today’s TA tech has really kept up with that, and so now we’re seeing that there’s larger investment in that,” Manzelli said.

However, instead of rushing to buy the buzzy new tech offering du jour, TA leaders should take the time to ensure that whatever new solutions they invest in will actually create value, Manzelli said. That includes documenting your recruitment process and identifying pain points and roadblocks.

“There is so much coming at us in HR and TA right now about what will improve efficiency and what will solve this problem and that problem,” Manzelli said. “But I think what every HR leader and every TA leader needs to do is just take a minute to pause and diagnose the challenges that your system, your team, your organization has.”

Recruiters unhappy with candidate quality, despite increased application volumes

Their recruitment tech stack might be to blame.

Recruiters are getting more applications, but quality candidates are few and far between 

An illustration of reporter Courtney Vinopal's headshot.

Courtney Vinopal

Companies are pouring billions of dollars into AI investment, and such initiatives are starting to have ripple effects across the workforce.

Amazon and Nestlé are among the companies that recently laid off workers in part due to advancement in automation. Meanwhile, corporate leaders from companies like Ford, Shopify, and Salesforce are starting to be more explicit about the fact that some workers will lose their jobs due to AI.

Research suggests organizations can embrace AI without cutting workers, but doing so often requires attention to areas like upskilling, workflow redesign, and enhancing skills that can’t yet be replaced by the technology.

Given HR leaders are at the center of this workforce transformation, it’s not surprising that some companies are appointing chief people officers to oversee AI deployment internally. HR Brew 

 of the “chief human and AI resources officer” in February, shortly after Moderna appointed its first chief people and digital technology officer.

ServiceNow’s chief people officer, Jacqui Canney, 

 to a similar dual role in January. Canney and other HR leaders reflected on how the function is evolving for an AI-driven future at a recent HR Brew event in New York.

Canney observed that HR leaders have had to help embed different technologies into their organizations throughout her 30-year HR career—from on-premises software to cloud to mobile.

“In each one of those instances, what I’ve seen is where companies bring their people along, they get the value out of the technology that they bought much quicker…than some who don’t,” she said. The difference with generative and agentic AI, she noted, is that the technology is moving much faster.

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Companies don’t have “years to accept the change from one to another. It’s down to months in many places to be able to create this agile workforce,” she said.

Because ServiceNow sells AI-driven products, “having a conversant, confident workforce that feels that way too” was top-of-mind for the company’s CEO, Bill McDermott, Canney said. To get employees fully up-to-speed with the technology, her team designed a four-stage learning journey that started with “knowing AI” and ended with “leading through AI.” She described the transformation, which took place largely over the last two years, as the “largest change management moment that I’ve ever seen in my career.”

 As HR leaders are overseeing the deployment of AI across their organizations, they’re also being challenged to think about the function from a product mindset, according to Canney and other leaders who attended the event.

HR teams are finding different ways to encourage employees to experiment with the technology, and even use it to make their jobs more enjoyable.

Workday, which promotes employee adoption through an initiative called “Everyday AI,” created a Slack channel where workers can share interesting use cases for the technology, said Allison Joyce, VP, global head of talent acquisition. Sarah Smart, a managing partner with HR consultancy HorizonHuman, said she’s had success emphasizing user experience when implementing AI. Showing a recruiter how they can use it to help filter applicants, or send 20 emails, for example, makes AI “a little less scary,” and creates “a lot more enthusiasm for adoption,” she said.

Over the last three years, IBM has asked employees to take part in WatsonX challenges, where they pitch new ways to improve their jobs with the company’s AI tools. The idea behind such initiatives is to get employees “to think about what is next. And if you get excited about what is next, then you’re not going to be afraid about staying in the past,” said Kim Morick, an HR technology offering leader with IBM Consulting.

HR leaders may be more integrated with technology than ever before, but getting employees to adopt AI might come down to a couple fundamentally human desires: transparency and trust.

“You really have to have clear and transparent communication. If you aren’t transparent about what the possible outcomes are, I think people then don’t trust,” said Diana Scott, US human capital center leader with The Conference Board. “I think that’s where leadership fails, very often. They’re not honest in their communication about where we’re going with these technologies and what might happen.”

A crowd of attendees watches a panel moderated by ServiceNow's HR chief, Jacqui Canney, and HR Brew reporter Courtney Vinopal

How ServiceNow, IBM, and Workday are deploying AI internally 

Companies like ServiceNow and Moderna are appointing chief people officers to oversee AI deployment internally.

How HR is adapting to an AI-driven future 

Kristen Parisi

AI may be the topic du jour, but there’s still a lot of hesitancy around adopting the rapidly changing technology. More than one in three US workers 

 that AI could displace them, and some HR leaders 

 about its unknown effects on their roles and employees.

HR Brew recently sat down with Steven Mills, chief AI ethics officer at Boston Consulting Group, to demystify some of the risks and opportunities associated with AI.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How do you deal with workers’ AI hesitations and fears?

Once people start using the tech and realizing the value it can bring to them, they actually start using it more, and there’s a bit of a virtuous cycle. They actually report higher job satisfaction. They feel more efficient. They feel like they make better decisions.

That said, we also think it’s really important to educate people about the tech, including what it’s good at and what it’s not good at, that you shouldn’t be using it for. Personally, I sit somewhere in the middle.

Where do you see the biggest risks with AI?

For us [BCG], we have a whole process that, if it falls into what we deem a high risk area, there’s a whole review process to say, “Are we even comfortable using AI in this way?”

Let’s assume we’re going to build the tech. It systematically maps out all the risks, which could be things like, what if it gives a factually incorrect answer, or what if it inadvertently steers users to make a bad decision. And then, as we’re building the product, what is an acceptable level of risk across these different dimensions.

Some people fear that incorrectly deployed AI could result in the technology learning to reinforce biases and create more potential for discrimination. How can we make sure that there’s a diversity of thought within LLMs?

We want to evaluate the input to output from the product perspective. Again, it goes to looking at the potential risks, which might be different types of bias, whether that’s bias against any protected group or things like urban versus rural. These things can exist in models. We really talk a lot about responsible AI by design. It can’t be something you think about when you conceptualize the product, design it from the start, think about these things, and engage users in a meaningful way.

What do you hear from HR leaders about their feelings on AI transformation?

A lot of HR leaders are super excited about the productivity and the value unlock of the tech and they want to get it in the hands of their employees. The concern is we want to make sure people are using the tech and feel empowered to use the tech, but doing so in a responsible way.

I love to show fabulous failures of a system doing silly things that sort of make you chuckle, but it’s just a really good illustration that they’re not perfect at everything. And so people seeing that, it helps them realize, I have to be thoughtful about how I’m using it.

We work really hard with our people, making sure they understand that they can’t have AI do their work. Use it as a thought partner. Use it to help refine your points, but like, you need to own your work product at the end of the day.

How can smaller employers establish AI boundaries?

Particularly for small companies, it can be as simple as leadership gets in a room and has a discussion about where they are comfortable using AI. Ultimately, some of this comes down to corporate values, and so you need to have the senior leaders in an organization engage in a dialog. It doesn’t have to be fancy. It can literally be an informal document that’s like, “Here’s how it’s okay to use it. Here’s how you shouldn’t use it.”

Do you think AI could impact productivity requirements?

We want to make sure employees use AI for the productivity benefits, but not in a punitive way. It should be more like, if they’re not getting it, it’s because we have failed. So then we’re enabling them, upskilling them, helping them see how to use the tools.

I use it a ton as a thought partner…I might share the slide deck I’m going to use for a big meeting and say, “What questions would you have if you were the chief risk officer?” It’s just a way to help me prep. I also use it to give me counterpoints for arguments I have. It’s important that we still own our own ideas, but using this [AI] as a thought partner, something to challenge your thoughts. It’s pretty powerful in those cases.

close up headshot of a white man with glasses and short haircut smiling

Boston Consulting Group’s chief AI ethics officer on the risks and opportunities of AI

Steven Mills uses AI as a thought partner, but cautions that companies should know the potential risks that come with using the rapidly changing technology.

Boston Consulting Group’s chief AI ethics officer shares his views on the risks and opportunities of AI

Talent acquisition has become HR’s poster child for AI disruption.

Recruiters now have a wealth of AI-powered tools at their fingertips to help streamline their job, from 

But, according to a new LinkedIn survey, many recruiters aren’t taking full advantage of all that AI can do for their jobs—beyond productivity gains.

Just 34% of the more than 1,000 recruiters based in the US and UK surveyed by LinkedIn described the majority of their colleagues as “AI power users,” meaning they’re using the technology to restructure their workflows and help them better deliver on business goals. Another 47% said their recruiter colleagues are “practitioners,” solely using AI to boost their productivity.

Recruiters recognize the pressure they’re under to find the best talent as their organizations increasingly embrace AI. The majority (86%) of recruiters said their CEO relies on them to build a “workforce of the future,” according to the survey.

“CEOs want talent that can adapt and embrace new AI tools to make an impact, and companies that invest in these AI change agents will progress further and faster,” Erin Scruggs, LinkedIn’s VP of talent acquisition, told HR Brew via email.

There’s a palpable anxiety among many recruiters about falling behind: Those who don’t develop AI skills in the next 12 months expect to struggle to keep up with competitors, attract top talent, and hit growth targets.

So, what does an “AI power user” look like in action? Scruggs gave an example from her own team. A recruiter at LinkedIn used the platform’s agentic AI-enabled 

 to fill a niche role that had been vacant for more than 100 days, according to Scruggs. After the traditional approach of looking for candidates via Boolean search didn’t net adequate results, she sourced a candidate who hadn’t been recommended by providing more feedback to the AI agent.

“A recruiter who is an ‘AI power user’ is thinking bigger and understanding the full breadth of possibilities for AI changing how they work. It’s not just about ‘can AI help with this search string’ and more about truly re-designing the end-to-end of what they do,” Scruggs said. “AI will make tasks easier, but it’s also going to make processes better and ultimately truly improve quality of hire.”

Recruiters who want to increase their AI use should also focus on enhancing the human elements of their jobs. Soft skills are more important than ever with AI’s rise: Even in roles that previously didn’t require “human skills,” importance in such competencies 

 from 2018, research from the World Economic Forum found. For recruiters, that means that the human elements of their jobs—such as forming relationships with candidates, having strong communications skills, and thinking creatively with matching talent—will be more important as AI takes over the time-consuming, rote tasks with their jobs, as 

“While it is critical that recruiters build AI skills, every talent professional will tell you that the hiring process has always been about humans and relationships,” said Scruggs. She said recruiters should prioritize 

, like relationship building, adaptability, and negotiating.

“It’s these human skills that are a recruiter’s true superpower,” Scruggs added. “They’re becoming even more powerful in the age of AI, giving recruiters the space to connect, influence, and lead in ways that truly move the business forward.”

Photo collage of shapes containing a recruiter looking at a resume and a close up of a laptop with floating binary code. (Credit: Illustration: Anna Kim, Photos: Adobe Stock)

How one-third of recruiting teams are going beyond just using AI for productivity

Data shows most executives are concerned employees are lacking AI skills that focus on business strategy.

One-third of recruiters say their colleagues are ‘AI power users’ according to new LinkedIn survey

Adam DeRose

According to Job van der Voort, co-founder and CEO of the global 

 Remote, HR teams “really need” their HRIS—or system of record—to work intuitively, calibrate for international hiring and business operations, and navigate emerging compliance minefields.

It’s the kind of platform needed for lean HR teams of the future.

Companies are quickly building out borderless workforces and are relying on transformative AI technology to upend work and optimize productivity, according to a new report 

. Remote—which primarily works with clients that employ international teams—found that 86% of HR leaders surveyed reported international talent as a part of their organization’s workforce. Many HR teams—equipped with AI tools—are delivering outsized impacts, according to the findings.

Remote surveyed more than 3,500 director-level-and-above HR and business leaders at companies in fields like finance, IT and telecommunications, and professional services in 10 countries.

Van der Voort told HR Brew that Remote employs roughly 2,000 employees across the globe, but he doesn’t “want to increase the size of our HR team,” so he’s building tools into Remote’s platform that can enable its own lean HR team to grow and scale without added headcount.

“HR teams have all this bureaucracy. They have all this administrative work, we can just make it disappear,” he said. “We’re just really fortunate and lucky to build that while we have all these cool AI tools now.”

 With automation and AI inside their tech stacks, of course. HR pros expect more and more of their function’s processes to be automated or reimagined by new AI-optimized workflows that can help smaller, more agile teams deliver an outsized impact.

“We want talented people to spend less time doing rote or other administrative work, which is not really fun to do,” van der Voort said.

While HR leaders said they see AI and automation as the future, the tools themselves are currently a challenge, especially with UX and integration. Nearly one-third reported that their top tech-stack challenge is “too many disconnected tools.”

Well-integrated, AI-enabled platforms can help address this gap in the future, allowing HR to rely more on AI-optimized workflows and amplify their workforce management and productivity contributions. Three-fourths of HR leaders expect AI will handle more than half of their admin tasks by the end of next year, according to the survey.

HR prose see a “unified, flexible stack, stronger analytics, and smart automation” as ingredients to high-performing HR functions, according to the report.

“You need automation to cut manual work, analytics to spot issues early, and one source of truth for all your people data,” he said.

 The patchwork of solutions currently utilized by many organizations addresses HR needs, but with fewer tools, better integration between them, and automated workflows, lean HR teams can deliver outsized impacts.

Roberta Terranova, CPO at Wildix, oversees a globally distributed workforce with a team of seven HR pros. She said AI helps them deliver data-driven insights that can help inform business decisions about hiring, comp, and L&D programs.

Wildix is also working on bringing employees along on the journey, prioritizing upskilling and training as the tools evolve and improve.

“My main focus is really to work together with managers and understand what responsibilities from the existing roles that we have in the workplace [that] can be automised,” she said. “AI is going to make that more efficient, but support managers again in that transition of identify[ing] early upskilling so that we really invest in our talent.”

But even optimists will tell you that, at present, “expectations are higher than we currently have.”

“In terms of expectations, I’m very positive, and yes, I think we will see an improvement,” she said, referring to the tools’ integration capabilities and potential for improved natural language potential.

image of human and robot shaking hands out of computers

This HR tech founder predicts lean HR teams in our AI-enabled future

He’s building an HR platform that attempts to make HR administrative work "disappear" with AI.  

As AI infiltrates most aspects of life and work, many remain hesitant to use the emerging technology or are concerned it may replace them. Employers, meanwhile, are navigating how to deploy AI while continuing to engage employees.

At Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit this week, executives from Workday, Microsoft, and Guild shared their approach to AI education, and how to remain authentic in an AI agent world.

AI is as complex as any business function, so companies should create systems tailored to their unique goals and employees, according to Katy George, CVP of workforce transformation at Microsoft. “AI can drive a whole variety of different performance outcomes. And what’s really critical is that the business leaders, not the tech folks…identify what matters, and then drive the connection of AI into their business processes.”

Workday analyzes business tools through three lenses: efficiency, risk mitigation, and talent amplification, Aashna Kircher, group general manager of CHRO products at Workday, told the room of female executives. “The biggest power is in where we amplify talent…it’s giving people access to information or data at their fingertips that they never had before that makes them infinitely better at their particular job,” she said. “The most important thing is anchoring them [employees] on AI as a catalyst for growth.”

Earlier this year, Workday launched Everyday AI, an initiative to encourage AI adoption among employees, HR Brew 

. The program is tailored to employees, in part based on their existing AI mindset, whether all-in on the technology, or skeptical.

George emphasized the importance of engaging workers in the process. “We know from other types of work transformation that you need employees to be the people who redesign their own work,” she said, noting that Microsoft runs AI bootcamps that aim to give employees the tools and exercises needed to gain a new perspective on their role and job function. “What we’re finding is that there’s a set of messaging, but there’s also a way of really engaging employees in a way that really helps them see what’s in it for them.”

As jobs and technology rapidly change, the challenge for Microsoft is creating jobs, career paths, and education that can help workers learn the AI skills they need to thrive. “What you’re trying to do is actually teach the humans the judgment that they need, and really designing jobs thoughtfully to take advantage of the productivity opportunities, but also build cognitive engagement and learning to build a judgment that’s required even earlier than before,” George said.

AI skills shouldn’t just be taught on the job—they should also be taught in the classroom. That’s why some companies are working with academic institutions to prepare students for the AI-enabled workforce. “We meet with employers, we aggregate what their demands are, and then we go back out to our academic institutions,” Bijal Shah, CEO of Guild, said.

 The panelists noted that AI is meant to augment processes, but employers still need to support and engage workers.

Companies should pause before using AI, for example, to write employee performance reviews. “Figuring out the right context and channels that makes sense for AI to completely assume the task versus take a first draft and then have to be tailored in a way that only you can add context, or your voice, both of those things are keeping whatever in the situation,” Kircher said.

“You do have to be really careful about the types of things you communicate, where it’s AI-generated, versus things that you are producing yourself,” Shah said, noting that AI-assisted communication can be received negatively. “People need to know that when I’m communicating things to our company that is coming from me, and that I wrote it and that I took the time and effort to actually sit down and think through what I wanted to communicate.”

A panel of five women in business clothing, sitting on chairs in a small conference room

AI