I’m old enough to remember going on road trips with my parents and pulling out the large state-by-state map that lived in the car. The whole family ogled it to figure out where we needed to go next as we ventured on our journey. Sometime in high school or college, typing my destination into MapQuest and printing off directions was a game changer. Post-college, my in-laws had a Garmin GPS unit in their vehicle. Today, I don’t even think twice about the combination of my iPhone Maps, working seamlessly with Apple CarPlay, to get me where I need to be. Looking back at that technological evolution, it’s truly mind-blowing how far things have come. When it comes to the art of writing, we may have just hit a similar evolutionary milestone.
You likely have heard of the phrase “ChatGPT” sometime in the last few months, but if not, you may want to reference our December issue of The Scoop, where we dive into some of its capabilities. Microsoft has invested heavily into it and has even incorporated ChatGPT into Bing’s search experience. Google followed up with an announcement of their version, known as Bard. It appears that AI is here to stay.
I asked it to write me a paragraph asking “how ChatGPT can help with writing content for a career site.” This is what it created:
“ChatGPT can be a valuable tool for creating high-quality content for a career website. With its natural language processing capabilities, it can write well-written and informative articles about various career-related topics such as job descriptions, career paths and industry insights. It can also generate quotes from industry experts and company leaders, adding credibility and authority to the website’s content. Additionally, its ability to provide concise and precise answers can be useful for creating frequently asked questions sections on the website. Overall, ChatGPT can help to create a comprehensive and engaging career website that provides valuable information to job seekers and professionals.”
Not bad for an AI robot talking about itself, huh? The more that I’ve played around with it, the more amazed I am with its capabilities.
How ChatGPT can Streamline your Talent Acquisition Processes
First, I’m sure just about every team could use some additional headcount or resources. There’s incredible value over time in creating content, like I referenced in part 1 and part 2 of these blog posts. However, I often hear that recruiting teams just don’t have the team members and/or expertise to execute a recruitment-focused content strategy. ChatGPT is currently a free tool that can help fill in those human gaps from a content generation standpoint.
Secondly, this eliminates “writer’s block,” which is inherently a human phenomenon (and weakness). At the very least, you can see what ChatGPT generates around an idea you have. From there, you can refine it with old-fashioned “human intelligence” to round out your desired communications objectives. New avenues of thought may be opened up from the written output, or you may want to delete entire AI-generated paragraphs. Consider the efficiency of a robot giving you an idea to work with, vs. your own brain giving you a concept that your own brain ultimately overrules. A half hour’s worth of human-generated writing can easily be wiped out with a single click of the delete button. On the flip side, you may be generally happy with a page of content that ChatGPT spits out, saving you or your team hours of work.
Thirdly, robots don’t procrastinate like people do. ChatGPT won’t put it on the calendar for Wednesday, push it to Friday, and then decide to come back to it next week. It doesn’t get sick or go on vacation, or get sidetracked with new projects. It is there, on-demand, to augment a content creation strategy.
I personally used ChatGPT to generate copy for a variety of specific pages on a demonstration career site that Radancy built, and I was honestly blown away by the quality of the writing regarding my requests. It churned out specific full pages of copy that would easily pass as human-created, and spit out employee quotes that felt totally genuine. If I wasn’t impressed with its abilities, I wouldn’t take the time to put this on paper. And yes, this is John writing these words, not a robot (outside of the earlier paragraph).
Doesn’t This Feel Like Cheating?
My gut reaction to this question the first time I used ChatGPT was “yes.” I know the mental effort and time that goes into taking an idea and turning it into written reality. But after a little while, my viewpoint has changed on it a bit. Instead of viewing it as cheating, view it as a tool that assists in arriving at a desired endpoint. Buzzfeed is in the business of content creation. They announced that they’ll start using ChatGPT to write content, and their stock jumped 150% overnight. Wall Street clearly sees the value in AI for efficiency. Adopt a similar approach in your recruitment process.
I do think there will be legitimate ethical issues in the world of academics, and I hope they find a solution to that. OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman has made the following point when asked about ChatGPT and plagiarism:
“We adapted to calculators and changed what we tested for in math class, I imagine. This is a more extreme version of that, no doubt, but also the benefits of it are more extreme, as well.”
Speaking for myself, I’m happy that I was able to use a calculator to get through high school and college math classes. Just like I’m happy today to use the GPS on my phone to get me where I need to go today. Generally speaking, I think there’s a natural human aversion towards technology making work, and therefore workers, obsolete. Yes, self-driving trucks and burger flipping robots may be inevitable. When it comes to managing a holistic talent acquisition strategy, though, these tools could accelerate great content creation for candidates, just like I can figure out the answer to a math problem much more quickly via a calculator. I work with some very talented copywriters, and I’m sure they could use some of what ChatGPT generates as a baseline, then mold and finesse it with their skills to make it twice as good. I’m curious to see if and how they will leverage ChatGPT in their work moving forward.
I often talk about CMS pages being a blank canvas to deliver information to candidates that they wouldn’t discover in other ways. Let ChatGPT help fill these canvases with content for your candidates, to better inform and persuade them to apply for your open roles. As always, give them opportunities to view relevant open jobs, share the content via social/email, and offer up job alert opt-in forms to keep them up to date. Don’t have a career site content management system? Reach out to Radancy and let us know how we can help.
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