Recruiting groups are, in some ways, floor zero for AI disruption. A plethora of duties traditionally carried out by recruiters can now be carried out by AI expertise. However…with a world of potentialities at one’s fingertips, it may be tough to know the place to start.
Actual property tech big Zillow has launched a number of AI instruments for recruitment because it started experimenting in late 2023. HR Brew lately sat down with Roz Harris, Zillow’s VP of expertise acquisition, engagement, and belonging, to debate how her recruitment workforce has recognized and adopted AI options.
The place to start? In November 2023, Harris’s workforce began wanting into how AI might be utilized by recruiters.
“We began the potential of AI. And what we discovered was, whenever you take a look at the position of a recruiter and what they do, about 80% of our jobs had been what you’ll hear within the conferences concerning the mundane duties” that AI may change, she informed HR Brew.
To assist ease recruiters’ concern of being changed by AI, Harris and her workforce experimented with AI with prompt-a-thons.
Zillow already used hackathons to develop consumer-facing options and merchandise; Harris’s workforce adopted the follow for its inside AI use. For instance, prompt-a-thon groups expressed a need for extra teaching on having tough conversations with hiring managers. They devised a immediate that might be used on ChatGPT, together with capturing particulars concerning the situation, in addition to emphasizing tender abilities like sustaining a rapport or belief with hiring managers. The outcome: options devised by recruiters themselves, not a top-down edict from management.
“The issues that they’d go to deal with had been ones that, I believe, if I needed to put my management workforce in a room and say, ‘Allow us to go do that,’ we wouldn’t have provide you with the identical questions and challenges in any respect,” Harris stated.
After figuring out the issues and options, Harris would herald, what she referred to as, the cavalry—the authorized, enterprise tech, engagement and belonging, and TA groups—to evaluate the instruments and decide usability.
Immediate-a-thons have thus far resulted in six AI recruitment instruments, Harris stated. Some had been developed in-house, however most are vendor instruments that Harris’s workforce had been both early adopters of or helped develop. Harris stated she hasn’t but been informed “no” by the cavalry, largely as a result of she has adopted their greatest practices, resembling avoiding decision-making instruments and private identifiers (like race, gender, or figuring out key phrases) to evaluate candidates.
“Fortunately, I’ve been round for some time, and so has my management workforce. We form of at all times knew we didn’t need AI to make selections,” she stated. “We stayed away from instruments and issues that did that.”
Measuring success. The instruments utilized by Harris’s workforce focus each on aiding recruiters and enhancing the candidate expertise.
On the job-seeker aspect, Zillow’s AI instruments embrace assistants that assist candidates discover and apply to roles, and schedule and put together for interviews. On the recruiter aspect, recruitment advertising software program or LinkedIn Recruiter assist supply high-quality candidates, whereas one other software analyzes and supplies suggestions on interviews.
“Should you’re making use of to a job at Zillow, you possibly can have help in serving to you try this, and it’ll assist match you to some roles as effectively. We additionally then use AI to assist the recruiter,” Harris stated.
Zillow’s AI-powered interview scheduler is meant to hurry up hiring and alleviate recruiters’ workloads, that are big; some roles, resembling gross sales or advertising specialists, obtain 4,000+ functions inside a day of being posted.
“As somebody who began their profession as a recruiting coordinator, I believe it’s the scheduling software that’s really my favourite,” Harris stated.
Up to now, Harris stated recruiting coordinators would spend over every week coordinating schedules for interviews. Now, candidates obtain a textual content or e mail with a hyperlink that exhibits the interviewer’s availability, and schedules a gathering, which has lower time spent scheduling an interview to half-hour—a 97% discount saving recruiters as many as 450 hours monthly.
For any recruiting coordinator sweating on the sight of that stat, Harris shared excellent news: “They’ve upgraded their abilities. All of them nonetheless work at Zillow.”
Many former coordinators now work in Zillow’s worker service middle, or in govt assistant or program supervisor roles; others assist handle the scheduling software. (And, when the October AWS outage crippled the web, these former coordinators helped manually schedule interviews.)
Zillow has additionally leveraged AI to recruit candidates from a wider geographic space.
After embracing its remote-first work mannequin, referred to as Cloud HQ, Zillow discovered it wasn’t a well known employer in some cities. Harris’s workforce used instruments, together with newsletters and focused actions to drive functions, in addition to LinkedIn Recruiter to save lots of time sourcing higher candidates, Appcast, a recruitment promoting expertise supplier that Zillow stated helped recruit throughout areas. Utilizing these three channels, 558 hires had been made in 2025 by way of mid-December.
“We had a popularity in these areas the place we had workplaces. Properly, whenever you flip that on the pinnacle and say, we’re going to be a Cloud HQ and we’re going to have the ability to rent throughout the nation, we don’t have a popularity in all places,” she stated. “AI helped us construct popularity.”
This report was initially printed by HR Brew.
