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Growth by Design Talent's Newsletter · May 29, 2025

Execs Say Buy AI—Now What?

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Growth by Design Talent · Growth by Design Talent's Newsletter

To our Talent Community,

It's becoming a familiar scenario: your CEO, CFO, or CHRO issues what seems like a straightforward directive: “Buy AI. Do more with less. Get strategic.” But what does this actually mean for talent acquisition teams already juggling increasing req loads and application volumes?

Several key factors are driving executive interest in AI adoption:

  • Scalability: AI solutions promise to help recruiters efficiently manage increasing workloads as job market volatility continues

  • Risk Management: Leaders are looking to predictive analytics to anticipate market shifts, detect fraud, and ensure compliance more proactively

  • Board/Investor Pressure: According to PwC's 2025 AI Predictions report, 86% of C-suite executives report that AI adoption is now a board-level conversation

The urgency is particularly evident in current recruiting metrics. LinkedIn’s Global Talent Trends reports that the average time-to-hire has increased by 17% since 2022, while application volumes per position have doubled for many roles. As we discussed in our March newsletter, knowing where to start and how to demonstrate efficacy is becoming essential to recruiting team success.

Here’s a strategic approach to turning an executive mandate into measurable advantage:

Starting Strong: Defining Your AI Principles and Philosophy

Before selecting tools or use cases, recruiting teams should establish clear principles for AI adoption. This means creating a values-driven framework that guides how and why AI will be used in your hiring process.

Why principles matter:

  • Risk Mitigation: Address potential concerns around bias, fairness, and compliance from the outset

  • Organizational Alignment: Ensure AI strategy aligns with company privacy standards, data security protocols, and legal requirements

  • Human-AI Balance: Clarify where human engagement and judgement remains essential

  • Purposeful Implementation: Preventing “AI for AI's sake” by articulating clear intent

  • Candidate Experience: Establishing guidelines for where AI use may enhance or detract from a candidate’s experience with your team and impact your talent brand

The Human-AI balance in particular is one companies shouldn’t take for granted. Take Klarna, for instance, which cut about 700 jobs in 2022 to boost efficiency through AI automation. However, this led to customer service and operational issues, and they are now rehiring staff to improve service quality and balance AI with human oversight.

ServiceNow provided a powerful example of how AI can be integrated into each stage of the employee lifecycle—from recruitment to offboarding—by developing an Idea App to capture and evaluate AI use cases. This approach fosters an AI-driven, people-led operating model to drive innovation. The team developed a four-question framework to guide their AI strategy:

  1. How will AI transform work across the organization?

  2. How will AI change HR operations?

  3. How will AI impact HR technology and analytics?

  4. How can we ensure ethical, moral, and legal use of AI?

Research from Deloitte found that organizations with clear AI governance frameworks are 3.2 times more likely to achieve positive returns on their AI investments. And, an IBM Survey found that 78% of candidates express discomfort when they believe AI is making hiring decisions without meaningful human involvement. A thoughtful human-AI collaboration model is critical for both effectiveness and candidate trust.

Finding High-Value Opportunities: Mapping Your Process

Once principles have been established, systematic process mapping can help identify the most impactful use cases for your organization. Begin with a comprehensive gap analysis to pinpoint the key areas to evaluate:

  • Time-intensive manual tasks: Where are your recruiters spending hours on low-value work?

  • Persistent bottlenecks: Which stages consistently delay your hiring process?

  • Error-prone processes: Where do mistakes or inconsistencies frequently occur?

  • Data-rich decision points: Which decisions could benefit from comprehensive analysis?

  • Candidate friction points: Where do candidates report frustration or drop out of your process?

  • Information synthesis: Where is time being wasted by manually searching and synthesizing dense processes or content?

These six AI use-cases consistently demonstrate strong efficiency returns:

  1. Inbound resume screening: Solutions like Covey and Qualified offer AI-powered candidate assessment that go beyond keyword matching to identify candidates with the right skill clusters and growth potential.

  2. Scheduling automation: Paradox's conversational AI assistant automates interview scheduling by engaging candidates 24/7, instantly coordinating interviews and syncing with recruiters' calendars—saving time and streamlining high-volume hiring processes.

  3. Interview note transcription and analysis: Tools including BrightHire and Metaview have introduced AI-powered interview intelligence that not only transcribes interviews but analyzes responses, driving even more talent insights about interview activity. Ashby recently proposed plans to enter this space as well.

  4. Natural language reporting: ATSs Ashby and Kula are building new ways to generate clear, easy-to-understand summaries or insights from data using everyday language in favor of technical jargon or complex charts.

  5. AI interviewing: CodeSignal’s AI Interviewer automates technical assessments with on-demand real-world tests and EarnBetter offers AI interviews to expedite top of funnel assessment for high-volume hiring.

  6. Outbound sourcing support: Profile.com and Covey offer augmented sourcing tools that can identify passive candidates across multiple platforms and create personalized outreach campaigns that see 31% higher response rates than generic templates.

Strategic Implementation: Beyond Features to Systems

Once you've identified priority areas, take a phased approach to selection, implementation, and team enablement. Evaluate potential AI applications against two key dimensions:

  • Problem-solving: Where might you address key pain points, reduce human error, and create efficiencies?

  • Enhancing the process: Where can you uncover new opportunities to deliver standout candidate experiences, elevate hiring quality, and generate valuable talent insights?

Major ATS providers like Greenhouse and Ashby are investing heavily in native AI capabilities to enhance resume parsing and ranking, native interview note-taking, sourcing functionality with AI-powered candidate matching and outreach, and more comprehensive analytics dashboards.

When budgets are tight, teams face a key decision of how to invest to get the most leverage in AI capabilities. This can be particularly relevant for top of funnel activities where volume of profiles can quickly burn tokens/credits and time necessary to tune AI models to get desired results. Teams are challenged with trying to optimize for functionality available within their existing ATS/CRM or invest in specialized AI tools.

There’s no single ‘right’ answer for every team. The best solution depends on your specific recruiting challenges, volume, and existing tech stack. Some teams optimize for tool consolidation while teams that require more sophisticated capabilities benefit from dedicated AI platforms like Covey.

Measuring Success: Evaluating ROI

Before implementing any AI solution, define specific, measurable outcomes aligned with your organizational priorities. According to Josh Bersin's Factbook, organizations that establish clear AI metrics before implementation are 2.7 times more likely to achieve positive ROI.

Common metrics to track include:

  • Reduction in time-to-hire (overall and by stage)

  • Decrease in cost-per-hire

  • Improvement in quality-of-hire indicators

  • Enhanced diversity in candidate pools

  • Completeness and consistency of interview feedback

  • Candidate satisfaction scores and impact on talent brand

  • Recruiter productivity improvements and capacity for strategic work

Team Transformation: Shifting Mindsets and Building Skills

One of the most pivotal aspects of successful AI adoption lies in how it transforms the capabilities of recruiters. This has been a central theme in our recent AI-focused newsletters and for good reason—the evolution of the recruiter’s role cannot be overstated. Gartner's 2025 Future of Work report indicates that 73% of AI implementation failures in HR are attributed to change management issues, rather than technology limitations.

Mindset Shift: Frame AI as a tool for empowerment, not replacement. Help recruiters understand how automation of administrative tasks creates capacity for the strategic work that drives real value. McKinsey's research shows that recruiters who effectively leverage AI spend 58% more time on high-value activities like relationship building and candidate experience design. Plus, we hear from many recruiters that being a strategic advisor is always a more challenging, rewarding role than simply filling seats!

Skill Development: As Josh Bersin notes, “The future isn't AI replacing recruiters—it's AI creating 'super-recruiters' who leverage technology for low-value tasks while deepening their human expertise in areas that drive competitive advantage.”

Creating “Super-Recruiters” means identifying which team members need different levels of AI literacy:

  • Basic users who will work with AI-generated outputs

  • Power users who will fine-tune prompts and evaluate results

  • System admins who will configure and optimize your AI tools

Next Steps: From Mandate to Movement

As executive pressure to adopt AI continues to grow, the most successful talent acquisition leaders will be those who transform this mandate into a strategic advantage. By starting with clear principles, identifying high-value use cases, selecting truly strategic systems, measuring impact, and enabling your team, you can position recruiting as a leader in AI adoption across your organization.

—

Mike, Adam & Jill, & special thanks to Allison Slater Rasch for her contributions to this month’s newsletter.

Why This Matters: In today's competitive talent landscape, recruiters who can transition from being tactical contributors to strategic advisors significantly increase their impact on hiring outcomes and business results. This skill gap was identified as the #1 training need across our community.

You'll Learn How To:

  • Build domain expertise to guide and influence hiring decisions

  • Use data to back recommendations effectively

  • Communicate effectively with different stakeholder types

  • Frame recommendations and tradeoffs strategically to drive better decisions

Who Should Attend: Anyone in talent looking to enhance their strategic impact and improve stakeholder relationships

Format: Both sessions are virtual with practical frameworks, breakout activities, and relevant recruiting case studies

Dates:

  • Day 1: July 8: 9-11am PT

    • In this session we will teach you the skills and frameworks for becoming a trusted advisor

  • Day 2: July 15: 9-10:30am PT

    • After having a week to put your new trusted advisor skills into action, we’ll reconvene to answer questions, problem solve your specific use-cases, and put some of the frameworks to use in your day-to-day work.

Investment: $950 per participant (20% discount for teams of 3+). Register here!

Did we miss your career change? Let us know: hello@gbdtalent.com

📚 Playbooks:

  • Your Guide to Evaluating and Selecting an ATS: A guide with helpful process frameworks, and evaluation templates to help you make an informed decision about selecting the ATS that is the best fit for your company.

  • Navigating an IPO: A guide to help you navigate your team through the IPO process. It includes tools and tactics to prepare your team, proactively communicate to pending candidates, and evolve your recruiting operations to support the shift in business.

Photo credit: Steve Johnson on Unsplash

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