In our recent blog post, “How Generative AI Is Shaping the Future Workforce”, we explored how AI is transforming industries and redefining workforce needs. As new technologies emerge, so do new skill sets—not just for employees, but also for employers navigating how to integrate AI tools into their strategies. This evolution impacts everything from workforce planning to recruitment marketing practices.
One practical example of this shift is using generative AI to craft job descriptions. How can these tools help create authentic, differentiated content while staying true to your employer brand? While AI offers speed and efficiency, our latest insights highlight why authenticity and human oversight remain critical in recruitment marketing. Let’s dive into the nuances of leveraging AI without compromising your brand’s unique voice.
If you’ve spent any time experimenting with emerging generative AI tools like ChatGPT, you know the outputs can be impressive, both in terms of quality and speed.
Ask ChatGPT to write a synopsis of a meeting, and you’ll get a bullet-point list of key topics and follow-up tasks in mere seconds. Ask Gemini to summarize the most important concepts from a textbook on microbiology, it delivers a concise, technical summary in minutes. It can even spit out a multiple-choice quiz based on this same material to use as a study guide.
Examples and use cases are virtually endless – and while there have been some high-profile stories where generative AI made egregious mistakes, accuracy will only improve over time. Love it or hate it, generative AI is likely here to stay.
This brings us to a dilemma: How should we leverage these generative AI tools to generate recruitment marketing content at scale? Or shouldn’t we?
Before handing over the “reigns” of job description writing to AI, here are the top three considerations we urge our clients to consider:
- AI is a Co-Pilot, Not a Pilot
While AI can churn out amazing content in seconds, we urge our clients in the early stages of experimenting with these tools to think of generative AI as an assistant or co-pilot – not a panacea or turnkey solution to your recruitment marketing content needs. AI-generated content of any kind still needs to be reviewed carefully by a human to ensure the accuracy of the information being conveyed. Beyond checking for the accuracy of basic “facts” about your employment offerings, you should also take a moment to zoom out. Do the resulting job descriptions sound like a human wrote them? - If Something Feels Off, Trust Your Intuition
We discovered something curious in our own experiments with generative AI for business content. The resulting outputs were objectively “good” in all the obvious, measurable ways – accuracy of information, grammar, business-appropriate tone – yet we were still left with an intangible feeling that a human did not write this content. This intuitive sense that something intangible isn’t quite right (which is to say, human), despite being unable to point to any specific evidence, is sometimes referred to as the “uncanny valley.” While this phenomenon may be a non-issue for certain business contexts (i.e., writing contracts), it is something to pay close attention to when deploying AI to write recruitment marketing collateral, where authenticity, tone, and your employer brand’s personality are paramount.
As a general rule of thumb, we urge our clients to trust their gut instincts: if something doesn’t feel quite right to you, odds are candidates will sense this, too, and unless you’re an AI company, this may not be the first impression you want to create with a prospective applicant - Authenticity and Differentiation Over Ease
Yes, it’s possible to use generative AI to write job descriptions, and likely in a small fraction of the time it would take a human (or team of humans) to perform this function. But should you? The answer to this question ultimately depends on your organization, the specific use case, and your goals.
When weighing the trade-offs of AI- vs. human-generated recruitment marketing content, we urge our clients to get back to fundamentals. Strong employer brands are authentic (aligned with employee experiences) and differentiated (distinct from competing employers).
If you want your job descriptions to be closely aligned with actual employee experiences, are you more likely to achieve this goal by having an employee write them, or an AI?
In terms of differentiation… while it’s possible to train an AI to learn your employer brand’s distinct personality and tone, we remind our clients that their competitors have the access to the same tools. Would you hire the same copywriter that wrote your direct competitor’s job descriptions to write your job descriptions? Probably not. Or if you did, you wouldn’t be surprised if the descriptions felt somehow “flat” or otherwise undifferentiated from one another.
Generative AI is evolving and improving rapidly, and so these concerns may fade with time. In the current moment, though, we advise our clients to treat these tools as very powerful beta products – something to dabble in as part of a larger strategy, but probably not something upon which to build a successful recruitment marketing content playbook alone.
If you’re interested in diving deeper into how AI is reshaping industries and marketing strategies, there are plenty of excellent resources to explore. Gartner’s research on generative AI in marketing, for instance, highlights how these tools are transforming workflows and speeding up production timelines. Deloitte’s insights into AI’s impact on personalization and customer engagement provide another compelling perspective. Together, these reports paint a picture of a rapidly evolving landscape where strategy and authenticity remain essential.
