Employers in Ireland are increasingly wary of job candidates using artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT to write their CVs and applications with some already using AI-detection software to sniff out the practice, a new IrishJobs survey has revealed.
Published on Monday, new research from recruitment and jobs search platform IrishJobs reveals an almost even split between senior company leaders and recruiters who say AI is making their job easier and those who believe it is making the recruitment process more difficult.
While 71 per cent of medium-sized businesses believe the technology has made recruitment processes more efficient, 46 per cent of the 250 businesses of all sizes that responded to the survey overall said AI is making things more difficult.
Almost one third of respondents said they are aware that job candidates are using AI tools to write their applications and CVs. Of that cohort, 71 per cent said they have had to increase focus on interview evaluation to ensure candidate quality while almost 40 per cent have introduced detection software to weed out jobseekers using generative AI tools in the hiring process.
Sam Dooley, Ireland country director for IrishJobs parent Stepstone Group, said this is one reason why almost half of senior leaders believe AI is making recruitment more difficult.
“They’re spending more time trying to identify whether this is somebody’s real CV.”
Overall, slightly more than half of in-house recruiters said AI is making things easier for them. Of that cohort, 42 per cent said they use AI tools to send reminders while a further 42 per cent use it track candidate application statuses.
At the moment, the technology is mainly used for smaller, administrative tasks within the hiring process. But using AI to complete these tasks can free up time for recruiters to focus on candidate quality and “strategic thought in terms of actually hiring the right talent,” Mr Dooley said.
However, a large minority – around 19 per cent – of employers said they are relying on AI alone to run their hiring processes and select candidates for interview.
“If you have 100 CVs applications for a role, it’s extremely difficult to go through every single CV,” Mr Dooley said. “But you can use AI to automate that process so that [it can] tie skills back to the job description and that can bring in the best talent.”
The survey found that 56 per cent of Irish firms have introduced AI into their recruitment processes with medium sized businesses the fastest adopters of the fast-moving technology and smaller companies the slowest.
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