AI & Recruiting: Navigating the Future of Talent Acquisition
To our Talent Community,
Recruiting technology has transformed significantly over the past decade, evolving from basic efficiency tools to help recruiters stay organized to specialized platforms for more sophisticated capabilities, better hiring outcomes, and more advanced analytics. As hiring picks up in 2025 and recruiting teams are asked to do more with less, automating with AI-enabled workflows is becoming a non-negotiable.
The Current State of AI in Recruiting
The intersection of AI and recruiting represents one of the most promising frontiers in Talent Acquisition. Yet, despite the buzz, adoption remains surprisingly measured. Recent statistics from the LinkedIn 2025 Future of Recruiting and the Lightspeed 2025 People Trends Report reveal that 65% of recruiting leaders haven't adopted AI solutions, while reports indicate that among the 55% of companies using AI, only 37% are applying it to recruiting functions.
Data privacy concerns (28%) and integration challenges (21%) continue to be significant barriers. Many organizations find themselves at a crossroads: aware of AI's potential, yet cautious about implementation.
Companies can see the promised land of AI-powered recruiting but remain wary. Many companies are implementing AI "at the edges" with lower risk use cases - using it to draft initial messages to candidates, summarize application materials, or schedule interviews. But it's a bit like buying a Ferrari and only driving it to the grocery store.
Meanwhile, the opportunity cost widens. Early adopters report cutting time-to-hire by up to 40% and improving candidate quality metrics by 20-30%. One tech company reduced their recruitment costs by 35% while increasing diversity in their candidate pool. Teams that are reluctant to adopt AI and stick to conventional workflows spend approximately two-thirds of their workday on non-value-added administrative activities and miss out on crucial opportunities to advance their hiring practices and uplevel their team.
Breaking Down AI-Powered Recruiting Workflows
The true power of AI in recruiting comes from its ability to optimize every stage of the talent acquisition process, from task management to decision making:
Job Description Optimization: AI tools are helping teams craft more effective, inclusive job postings that attract diverse, high-quality candidates while accurately reflecting role requirements.
Candidate Sourcing: Platforms like Gem are revolutionizing how teams identify potential talent, using AI to analyze vast candidate pools and surface ideal matches based on both hard skills and cultural alignment. Gem AI Sourcing can identify and engage best-fit candidates by leveraging a company’s unique hiring patterns and success data, enabling recruiters to build diverse talent pipelines faster.
Application Review: AI-powered screening tools can evaluate thousands of applications with consistency and speed. Tools like Gem’s AI-Powered App Review can help teams identify promising candidates that might otherwise be overlooked.
Interview Enhancement: Metaview and Brighthire offer integrations that bring structure and insight to the interview process, analyzing conversation patterns and ensuring consistent evaluation while identifying key candidate attributes.
Coordination Automation: Solutions from ModernLoop and all-in-one platforms like Gem and Ashby are eliminating the scheduling headaches that consume recruiters' time, allowing them to focus on high-value interactions.
Using AI to Reduce Bias
In addition to reducing the administrative burden on recruiting teams, one of AI’s most powerful applications is reducing the bias that comes with human decision-making. For example, Metaview's AI tools analyze job descriptions to identify and flag potentially biased language that might discourage diverse candidates from applying.
This process can also flag unnecessary requirements that statistically reduce applications from underrepresented groups, such as specific degree requirements when equivalent experience could suffice. For one company, this approach not only increased diversity in the applicant pool but also expanded the overall number of qualified candidates by 18%.
AI tools have proven effective in mitigating bias across the recruiting process:
Talent Sourcing: AI-powered diversity sourcing tools can help identify qualified candidates from underrepresented groups, increasing diversity in pipelines that historically trend towards more homogenous representation.
Resume Screening: Applying tools or features like Gem’s AI-Powered App Review for blind screening algorithms to remove names, photos, addresses, and graduation dates can result in more diverse candidates advancing to interview stages. Some platforms can take this beyond resume screening to evaluate candidates based on job-relevant skills through standardized tests, work samples, and scenario-based questions rather than subjective resume evaluations or interviews.
Interview Intelligence: Brighthire’s structured interview platform identifies and reduces inconsistent questioning patterns, which has shown to increase offer extensions to underrepresented groups.
Candidate Scoring: Candidate evaluation platforms can analyze historical hiring data to identify patterns where qualified candidates from underrepresented groups may have been overlooked, establishing evaluation criteria based purely on job-relevant qualifications and success predictors, while systematically removing variables that don't predict performance.
Future-Proofing Your Recruiting Career
As AI transforms recruiting, the role of talent acquisition is evolving. The recruiter's role is becoming more relationship-focused and strategically valuable as AI handles the more administrative, day-to-day aspects of the job.
As the AI-enabled tech stack grows, recruiting teams will want to shift their focus to building strategic advisory skills.
As AI tools evolve to handle the day-to-day “grunt work,” recruiting roles are expanding beyond tactical tasks to deliver higher-level strategic talent advising, facilitation, and analysis. Hiring managers are eager for partners who can leverage market expertise and translate business needs into effective talent strategies across the business.
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Adam, Mike, & Jill & special thanks to Allison Slater for her contributions to this month’s newsletter.
🗓️ Upcoming Events:
Boston Talent Leader Dinner: Are you a talent leader that lives in the Boston area? Let us know at hello@gbdtalent.com!
💫 “Becoming a Trusted Advisor” Training Now Open to the Public
Based on popular demand from our community poll, we're thrilled to announce that our most requested training—"Becoming a Trusted Advisor"—will be available publicly for the first time this June!
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: Two sessions: Day 1 is 2 hours, and Day 2 is 90 minutes. Both sessions are virtual with practical frameworks, breakout activities, and relevant recruiting case studies
Dates:
Day 1: June 3: 9am-11am PT
In this session we will teach you the skills and frameworks for becoming a trusted advisor
Day 2: June 10: 9am-10:30am PT
After having a week to put your new trusted advisor skills into action, we will 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!
🚀 March Leadership Moves in the Market:
Lars Schmidt, founder and CEO of Amplify Talent, joined Agrovision as Head of Talent.
Kristen Macroe, former Manager, Talent Acquisition at Airbase, joined Credo AI as Director of People & HR.
Viet Nguyen, former Talent Acquisition leader, Strategic Programs at Netflix, joined Vercel as the Head of Global Recruiting Operations.
Hetal Shah, former Director, Global Recruiting at Handshake, joined Terradot as Director of People & Talent.
Lance Lozano, former Senior Recruitment Manager at Apollo GraphQL, joined AKS Engineering & Forestry as Director of Talent Acquisition.
Missy Ballew, former Chief Human Resources Officer at Lookout, joined Delinea as Chief People Offer.
Ally Baker, former Vice President, Executive Talent at Insight Partners, joined Uber as Director, Global Non Technical Executive Recruiting.
Cynthia Coutinho, former Global Talent Leader at Meta, joined Veeam as VP of Global Talent Acquisition
Dan Collins, Principal Managing Partner at Nexora, joined CommerceIQ as Head of Talent Acquisition.
Tina Wig, former Head of Global Talent Acquisition at Moveworks, joined Microsoft AI as Director of Talent Acquisition.
Shweta Vohra, former Chief People Officer at Lacework, joined Github as Chief People Officer.
Michael Goldman, former VP, Head of Talent Acquisition at FLOWX.AI, joined Norm Ai as Head of Talent.
Ashleigh Anderson, former Vice President, Head of People Attraction & Enablement at Credit Karma, joined Confluent as Global Head of Remote Work.
Valerie Vadala, former Head of Talent Acquisition at Shutterstock, joined HUMAN cas VP of Talent Acquisition.
Scott Harrison, former VP of Talent Discovery at Formula.Monks, joined Intuitive as Sr. Director - Talent Acquisition.
Tia Gordon joined Coactive AI as Head of People.
John Jung, former Talent - Executive Recruiting leader at Zoox, joined Arm as Sr. Talent Manager.
Esso Bodjona, former People Ops Generalist at DoseSpot, joined Pulley as People Ops Manager.
Alanna Shipley, former Senior Manager - Recruiting at Coinbase, joined Vercel as Director, Technical Recruiting.
Neva Davidson, former Internal Talent Lead at Bain Capital Ventures, joined Spectrum Equity as Talent Consultant.
Blake Levya, former Consultant, Talent Acquisition at Honeybook, joined Hasura as Principal - Talent Acquisition.
Matt Stephenson, former Operating Partner, Talent at Human Capital, joined Bain Capital Ventures as Head of Tech Talent.
Matthew Durr, former Co-Founder at Werkx, joined MagicSchool AI’s Talent team.
Francesca Bertone, former Head of Talent at Personio, joined Credit Genie’s Talent team.
Amy Anton Loehrer, former Head of Talent Acquisition, North America at Google DeepMind, joined Lightspeed as VP of Talent AI.
Did we miss your career change? Let us know: hello@gbdtalent.com
📖 What We’re Reading & Listening to:
The future of recruiting is AI-first: are you ready? - SJ Niderost, Gem
Measuring the Real Economic Impact of AI Agents - Daniel Rodríguez, Medium
There’s No Such Thing as a Generalist - Molly Graham, Substack
Returning to the office? Focus more on practices and less on the policy - McKinsey
2024-2025 People Trends - Lightspeed
Canva cofounder: My AI predictions for 2025 - Cameron Adams, Fortune
The Job Market is Frozen - Rogé Karma, The Atlantic
The UI for AI agents doesn't work. No one is talking about it - Parul Singh, LinkedIn
Leveraging AI for a Human-Centric Hiring Process - CodeSignal and Ashby
Everyone Needs an AGI Pill… Now - Julia Villagra, Medium
Agentic AI: The Next Evolution in Talent Acquisition? - Matt Staney, LinkedIn
📚 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.