The Remarkable GPT-4 Insights of The Source and Recruit Company Illuminate SHRM Vermont

Since the dawn of the digital age, the talent sourcing and recruitment industry has always been quick to adapt. From simple job boards and video interviewing tools such as SparkHire and Microsoft Teams to sophisticated applicant tracking systems, pre-hire assessments, and reference and background check solutions, the industry has never been far from the leading edge in tech. And now, there’s AI. 

“AI is contributing to significant quality and efficiency gains,” says Matthew Burzon of The Source and Recruit Company. “We are fully invested and in the midst of training the team on various ways to enhance the recruitment process using a variety of AI-driven tools.” 

Initially established eight years ago as Talon Recruitment in Vermont, The Source and Recruit Company has become a powerhouse boutique agency with national reach. Under Burzon’s leadership, the company has established a reputation for delivering quality candidates at a palatable cost using a fractional recruitment model underpinned by a robust modern technology stack. 

“Recruitment technology is becoming quite sophisticated, and it takes considerable training to learn how to use various applications effectively,” Burzon says. “A substantial component of our value proposition is that our technology is in place, the team is trained, and we can deliver near immediate results.” 

Recently, Burzon was invited to present at the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) Vermont State Conference. In a session titled “Level Up Your Recruitment Game with GPT-4,” he shared his wealth of insight into this specific application of artificial intelligence and how he and his team at The Source and Recruit Company have used it. 

For starters, Burzon advises using different personas when prompt writing. ChatGPT can write content using the “voice” of a certain type of person, like an industry expert, an influencer, or even Crocodile Dundee, which allows it to create content that targets a specific demand in context with an appropriate tone. 

In terms of recruitment, for example, assigning a recruitment marketer persona makes sense when asking ChatGPT to create a job advertisement copy for a post intended for social media. When creating interview questions for a software developer, however, it might be better to call on the persona of an expert in PHP, Python, Ruby, or JavaScript programming languages. 

ChatGPT excels at writing marketing copy — if it’s prompted well. “I was reading an article recently about a new type of job emerging focused on prompt engineering,” says Burzon. “Learning how to write ChatGPT prompts to achieve specific desired outputs is clearly a highly in-demand skill.” 

Prompts play a crucial role in getting ChatGPT to produce accurate content, which is why it might be worth anyone’s while to spend some time studying basic prompt writing. While the tool has limited knowledge of world events after 2021, learning to use plug-ins can help it familiarize itself with websites and texts that have been produced in more recent times. 

The best thing about Chat GPT is that it can provide endless variations to a given theme. In his eBook titled “Recruiting in the Digital Age: Harnessing the Power of OpenAI’s GPT-4,” which served as the basis for his SHRM Vermont talk, Burzon identifies several different tasks in which this trait could be beneficial, such as identifying alternate job titles that appeal to certain personality types or creating keywords for particular jobs that can be used to find candidates. One thing that’s made especially apparent in the book is the incredible span of possibilities to boost workplace productivity using ChatGPT. 

The quality of work of AI will, to a large extent, depend on the people who use it. That’s why Burzon advises that in addition to humans playing the role of Creative Director, we must also play the role of Editor-in-Chief. ChatGPT-written copy must be checked for accuracy and biases before being put into use. “Strong writing skills are still necessary,” says Burzon. “You need to learn to walk before you can run.” 

In the end, future recruitment processes, as Burzon sees it, will involve both human and artificial intelligence.  "Artificial Intelligence has been a remarkable asset in crafting job descriptions, condensing them for candidate correspondence and social media outreach, composing recruitment emails, formulating screening queries, orchestrating updates, generating keyword inventories, and constructing Boolean search algorithms, among other tasks," he notes warmly. "Yet, we remain confident in the irreplaceable value of human intuition, emotional intelligence, and empathetic connection. While AI serves as an invaluable tool in our arsenal, it has its limitations, assuring us that our roles are far from obsolete."