Optimizing Hiring: Using AI and Automation to Enhance the Candidate Experience

BY Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | April 07, 2025

HR is a big job, and teams are feeling the pressure. SHRM’s 2025 State of the Workplace report showed that 62% of HR professionals feel like they’ve been overcapacity in the last year. Fifty-seven percent report being understaffed. The report also points out a promising development that can help teams get a handle on their responsibilities: artificial intelligence.

From Day One gathered a panel of recruiting leaders for a webinar on using AI and automation to enhance the candidate experience, most of them well into their experiments with AI, and all of them ready to talk about how it’s saving them time and energy, and making the hiring process better.

Panelists were eager to put to bed some common misconceptions about how AI is being used in hiring. First, that it’s used to auto-reject candidates. “I’ve never seen that happen, and frankly, most recruiters I talk to wouldn’t want that to happen,” said Kyle Forsberg, senior technical recruiter at biotech firm Thermo Fisher Scientific.

Another is that recruiters are somewhat “brainless,” said Michelle Yoshihara, senior manager of talent planning at HR software platform Greenhouse. That they go through the hiring process allowing AI to make decisions for them and failing to advocate on behalf of their clients. Also not true.

What it is doing is freeing up a lot of time, which lets recruiters source and interview candidates the way they’ve wanted to do it for some time. Polina Morozov, a senior technical recruiter at Grammarly, uses the company’s AI writing assistant to personalize candidate outreach and make messages more attention-grabbing. She’s been using it for two years, to great success. “Whenever I have any subsequent communications with candidates, I do run it through AI to make sure that I’m getting my point across, especially in written form.”

Panelists spoke about "Optimizing Hiring: Using AI and Automation to Enhance the Candidate Experience" during the conversation moderated by journalist Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza (photo by From Day One)

When you have more time, you can expand your talent pool to find better candidates. “We’re making the process simpler for candidates,” said Chuck Kostomiris, who leads global executive recruitment at energy firm ConocoPhillips. “Not just less pre-screening questions, but more inclusive pre-screening questions to help hopefully more candidates come through that meet the basic requirements for a position.”

At Google, senior technical recruiter Steen Whidden fills roles for freshly minted PhDs and other highly credentialed talent, often with 30 years of experience, which means he’s working with multiple generations at any given moment, and he’s using AI to tailor the candidate experience.

“For people recently out of PhDs, maybe they just want a short prep call right before they start interviewing,” he said. And at the end of the process, “maybe some don’t want a rejection call, but would rather get an email instead.” More senior workers sometimes like a more high-touch style of recruitment, Whidden has found. Meeting candidates the way they want to be met hasn’t always been possible, simply because there isn’t enough time, but “as we get more time freed up, we can hopefully provide even better candidate experience,” he said.

Others are using interview transcription. Kostomiris tells candidates ahead of time that he’ll be using a transcription tool—though the interview recording itself won’t be stored or recorded—and that they’re welcome to opt out. He likes that he doesn’t have to worry about taking notes, and instead can focus on building rapport with the candidates.

Forsberg uses it to communicate with hiring managers who have more technical expertise than he does. “I can send them the recording they can hear straight from that candidate, instead of playing a game of telephone between the hiring manager and myself.”

Introducing new steps in the process or augment existing ones won’t get you very far unless you persuade hiring managers to buy in. They have to know ahead of time that anything you ask them to do is deliberate and toward a very specific end. 

“Take a moment prior to all these changes and say, ‘This is the year we’re really focused on AI, so a lot of the changes you’re going to see are going to be us amplifying our processes with AI or automation so that we can make our process more efficient,’” said Yoshihara. When managers see the direction, they can trust that you’re not chasing trends or complicating the process unnecessarily. 

Disclose to candidates how and when you’ll be using AI, panelists agreed. And as far as possible, give them the chance to opt out. And if you’re going to use AI, don’t expect or require your candidates to totally refrain.

But don’t introduce AI into the hiring process if it’s not necessary. “AI for the sake of AI is not what we need,” said Forsberg. “If it ain’t broke, you don’t need to fix it.”

“It seems that there will be an AI solution for any number of challenges that businesses face,” said Yoshihara. “But for a recruiting team, as you’re thinking about the candidate experience, you have to consider where this is best applied.”

There are some things AI can’t do. Morozov noted that the excitement of finally extending a job offer can’t be done with an AI assistant. And she doesn’t want to hand it over either.

Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Greenhouse, for sponsoring this webinar. 

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism.

(Photo by Nuthawut Somsuk/iStock)

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