How to use ChatGPT for high-response recruiting emails

ChatGPT is everywhere, but what is it and why should recruiters care? 

Think of the chatbot as a “language machine,” that is better at grammar than most of us. A chatbot uses statistics and learning to answer questions, write articles, summarize information, and more. And no, Chatbots do not have feelings. 

It’s being applied across industries, for all different purposes. And in recruiting, talent teams continue to find new ways to use AI in the hiring and recruiting process.

Candidate outreach is a great place to start. Using tools like ChatGPT to generate recruiting emails might give you better recruiting email templates. That’s efficient; you can send a lot more emails, more quickly. But is it productive? 

Why chatbot recruiting emails make you less productive

Well-written emails without context, written to a generic talent pool of candidates just won’t get the right people’s attention. That results in noise for everyone. Generic emails clog up the best matching prospects’ inboxes, and unqualified, undifferentiated applicants fill up your inbound channel. 

Candidates on the job hunt don’t need another generic email in their inbox. And you don’t need another unqualified applicant in your talent pool.

Read on to learn more about how you can use AI to create a talent pool of differentiated candidates and then send emails that will get their attention. The result? Efficiency AND productivity for your sourcing efforts.

When to use ChatGPT in recruiting

The beauty of ChatGPT today is that despite rapid expansion, it’s free to anyone looking to test it out. In just two months after launching, the tool is estimated to have reached 100 million monthly active users in January 2023, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history.

For fun, we asked ChatGPT to define itself and received an answer in less than 15 seconds.

The possibilities are endless. In recruiting, we’re starting to see AI and chatbots integrated into the content generation part of the sourcing and outreach workflow.  At Findem, we’ve added an AI button to our email outreach editor. 

But what appears simple on the surface is actually the result of a complex relationship between data, your people's talent, and the potential of AI. 

Adding AI to help generate outreach emails will make sourcers more efficient — saving them time from populating templates and personalizing emails — but not necessarily more productive. Without the context provided by a rich data pool, AI will only generate generic emails that add to noise and drop response rates, turn off prospective employees, and harm your brand.

To make ChatGPT a powerful candidate outreach solution, you need to use data and AI to generate your talent pool and differentiate your outreach. Data that adds context to the limited information captured in a resume or a profile helps you uncover people for who they really are. When that context is used to differentiate your outreach, your outreach can be more efficient and productive.

How AI gives context to your talent pool

As we learned from the definition above, ChatGPT is trained to respond by processing massive amounts of text data. In order to work most efficiently as part of your candidate outreach strategy, you need to process massive amounts of data to generate a talent pool, not just a keyword match to a resume or a profile. That’s where attribute search can help.

A typical keyword search for a software engineer or a sales account executive will yield the same pool for you and every other sourcer. Everyone is looking for software engineers with specific coding experience, or sales AEs with a background in Salesforce administration.

An attribute search, on the other hand, processes massive amounts of data from thousands of sources to uncover people who may not have the right words on their resume or who have worked at the right kind of company at the right time. Rather than being limited to the same keywords your competitors are using, you can find candidates by “saw a startup through to exit” or “NCAA athlete” or “mission driven”. You can find people not just with Java on their resume, but with verified code in GitHub. 

By using AI to drive the attribute search, you’re creating a large, more diverse, and differentiated talent pool. In turn, your recruiters will gain more productivity by reaching out to more people who are a better fit for your company. Sourcing tools that use keyword matching don’t deliver the same quality of candidates, reducing the effectiveness of your emails.

Here’s how it looks in action.

Generating AI content based on attributes

Most other tools require you to review profiles one by one and generate a list of 10-15 candidates for outreach. With Findem, you review a few enriched profiles in your talent pool to calibrate the list, then shortlist 100 candidates for outreach without having to review each one.

Generating an email is as easy as clicking a button in the Findem Platform. With Findem’s outreach tool, you can start with a blank draft or load a pre-approved template into the window.

At first, the email is somewhat generic, with information about your company, a basic intro, and top-level detail about the candidate pulled into the draft. By pressing the ‘AI’ button in the toolbar, any recruiter or sourcer can enrich the email with information based on the attributes that were a “must-have” in your initial search.

After a few seconds of “thinking,” ChatGPT pulls attribute data from each enriched profile, into a highly curated, personalized email. Instead of telling a candidate that they’d simply be a good fit for a software engineer role, ChatGPT provides added context to the statement, so you can cite specific experience or skills that make them the right candidate for the job.

ChatGPT is just the starting point, though. Your sourcers connect the dots between the data and generate more interest from more candidates who are a better match. 

Refining chatbot content with a recruiter’s touch

Your talent team knows your business better than a bot ever could. While AI is an excellent resource for pulling context from loads of data, it can’t explain why your company might be the right place for a candidate to work.

Building on the email, sourcers and recruiters can bring the story of your company to life. What makes your business different? How is your brand voice and tone a better fit than the rest of the competition? That’s where your employer branding comes in and turns generic emails into standouts.

By bringing context into outreach without requiring sourcers to view profiles one by one, you’re freeing up your team for more authentic interactions. And when you automate a series of personalized emails to cultivate interest  — you’re helping them to be more efficient and more productive.

Automate outreach for greater efficiency and productivity

Sending generic emails to candidates, some who may not even open the message, is a waste of time — especially when those candidates are being inundated with queries from competition in the market.

Why not take the top 100 candidates from all of your channels — outbound, ATS, CRM — and send custom, personalized emails to each? With Findem’s robust attribute search, ChatGPT’s ability to pull context from that rich candidate data, and your talent team’s knack for the personal touch, you should see higher outreach right away. 

We have. One of our customers saw a 60% response rate to her emails using a calibrated search with an automated recruiting email nurture flow. Ready to gain those efficiencies while making your organization more productive?

Request a demo today and see how we’re using AI to drive higher candidate responses.