ChatGPT for remote hiring: using AI to recruit beyond borders

We live in the age of AI, and the age of remote work.

The beauty of hiring a remote team is that it gives you access to a global talent pool where you have access to the skills you need anywhere around the world, regardless of geographic location.

With that global access to talent though comes global competition. Remote and hybrid positions are in high demand. Remote work is becoming a preference for today’s workers, and more people are seeking remote roles than there are positions available.

Enhancing your remote hiring process with AI can make your hiring process easier, better, faster, and stronger, in a way that makes that remote talent come straight to you.

ChatGPT was barely a year old as of the end of 2023, and it has already begun to change the way companies build remote teams.

According to Workable’s AI in Hiring and Work 2024 survey report, 62.5% of hiring managers used some form of AI in the recruitment process over the past year – with a vast majority pointing to time and cost savings as a result of utilizing AI.

Likewise, using AI for hiring remote workers can save you time and build remote teams by identifying, engaging, and onboarding the perfect candidates.

Here, we’ll offer you guidance on how to use ChatGPT to build remote teams and find the right candidates for them.

1. Virtual interviews

When you’re sourcing and recruiting job candidates for remote roles who live in a different city or even a different country from your physical office, virtual interviews will be part of your remote hiring process by necessity.

One in five hiring managers in Workable’s survey say their video interviews utilized some form of AI. Tools like ChatGPT can assist you here and make your virtual interview process more efficient and more streamlined.

Automated pre-screening interviews

The moment you put a job posting online, you’ll soon have 100+ messages piling up in your inbox – more than you could ever address personally on your own. Of those, you’ll have maybe five who make it to the final round of interviews.

How can you possibly single out the best candidates on your own, and balance your other job responsibilities?

ChatGPT can help you identify the best people to talk to out of your hundreds of applications during the pre-screening process.

That way, you can save your time and attention for the most qualified candidates.

Say you want to single out the candidates who have had experience working in remote teams. You could have ChatGPT filter through the cover letters, look for keywords and phrases such as “remote work”, “self-discipline”, and “communication skills”, and analyze which candidate would function the best on a remote team.

Example prompt: Analyze these cover letters for key skills and experience related to remote project management. Which candidate would do best on our fully-remote team, and why?

Interview preparation

Virtual interviews lack the face-to-face interactions and body language cues that can give you insight into a candidate’s soft skills and inner character.

AI tools can help compensate for the lack of in-person interaction in the interview by helping you learn as much about them as you can during the time that you have.

Suppose you’re hiring for a remote software developer position in the real estate industry, and it’s a fully remote role that can be done from anywhere. You can have ChatGPT help you brainstorm a list of questions that are tailored for the role.

You could use the Workable AI-powered interview question generator (as part of our Free Tools for Managers package) as a starting point to brainstorm your initial questions.

Then, you can use ChatGPT to take that list, and further tailor them to make them specific to remote work, or to the position itself.

Example prompt: Generate a list of behavioral questions for this remote software developer position in the real estate industry. Below are some interview questions I’ve already made, and the job description.

{{Insert Interview Questions}}

{{Insert Job Description}}

2. Candidate engagement

Candidates can drop off during the interview process for all sorts of reasons. Poor timing, a more enticing offer elsewhere, or a bad candidate experience can drive remote workers away to find other opportunities.

With ChatGPT’s help, you can keep the lines of communication open and improve your candidate engagement, so that they stick with you until the end and stay excited about the opportunity you’re offering them.

Automated follow-ups

One of the first chokepoints where candidates are likely to drop off is after the initial screening. You can use ChatGPT to create follow-up emails to let them know they’ve made it through the first round of interviews, and even personalize it to their responses.

Let’s say you were drafting a follow-up email for a candidate who successfully made it through the pre-screening stage of the real estate software developer from before. You can use a prompt like the following:

Example prompt: Create a follow-up email for this candidate who has completed the initial screening. Include information from their interview responses.

FAQ chatbot

Having an FAQ chatbot on the application page can field common questions that candidates might have about the role, and learn more about you, your company, and your remote work policy before applying.

If that’s something you’ve considered, have ChatGPT think of common questions candidates might ask about the position given the company and the role you’re hiring for.

ChatGPT pro-tip: Having web-enabled ChatGPT browse the homepage and “About” page of your website can help it learn more about your company culture and make the FAQ questions more personalized.

For this, you’ll need to have ChatGPT-4 enabled with the ChatGPT Plus subscription and insert one or two links from your company’s website to give examples. You can also use the VoxScript plugin available from the ChatGPT plugin store.

Example prompt: I’m making an FAQ chatbot for this role. Can you come up with two or three common questions candidates might have for the chatbot, such as the company culture, benefits, and the remote work setup?

Engagement surveys

If remote team building is something that your company is new to, you can use ChatGPT to continually optimize your remote hiring process based on your candidate’s feedback with candidate experience surveys.

Example prompt: Please generate questions for a post-interview candidate experience survey based on this role.

3. Collaboration

It can be harder to gauge a candidate’s personality and character in a virtual interview on your own. For that reason, your whole hiring team must be aligned on what to look for as you build your remote team.

Here are a few ways ChatGPT can make collaboration easier as you put together your remote team.

Candidate scorecards

The hiring team for your remote positions can keep the process objective and fair with a candidate scorecard. ChatGPT can make standardized scorecards for you based on the job description. That way, the criteria for candidate selection can remain unbiased, consistent, and fair.

Documentation

About 16% of companies are fully remote and have no physical office, and 32.6 million Americans will be remote by 2025.

If your organization is transitioning to a remote work setting, there may be an adjustment period as your company catches up to the new realities of the remote workforce.

ChatGPT can help smooth that transition and draft your internal documentation outlining the new rules about remote work at your company. Try having it draft an internal Slack message or email about your remote work initiatives.

4. Additional use cases

ChatGPT does its best work when you get creative with it. The trend toward remote work will bring about many exciting opportunities, but it will also bring challenges you can’t anticipate.

Here are some more out-of-the-box ways ChatGPT can help you recruit and build your remote teams.

Onboarding guides

Remote work is very new territory for many people. Some candidates will be more used to working in remote work environments than others. You can use ChatGPT to make personalized onboarding guides to make sure that all of your candidates start their roles on the right foot, regardless of their prior experience with remote work.

Going back to our example for the software developer job at the real estate company, a prompt you could use might be:

Example prompt: Create an onboarding checklist for this new remote role position.

Training modules

It’s perfectly possible that of two candidates who are equally qualified for the same position, one may be more used to remote work tools and communication platforms than the other.

You can help get the new remote workers on your team to get up to speed with training modules that can show them how to use the tools they’ll need to collaborate with their teams.

Let’s say you want to include a section on how to use your company Slack.

Example prompt: Outline a training module for using Slack in this position.

Embrace the future of remote hiring

AI tools and remote work together represent a significant shift in how we recruit candidates. If you make use of ChatGPT in key areas of your remote team-building process, you can make it easier on yourself and save yourself considerable time, money, and wasted effort finding qualified candidates for remote roles.

Curious about transitioning to a remote work setting? Check out our Workable guides on remote work here.