Power Up Your Recruiting With These Three AI Tools
Every week, we receive newsletters or see LinkedIn posts with headlines like “The 100 best AI tools to revolutionise your recruiting!”. These headlines leave us with a constant fear of missing out. Do you feel the same?
After researching and testing various AI recruiting tools, our fear has lessened. Yes, there are many tools out there, but not all of them deliver what they promise. In fact, many of them are not sufficiently compliant with GDPR that we’d feel comfortable using them.
While many tool descriptions give the impression that they’ll put the recruitment process on autopilot so you can focus on conducting interviews and making decisions, we find it more useful to think of them as little helpers for recruiters.
Here are three AI recruiting software tools we’ve tested that are worth your time to take a closer look at:
1. Active Sourcing: Juicebox PeopleGPT
Juicebox’s PeopleGPT is an AI-powered search tool based on natural language, allowing for highly targeted searches. It searches over 30 data sources, including Google, LinkedIn and GitHub. We tested PeopleGPT for a (Senior) Consultant role at Julia Reis Consulting.
🔎 Our impression in a nutshell: Great candidate suggestions
👍🏻 What worked well
- Various ways to input and filter: You can start your search with PeopleGPT by uploading a job description or writing a brief search blurb. Based on this information, the tool suggests specific filters you can refine, edit and adjust.
- Assessment and ranking of candidate profiles based on criteria: With the PeopleGPT Autopilot, you can review, adjust and rank criteria that match your search and receive a table overview assessing candidates based on these.
- Better results than with LinkedIn Recruiter: Overall, we are very impressed with the quality of candidates identified by PeopleGPT. The different options to refine and adjust searches led to highly suitable candidates. The tool even identified Julia as a great match for Julia Reis Consulting!
😐 What didn’t work so well
- Candidate search based on job description: In the first attempt, we uploaded our job description to PeopleGPT, but this didn’t lead to suitable candidates. The great ones appeared based on our prompts, which remain an art (or rather science) to be mastered whenever AI tools are used.
Data protection & integrations
Juicebox is based in California, USA. Juicebox assures GDPR compliance on its website – but for anyone considering using it, we’d recommend consulting with Juicebox and a legal expert regarding details like data storage location, etc.
Juicebox allows data exports to ATSs like Greenhouse, Lever and Workday and CRMs like Salesforce or Close. It’s also possible to export a CVS file for LinkedIn Recruiter.
Other tools in this category
We also talked to the team at Talentwunder. Their sourcing app focuses on Germany, Switzerland and Austria and also sources from around 30 platforms (among them LinkedIn, XING and GitHub). If you’re looking to fill a larger number of positions in these countries, Talentwunder might be a good fit (they only sell packages that run at least for a year, and the current monthly price for the most basic version starts at 449€). A clear advantage of Talentwunder is that they are fully GDPR compliant.
Other AI-based sourcing tools you might want to take a look at (not tested by us):
2. Interviewing: Metaview
Metaview is a specialised note-taking tool for recruiting interviews. We tested it in several candidate conversations via Zoom and in connection with our applicant tracking system Teamtailor.
🔎 Our impression in a nutshell: High-quality notes, but a bit slow
👍🏻 What worked well
- Quality of notes: Metaview takes high-quality notes and creates transcripts in a number of languages. The notes are so accurate that you can lead the conversation without typing a word yourself.
- Template library: Metaview comes with several useful templates: You can choose if you’d like the notes to be shown in a question-and-answer format, focused on specific topics, etc.. You can also select how long you’d like your notes to be and whether you prefer reading paragraphs or bullets.
- Comparing candidates: Metaview gives the option to look at candidates in direct comparison, which can be helpful when making decisions on who to move to the next stage in a recruitment process or who to make an offer.
😐 What didn’t work so well
- Change of language during the interview: Language changes during the interview (in our case, from German to English or vice versa) aren’t always captured accurately in the notes.
- Populating Teamtailor evaluation forms: When using Metaview with Teamtailor, the tool doesn’t add summaries to the respective fields of an evaluation form or scorecard. The interview can only be added as a comment and only after transferring it individually from Metaview. According to the Metaview website, this functionality seems to exist with other ATS.
- Loading times: Loading times to generate content or comparisons are sometimes quite slow.
Data protection & integrations
Metaview is based in London and – according to their website – compliant with GDPR. Recordings and transcripts are stored on an AWS UK environment.
Using Metaview for note-taking and recording requires candidate consent; it’s also possible to only record audio and disable video capture.
Metaview offers a range of integrations:
- Various ATS, among them bambooHR, Personio, Recruitee, Teamtailor and Workable
- Video conferencing tools like Google Meet, MS Teams and Zoom
- Calendar & scheduling tools like Calendly, Google Calendar and MS Outlook
Other AI-based tools in this category (not tested)
- Carv - We tested the note-taking function for regular meetings, which worked quite well, but the tool didn’t convince us with their intake interviews/job description function.
- BrightHire
- Asynchronous AI video software: Interviewer.ai & sapia.ai
3. Skills Assessment: Vervoe
Vervoe is an AI-powered platform designed to assess candidates’ skills through customized tests and challenges. It comes with an extensive assessment library, but you can also create your own assessments. We tested Vervoe within our team for a consulting internship role. The free test version only allows the use of text answers and multiple-choice questions in assessments. With the paid plan, you can also use spreadsheets, presentations, audio, video, and a lot more.
🔎 Our impression in a nutshell: Good start, but we’d need to see more
👍🏻 What worked well
- Fully customisable assessments: While Vervoe comes with an extensive library of assessment templates, you can build your own assessment in exactly the way you want. To train the AI for longer text replies, you’re required to indicate examples of correct answers.
- Useful candidate ranking overview: Once candidates have completed your assessment, you can review the results in a ranking overview showing their total and skill-specific scores. You also see in what range the AI scored each task and can select a specific score to further personalise your AI.
- Tasks cannot be copied and pasted: Candidates can’t simply copy the assessment tasks and paste them to ChatGPT. This helps reduce the number of AI-generated replies.
- Simple and nice UI – with one exception: Generally, the UI is simple and nice – both when setting up the assessment and when completing it. Our main point of critique: The “action” buttons are displayed in such a pale colour that they don’t seem clickable.
😐 What didn’t work so well
- Initial set-up complexity: It takes quite some time to create a customised assessment, provide example answers, etc. If you’re using an assessment repeatedly to hire for the same role, this investment might pay off. But on a smaller scale, sending out skills assessments as documents via your ATS might be more efficient.
- AI grading nuances: While the initial AI grading generally goes in the right direction, you might need a larger sample size to personalise and train it to your needs (the free trial is limited to five candidates). The AI might not be fully able to capture the nuances of open-ended questions or creative tasks.
Data protection & integrations
Vervoe is based in Australia and assures GDPR compliance on its website – it might be worth digging deeper if you consider using this tool. Vervoe integrates with ATS like Smartrecruiters, Recruitee and Teamtailor. It also offers API access for custom integrations.
Other AI-based tools in this category (not tested by us)
🗨️ AI tool or not, we can help!
Are you looking for support in setting up the right HR tool landscape for your organisation?
We’d be happy to help you select the right HRMS, ATS or other tools to make your life easier, generate efficiencies and enhance your candidate and employee experience.
Feel free to schedule an initial call with Julia to discuss your situation and how we might be able to support you.
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Please note that tools such as the ones we described above tend to develop rather quickly. Our article is based on their status as of August 2024. Some of their features might have changed or improved since we've tested them.
As of the date of publication, we are not connected with any of the providers mentioned above in any commercial way.
© 2023 Julia Reis Consulting
