Why Your Recruitment Marketing Strategy Needs Generative AI

Generative AI has been the hot topic in HR tech (and everywhere else) for almost two years, yet many talent organizations are still barely dipping their toes into the water to explore how it can be used to support their day-to-day needs. For these organizations, finding the best use case to start the gen AI journey–one that’s strategic and will provide measurable results–is a persistent challenge.

Talent marketing and employer brand experts are utilizing generative AI to improve job ad creation and distribution, optimize personalized, targeted content, and enhance the overall talent experience. These are considered some of the best ways for generative AI to drive candidate conversion and operational efficiency. It starts with talent attraction.

Generative AI is a Game Changer for Recruitment Marketing

A global EVP and content strategy for an organization might at one time have taken an employer brand practitioner or consultant six months to develop. Now, the same project takes only a number of weeks through the use of a large language model, which will generate brand pillars, personas, and core messages based on inputs the organization already has at its disposal, reducing the time it takes to create an employer brand strategy by up to 80%.

There are cases in which AI-generated content does not perform as well as human-generated content, but the sheer amount of time it can save warrants its use. For many organizations, gen AI tools can be the difference between having a real content marketing strategy and not having one, because they make it possible for organizations to meet their content needs affordably.

On the product side, vendors are adding generative AI to the full scope of talent marketing functions, including content ideation and planning, AI-augmented video and written content creation, content library organization and search, content repurposing and updating, and job advertisement and job post creation.

New AI-based solutions for recruitment marketing are emerging, such as The Martec, a platform fully underpinned by client-custom AI models to support end-to-end creation and distribution of employee-generated content and social marketing copy. The Martec uses generative AI for a variety of functions, including content ideation and planning, generative prompts for video and written content creation, and drafting job advertisements and job descriptions.

Generative AI can also be applied to the marketing campaign creation process by generating content for a job advertisement, populating visual media, branding, and call-to-action links that are relevant to that job, and automatically optimizing the content for any social channels where the job ad will be posted.

Can AI-generated Content Compete with Human-generated Content?

In consumer marketing, AI-generated content is already prevalent, and recruitment marketing is still experimenting with how best to use generative AI to support the creation of marketing content. This technology poses a huge opportunity for employer branding and marketing teams that don’t have the resources to create marketing copy at scale, but, understandably, many practitioners are concerned that AI-generated content is too generic and that using tools such as ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot will dilute an otherwise unique brand voice. 

Generative AI can also support employee-generated content without sacrificing brand authenticity. Employee-generated content is frequently used in recruitment marketing to create assets such as videos, photos, blogs, and workplace profiles. Some organizations struggle with getting employees to participate in content creation, specifically video creation, often due to a set of personal barriers (e.g., “My hair doesn’t look good.”) and professional barriers (e.g., “What if I say something my employer won’t like?”). Experts in the space recommend against providing employees with scripts, and rather, encouraging employees to be authentic when presenting themselves. Tools that support employee content creation such as The Martec will provide employees with conversational AI prompts that encourage authentic sharing while simultaneously guiding employees to cover key topics that are of interest to potential candidates.

How Recruitment Marketing Can Drive Gen AI Adoption in HR

According to a 2024 survey by Dresner Advisory Services, IT and marketing professionals are among the first adopters of generative AI, with 44% of IT and 36% of marketing professionals saying that adopting gen AI is a primary focus. However, professionals in human resources indicated the least overall interest, with only 16% saying that adopting gen AI is a primary focus.

While consumer marketing professionals have been quick to realize the value of gen AI, recruitment marketing teams can struggle to gain support and buy-in from leadership when it comes to using AI-enabled solutions. Many organizations are rightly concerned about the use of AI in the hiring process due to the associated legal risks, and they may also be concerned about the data protection and cybersecurity risks of using ChatGPT. Corporate legal and security teams sometimes think of AI as a homogenous threat that affects all aspects of recruiting in the same way.

We consider the use of generative AI in recruitment marketing to be a low-risk/high-reward use case for organizations that want to incorporate the technology into their talent processes. The risks of using AI to process application data or to assess or “match” a candidate’s fit for a role are of a different nature from using AI tools at the very top of the funnel to attract and market to potential candidates. Recruitment marketing and branding processes involve externally-facing content and data, which have no impact on applicant data or data used in hiring decisions. 

Some vendors are finding ways to mitigate concerns about generative AI by offering a purely custom-built GPT model behind a firewall, posing no risk to the company’s proprietary data. As is the case for most uses for AI in talent acquisition, there is still a long way to go in educating business leaders on the nuances, risks, and opportunities inherent in the technology, and the ubiquity of AI assistant tools in web applications will eventually force more organizations to embrace its use in the future.

Final Thoughts

Looking at the history of recruitment marketing technologies, what stands out most is how they have lagged behind consumer marketing technologies over the past few decades. Today, the gap in technology innovation and adoption between recruitment and consumer marketing is even more apparent. We think the excitement around generative AI could have a major impact on recruitment marketing and employer branding, and it could pave the way for more experimentation and day-to-day use of the technology to drive efficiency and effectiveness of talent acquisition strategies.

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