You made it! If you’re reading these words, you know the value of AI tools like ChatGPT, Bard, Claude, and all the other cool new AI software.
You know AI can help your recruiters, sales reps, and entire staffing team offload repetitive tasks, so they can work more efficiently and spend more time building the relationships that make your business thrive.
You know that your competitors are using AI right now to get more done with less. AI is constantly evolving so its potential to make business better expands rapidly every day.
But what you may not know – and what can be overwhelming – is how to get started tapping all this potential right now.
So we’ve created this AI starter kit for staffing leaders like you who are ready to make the leap and put this powerful tool into your teams’ hands – the right way.
Here’s what the AI starter kit includes to get started with AI at your staffing firm:
Included in the free resources are the AI prompt cheat sheet, 75+ AI prompt templates, and a AI template spreadsheet to share prompts across your firm.
It’s likely your team is already using AI so a good place to start is to survey your recruiters and sales reps to understand their current adoption and favorite use cases.
A few tips for using this kit:
- Feel free to use this content as you see fit (delete/edit/add) to fit your firm’s needs
- Add your staffing firm’s logo in the placeholders
- Choose from the 75+ prompt templates to get started in your prompt spreadsheet
- Download all the AI resources included for additional tools and inspiration
So let’s dig into the kit and get your staffing firm started with AI!
Dos and Don’ts
Before getting into the hyper-specific ways you can use AI in staffing and recruiting, let’s zoom out and take a look at some high-level dos and don’ts to guide your AI strategy.
Dos:
- DO tap AI to help make your job easier. Think of the most time-consuming aspects of your day. Many of these timesinks are optimal for AI’s assistance: drafting emails, text messages, social media outreach campaigns, crafting marketing copy, creating pitch decks, reaching out for credentialing documentation, and more.
- DO use AI for outreach assistance. These days, the sheer volume of outreach required to stay in constant touch with prospects, candidates, and employees means is impossible to manage manually. AI can help keep your outreach personalized, relevant, and timely – all while saving your team tons of time.
- DO save time by using AI to speed up your process. For example, writing candidate submittals is the kind of repetitive but highly detailed activity that’s perfect for AI.
- DO get creative with AI. For example, crafting job descriptions can get old quickly. While positions vary in their particulars, your team may be struggling to find creative ways to package similar jobs over and over again. AI can create endless variations of the same postings and churn out enticing job postings faster.
- DO brainstorm with AI to innovate. AI isn’t just good for creating copy. It can help you and your team come up with boolean search strings, email subject lines, behavioral interview questions, ad copy, prospect newsletter hooks, and so much more.
Don’ts:
- DON’T automate relationship building. While you want to partner with AI to help you streamline, innovate, and expand your outreach efforts, you don’t want to automate away your relationships. Your agency offers recruiting knowledge, job placement expertise, and the emotional intelligence that sets you apart. Don’t over rely on AI automation to the point that you lose the personal touch that makes your team successful.
- DON’T skip the proofreading. It can be tempting to generate text with AI and just run with it – but this is a mistake. AI is still a work in progress – it may let in errors, use strange language, and misunderstand your prompts. So, don’t let AI speak directly to your candidates and clients – encourage your team to edit anything it generates before sending it out in the wild.
- DON’T trust the facts. Generative AI is a constantly evolving large language model – and in some ways it can operate like a collaborative Google search console. However, like Google, AI can get the facts wrong. It only knows what it is trained on, so it can’t differentiate between fact and fiction. It tends to make things up – and it also doesn’t always have the most up-to-date information. So double check any info AI inserts into your content to avoid misinformation – and hits to your reputation.
- DON’T forget to run bias checks. AI isn’t exempt from the human biases, stereotypes, and discriminatory practices that humans can fall prey to. Since AI is based on human-generated information, it can replicate and amplify human prejudices – something you don’t want in your hiring practices. You can instruct AI to eliminate its own biases with carefully constructed prompts (see more below), but always be on the lookout for discriminatory language that could alienate your candidates and clients.
- DON’T feed AI sensitive information. Many AI tools are a public large language model, sharing sensitive information could be risky, leading to business security issues. Never share financial information, confidential candidate information, or intellectual property with AI. Only post to public AI model what you’d want to see on a social media post.
Remember, you never want AI to run the show. It can’t be self-sufficient. It’s not a replacement for human thought, ideas, and connection – it’s a tool like your software.
Encourage your team not to think of it as a replacement for the value they provide but as a jack-of-all-trades assistant that can help them work faster.
AI Best Practices
Develop an AI strategy – and communicate it effectively with your other team members.
Like any other tool in your tech stack, you want to have a clear strategy for implementing AI in your staffing and recruiting process.
It’s important to help understand why you’re using the tool, what high-level goals it can help you achieve, and what to look out for as others integrate it into their workflows.
While defining your strategy and educating yourelf on best practices, you can also clarify where to proceed with caution when using AI. By keeping your firm educated about privacy issues, misinformation, bias, and other snags that come up in AI-generated materials, you can make sure adoption of the tool goes smoothly.
Train AI on your brand, voice, and values.
Just as you want to train your team on how best to use AI, you also want to train AI on how best to represent your firm.
Because AI continuously learns from the information your team shares, it’s helpful to input clear guidelines that teach the AI about your brand voice, your preferred tone, your firm’s goals, and any other top-level information that guides your firm’s outreach.
Encourage team members to share prompts, templates, and use cases with each other.
Each recruiter, sales rep, and credentialing manager will likely be using AI in innovative ways – there’s no use in everyone in your firm continuously reinventing the wheel.
By creating knowledge repositories such as prompt and template spreadsheets and collaborative spaces to share best use cases, your team can continually learn from each other, too.
Tie your use of AI to metrics and continually monitor its effectiveness.
As with any other aspect of your recruiting cycle, it’s important to measure the effectiveness of the outreach, brainstorming, and other text created with the assistance of AI.
Perhaps you want to measure the click-through rates of your automated email campaigns to passive candidate before and after AI zhuzhed up your text. Or maybe you want to track your apply rate on job descriptions that were cowritten by AI. AI is all about continuous improvement.
Bonus: Integrate AI with your ATS/CRM database.
AI is a powerful tool on its own – but by integrating it with your ATS/CRM, you can really unlock its superpowers.
This integration allows your team members to create personalized, quick candidate submittals, tailor outreach to specific contact needs with a click of a button, streamline job description creation, and much more.
Rather than starting from scratch with every prompt, with a custom AI model you can instantly pull data into advanced prompts without exposing your private data.
The Structure of a Prompt
Now let’s get down to the nitty-gritty. Generative AI is used in a conversational interface, in which users chat their prompts to the AI and a Large Langage Model returns detailed answers.
AI is only as effective as the information you give it, so be sure your prompts are as clear and specific as possible.
For example, if your sole instruction to AI is: “Write a social media post for a nursing position,” you’ll get something like this:
Passionate about patient care? We’re hiring! Join our team of dedicated nurses and make a difference every day. Competitive benefits, supportive team environment, and opportunities for growth. Apply now and take the next step in your nursing career! #NursingJobs #HealthcareCareer
Notice that this post is very general. It also chooses what to highlight, making up the perks of the job. Promising “opportunities for growth” would be inappropriate in most travel nursing situations.
But if you instruct AI to “As a healthcare recruiter, write a Twitter post advertising an ER travel nursing night shift position in a teaching hospital in Colorado with great benefits,” you’ll get something like this:
Dreaming of picturesque Colorado mountains? 🏔️ Ready for a night shift adventure as an ER Travel Nurse? Our leading teaching hospital in Colorado has the perfect opportunity for you! Competitive pay, stellar benefits, and an unbeatable experience. Apply now! #ERnurse #TravelNurse ✈️
It still needs a fact-checking (is the pay stellar?), but it’s much closer to something specific, useable, and tailored to your client’s needs.
Think of it as giving the AI a specific story so it can generate the right information to yield the content you need.
Here’s the structure of a good AI prompt in staffing and recruiting:
Role: This is the main character in your story, the role that the AI will take on when it crafts the prompt. It may be playing the role of a recruiter, a marketing director, an account manager, or a CEO. What hat do you want the AI to wear as you collaborate with it?
Task: This is the task you’d like the AI to take on. Do you want AI to write a job post for an executive position at a brewery, craft a redeployment email campaign, or generate 25 subject line options for your next newsletter?
Audience: Your audience is whoever will receive the content you create. Perhaps your redeployment campaign is targeting light industrial workers who have been dormant with your agency for 18 months. Maybe your newsletter targets all new prospects who have recently connected with a recruiter for the first time. Get specific with your audience persona to help AI understand who you’re talking to.
Tone: Tone is the voice that the story. While your team naturally changes tone in their outreach – writing more formally to executive candidates, say, or using more emojis and joyous language when reaching out to substitute teachers. AI can’t make these tone adjustments automatically and needs to be taught how to interact with your audience.
Essential Info: This is any other information that makes your story clear to AI. In the example above, we included job title, shift, location, and experience level in the prompt. Whatever your task, be sure to give AI as much info as it needs to yield what you and your team need.
Questions. Sometimes, even if you’re extremely specific in your prompt, you may not know what you don’t know. By instructing the AI to ask you clarifying questions, you can have the AI help you identify gaps in your prompt, which will generate even better results.
Of course, you won’t always need to use every aspect of this structure in every prompt. When brainstorm ideas or generating variations on existing text, for example, you can often skip to simpler prompts, especially as AI becomes more familiar with your agency.
[Your Staffing Firm Name] Approved Prompt Templates
Now that you understand the anatomy of a good staffing and recruiting AI prompt, here’s how you put it all together in some specific use cases.
To get started you can download the AI Prompt Template Spreadsheet to organize and share prompts that work well for your firm.
Prompts: Job Descriptions
- I am a recruiter at a staffing firm. Craft a job post for a UX/UI Designer at a design-focused startup. Highlight the importance of user-centric design and innovation. Tone should be excited and future-focused. Please ask 5 clarifying questions so you can succeed at this task.
- Using the following job description as an example, please create a new job description for Business Development Manager position in a SaaS company. Include the target markets, revenue goals, and sales strategies. Please give three alternative versions of the description. Here is the job description example: [JOB DESCRIPTION]
- Create a list of 10 job title alternatives for the role of [JOB TITLE].
- List the top 10 most important skills for a [JOB TITLE].
Prompts: Email Campaigns to Candidates
- Acting as a recruiter, generate a sequence of 5 emails to potential candidates in order to nurture a relationship with them. The first email should provide industry resources, the second email should be a simple follow up from the first, the third email should share recent job opportunities, the fourth email should share a recent blog post, and the fifth email should be a personalized check-in. Ask me 3 clarifying questions before you begin.
- Acting as an executive recruiter, write a sequence of three cold emails, reaching out to passive executive candidates about a CFO position at a Fortune 500 Company. Write the emails in a professional, respectful, informative tone. Be sure to include that the available position is remote and that the company is looking for someone with experience leading diverse teams. The first email should be an introductory email, the second should provide more information about the position, and the third email should be a brief, personal message. Ask me 3 clarifying questions before you begin in order to succeed at this task.
- Acting as a recruiter, write a sequence of three emails inviting candidates to an interview for a travel nursing position. Write the emails in a professional, excited, welcoming tone. The first email should provide the interview details, the second should remind the candidate about the interview and logistics, and the third email is a post-interview thank you email. Ask me 3 clarifying questions before you begin in order to succeed at this task.
Prompts: Interviews
- Create an interview question bank for a first-round phone interview. The interview will be about 30 minutes long, for a project management role at a nonprofit. I hope to understand how the candidate views their role as a leader, how they handle pressure, and how they respond to feedback. Ask three clarifying questions before you begin.
- Please generate 10 diversity, equity, and inclusion interview questions for a CEO position at a health and wellness company. Ask three clarifying questions before you begin.
- What follow-up questions should I ask a candidate to determine their level of interest in a role?
Prompts: SEO Optimizations
- Suggest relevant, high-volume keywords for a job description for a [JOB TITLE].
- Suggest places where I can seamlessly incorporate the keywords you provided into this [EXISTING JOB DESCRIPTION].
- Suggest SEO-friendly header tags (H1, H2, H3) for this article: [INSERT BLOG POST TEXT]
- Provide a list of long-tail keywords related to travel nursing for a new healthcare staffing agency website.
Prompts: Attracting and Pitching Clients
- I am a marketer at a staffing and recruiting firm. The audience for my blog is prospective clients who are looking for staffing services to fill light industrial roles. Please generate Please generate 50 blog post ideas. Please ask me 3 clarifying questions so you can succeed at this task.
- I’m the owner of a staffing and recruiting firm. Please generate an outline for a pitch deck that will help me get new clients to sign with my firm. Use an engaging, confident, and informative tone. Please ask me three clarifying questions before you begin to help you succeed at this task.
- Acting as a sales representative in the staffing and recruiting industry, please create a contract for services for a new client. Write the contract in a professional, legal tone. Include a clause stating that either party may terminate the agreement with 30 days’ written notice and that the monthly rate is $12,500 for an ongoing staffing consultancy. Ask me 5 clarifying questions before you begin in order to succeed at this task.
AI Started Kit Resources
We’ve created a series of resources to help you expand the use of AI at your staffing firm, improve your team’s efficiency, and get more done. We hope these resources will help you connect with candidates faster and improve your relationships with clients.
The Ultimate AI Cheat Sheet
The Ultimate AI Cheat Sheet for Staffing and Recruiting helps you understand the basic structure of a prompt and provides tips on how to craft the best prompts to tap into the power of AI.
With lists of potential roles, tasks, audiences, tones, info, and questions, this handy one-pager will also help you brainstorm out-of-the-box ways to tap AI to work smarter.
The Ultimate AI Prompt Library
With The Ultimate AI Prompt Library for Staffing and Recruiting, built out a bank of over 75 prompts that recruiters, sales managers, compliance directors, marketers, and others throughout the industry can use to make their jobs easier.
These prompts can be copied directly into ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini to create candidate emails, compliance checklists, offer and rejection letters, ad copy, SEO and keyword research, and so much more.
The Ultimate AI Tone Guide
Stuck trying to figure out how you want AI to talk to your audience?
The Tone Guide for AI Prompts helps you choose from 85 professional tone words to craft prompts that reflect your brand voice.
P.S. Ready to learn about AI for your staffing firm?
We’re here to help! Connect with a Staffing Engine AI expert to help answer your questions and get a demo to learn how to apply AI to accelerate recruiting at your staffing firm.