1,166 words | 7 mins
By: Ryan Malmberg, Talent Manager – Invest Ottawa
As AI continues to evolve, its role in recruitment is becoming clearer. While some businesses are still waiting to see tangible results, AI-driven hiring tools are already reshaping how start-ups and scale-ups attract and find top talent.
In late 2024, GenAI entered Gartner’s Trough of Disillusionment meaning companies have moved past the initial hype and are focusing on real-world applications beyond the Peak of Inflated Expectations.
Despite AI fatigue and the constant pressure to keep up or fall behind, the hiring landscape is one area where AI is both adding value and headaches for hiring teams and job seekers alike.
For early-stage companies, opportunities are emerging to use these tools to add a human touch to candidates, do your own sourcing, and get out from under the pile of resumes.
How AI is Reshaping Hiring
While building our NEW Talent Service offering for Invest Ottawa’s Venture Path companies, I’ve explored and recommended AI-driven recruitment strategies with founders and HR teams across our supported companies. To provide meaningful guidance, I’ve evaluated 20+ demos of recruitment tech, something I rarely had time for when I was deep in the hiring trenches.
AI recruitment tools generally fall into six categories:
- The Rise of AI-Powered Recruitment Tools – New Outreach Opportunities for Start-Ups – AI-driven talent discovery
- Resume screening and parsing – Automated shortlisting
- Interview co-pilots – AI assistance during interviews
- Candidate-facing chatbots and automated interviews – AI-led interactions
- Candidate assessment tools – Skills testing & behavioural analysis
- Job posting optimizations – Enhancing reach & targeting.
While these tools are helping companies streamline hiring, candidates are also leveraging AI to optimize applications—sometimes flooding recruiters with AI-altered resumes and bot-driven mass applications. The result? Growing frustration on both sides.
Employers struggle to sift through applications, while job seekers feel discouraged when their dream job attracts 100+ applicants before they even hit ‘submit.’ If you want a reality check on today’s hiring landscape, just take a scroll through the r/recruitinghell subreddit.
Something needs to change.
A Smarter Approach for Start-Ups & Scale-Ups
AI-driven recruitment tools present an opportunity for starts-ups to compete with larger companies in hiring top talent. The key is to balance automation with human touch by leveraging AI to streamline processes while maintaining authentic engagement.
A Winning Strategy:
1. Attract Applications
- Post your role with an engaging description and evaluate candidates within the first week. There are lots of quality candidates on the job hunt right now.
- Write the type of job description that shows your wins, your challenges, why the role matters and the problem you need someone to solve – not just bullets of generic requirements.
- Don’t let applications pile up – treat them like dishes in the sink. The best candidates go quickly, and you’ll dread doing it if the task gets too burdensome.
2. Don’t Rely Solely on Job Postings
- Hope is not a hiring strategy. Post-and-pray may not be enough.
- If you don’t see a strong pipeline of applicants with at least six phone-screening-worthy candidates in the first 10 days – be proactive. Consider targeted outreach to find the right candidates yourself.
3. Turn to Outreach Using AI-Enabled Features
- LinkedIn Recruiter Lite is the best option for scaling companies. Newcomers like PeopleGPT and SeekOut are worth keeping an eye on.
- Search like a recruiter using a mix of AI-assisted text prompts, Boolean and filters to identify top talent.
4. Balance AI with Personalized Engagement
- Candidates expect human connection – much like you expect from applicants. Good candidates will often reciprocate your level of personalization. Investment here is mutual.
- Use personalized outreach via LinkedIn InMail through a strategy focused on quality – not quantity. Connect the problem you need them to solve with their experience.
- Did you know anyone can direct message profiles in shared LinkedIn groups without using InMail credits? For more on that, see our workshop info below.
Are LinkedIn Profiles the New Resume? In an interesting twist, 57% of applicants now use ChatGPT to refine resumes and cover letters. This raises the question: does a well-maintained, publicly visible, peer-reviewed LinkedIn profile hold more truth than a resume that gets AI-altered to your job description? For some candidates, yes.
When comparing a resume to a LinkedIn profile, start with verifying the alignment of employment dates and job titles. While gaps in employment often have reasonable explanations, it may be a question you ask if there is a discrepancy between the two. It’s not uncommon for a candidate to alter their job duties to align closer to your role requirements, but changing a job title can be a sign of AI influencing a resume beyond the truth.
If that’s the case, you may be reasonable in questioning the accuracy of the role information below it. Candidates typically write one public LinkedIn profile, but some will have multiple resume versions. For this reason, it’s a recommended practice to compare the two.
While LinkedIn remains the most valuable database of profiles, start-ups previously balked at the $12,000 annual price tag for LinkedIn Recruiter. AI-powered alternatives like PeopleGPT (Juicebox) and SeekOut have disrupted the space and offer different features than LinkedIn.
Recognizing the rapid rollout of new features for all tools in the space right now, I’m keeping a close eye on the value and tradeoff of these products and their use cases for early-stage companies.
In the long term, don’t underestimate Microsoft’s AI enhancements and investment in the platform. Their $26B acquisition of LinkedIn is more than they paid to acquire Skype, Github and Nokia mobile – combined. Amongst the hype and new tools surfacing, it remains an immensely powerful search tool… and the database from which its competitors rely on.
Final Thoughts
As AI reshapes recruitment, the opportunity to stand out is in personalized, thoughtful engagement.
The winning strategy will continuously evolve. For some roles, there are great hires to be made from the applicant pool. For others, the tradeoff of time spent under the stack of resumes might be better invested in outreach with tools that weren’t previously available to starts-ups and scale-ups.
Early hires shape your company’s trajectory. The wrong hires cost you time, resources, and missed opportunities. Hiring isn’t a science – it’s part art, strategy, and gut instinct. If you need a reminder to trust your instincts, listen to Malcolm Gladwell’s reflections on his “Blink” inspired early hiring decisions.
WANT TO LEARN TO SOURCE CANDIDATES LIKE A RECRUITER?
WANT TO LEARN TO SOURCE CANDIDATES LIKE A RECRUITER?Join our upcoming workshop. When post-and-pray doesn’t deliver, it’s time to turn to targeted outreach.
Your open role might be somebody’s dream job, but they just don’t know it yet. We’ll share strategies, tools and best practices to recruit your next rising star to your team using tools not previously available to you.
We’ll compare specific use cases for LinkedIn Recruiter Lite and PeopleGPT (Juicebox), how to write compelling outreach messages that are personalized enough to earn a response, and how to leverage AI to find efficiencies at scale that save you time throughout your hiring needs.
Modernize Your Hiring Process: How to proactively source your next hire using LinkedIn Recruiter Lite and PeopleGPT.
📌 Wednesday, May 7, 2025
1:00 – 2:30 PM
Virtual