How Google recruiters are using and experimenting with AI tools

AI is going to change everything in HR! (...is what we’re hearing everywhere nowadays.)

While many HR pros are using AI in their work, the tech will continue to disrupt their processes. That’s why Google’s recruitment team has positioned itself somewhere between actively using and continuing to experiment with AI, according to Brian Ong, Google's VP of recruiting.

“There’s a lot of tasks in the recruiter’s day job, and more and more AI can take care of some of those tasks in different ways,” Ong told HR Brew.

How Google recruiters are using AI. When interviewing international candidates, Ong said recruiters typically brush up on geographical and cultural differences. Nowadays, Google recruiters use the company’s AI language learning model (LLM), NotebookLM, to educate themselves, inform interview questions, and improve the candidate experience.

Recruiters also use Google’s chatbot, Gemini, to role-play conversations with candidates and hiring managers before having them face-to-face, Ong added.

“[When] all these little tasks go away, the administrivia goes away, and now I’m spending more time getting educated, but I can get educated faster too,” Ong said. “The combination of those two things that make me more impactful as a recruiter. It’s less task orientation and more value orientation.”

Google’s AI-enabled applicant tracking system helps recruiters identify candidates who, based on information from previous applications, might be “more likely to respond” to outreach, Ong said, before offering an example of a time when a recruiter on his team reached out to a candidate designated as likely to respond, and they did, in just five minutes.

“We’re trying to reach out to them for roles they are a better fit for…which means they go further down the pipeline,” Ong said. “It just makes sure that we’re making better use of our time, instead of just reaching out to tens or hundreds. We can reduce that amount of reaching out.”

How AI will continue to impact recruiters. Recruiters often have to chase down hiring managers and interviewers for candidate feedback, Ong said. He wants agentic AI to take over this task.

“It seems nominal, but, if you multiply it by the number of times somebody has to do that over the course of a week, it really starts to add up,” Ong said. “It frees recruiters up to do other things versus this administrative nudging type thing that they’re kind of stuck doing.”

Ong said he hopes to reduce the amount of applications recruiters have to sift through by giving candidates access to an AI-powered feature that will match them with roles based on their résumés.

“The breadth of tasks that AI continues to pull away will increase, and what that will then do for the recruiter is they’ll continue to move up that value stream,” he said. “Whatever percentage of time they’re spending on all these administrative things continually gets closer and closer to zero. The time that they’re spending with humans increases.”

Ong said he wants his recruiters to be more like “internal mobility coaches,” focused on improving retention and the employee experience.

“Recruiters, who have already played with things, are sharing with each other different ways to use AI in the day job, as well as explaining things that we might see on the horizon,” Ong said. “That exposure and having evangelists that do it as a day job should help with adoption over time, rather than this feeling like some semblance of, like, an imposition.”