Roz Francuz-Harris, vice president of talent acquisition at Zillow, has a simple reason for using AI so much in her work: “I love my family,” she told the audience during her recent Talent Connect talk. “AI is one of the tools I leverage to get time back to be with them.”
But Roz — who has built and led talent teams for IBM, Uber, Slack, and WarnerMedia — also finds AI valuable for another reason. Namely, it gives recruiters more time for the human aspects of their work.
“AI has the capability to make our process more objective, effective, and efficient,” she said, “which can free us up as human recruiters to focus on things that matter, such as relationships and strategic decision-making.”
While AI is often the subject of hype, we’ve noticed that the nitty-gritty details of how it can help talent teams is often missing from the conversation. That’s why we found Roz’s talk so refreshing. She offered step-by-step, practical details of how to use AI to increase diversity, complete mundane tasks, and even deal with an insensitive hiring manager.
Let’s check out the practical tips from her session on Revolutionizing Talent Acquisition: AI Meets Inclusivity and Authenticity.
1. Make a game of learning AI
Roz uses generative AI five to ten hours a week, so it seemed like a no-brainer to her that her team would do the same. When she suggested this to her director of talent acquisition experience and enablement, Shahbaz Ali, he told her,“We’re going to gamify this so the team can actually digest what you want them to learn.”
Shahbaz created “Prompt-a-thon” and then crowdsourced ideas from recruiters, coordinators, sourcers, and talent brand managers, asking them to submit use cases in which Zillow’s internal generative AI, ZGChat, could help.
In one example, the team prompted the AI to “Act as if you’re giving a presentation on key data findings and theme takeaways from survey responses around our representation recruiting survey.” They shared a hyperlink to Google Sheets with the survey. The tool quickly generated a well-written presentation that touched upon key points, including that respondents wanted more transparent and frequent communication.
The Prompt-a-thon lasted from April to June, and judges from Roz’s leadership team and the greater People team then gave prizes to the winning teams and individuals who performed strongest during the competition. But most importantly, it got Roz’s team really excited about AI and how it could make their jobs more enjoyable.
