SHRM26 Debrief · Talent Management & Acquisition · #1272
Building an AI-Enabled Recruiting Team
with Tim Sackett
"If you suck at recruiting, great AI recruiting technology will exponentially allow you to suck much faster."
What it was about
Most organizations already have AI embedded in their recruiting stack (ATS machine learning, LLMs, chatbots), whether they realize it or not. The real work isn't shopping for new AI tools, it's turning on and properly using the features already available, which frees recruiter capacity for higher-value, strategic talent work.
By the numbers
3% to 5%
average career-site visitor-to-application conversion rate without conversational apply
~10,000 to near zero
Chick-fil-A's backlog of franchise-owner applicants before and after turning on an AI interview product
31.5 to 9 days
Great Wolf Lodge's time-to-hire reduction
Key notes
- Go back to your existing ATS/vendors (Greenhouse, iCIMS, Workday, Oracle, SAP, UKG, etc.) and ask what AI features are already built in and unused before buying new technology.
- Turn on conversational apply and AI interview scheduling first — they are low-risk, high-ROI, and can cut time-to-hire by 40-50%.
- Remove the 'create a profile' step from your career site application flow, since 67% of candidates abandon at that point.
The contrarian takeTime-to-fill is dying as a legitimate TA success metric, because AI is pushing it toward zero (racing to beat an 18-minute Amazon warehouse hire is meaningless). The speaker argues quality-of-applicant, targeting roughly 90% hiring-manager acceptance, is the real measure. Retention is a poor way to judge AI-driven hiring right now too, since a weak job market is inflating everyone's retention numbers regardless of hiring quality.
Take this back Monday
Do this for your team
Ask your ATS vendor what AI screening/scheduling features are already built in and unused, then turn them on.
Say this in your next leadership meeting
AI isn't something we need to buy — it's already in our ATS. The real work is turning on what's there.
Watch out for
- Trusting surface-level AI adoption stats (e.g., a study claiming 74% of HR leaders have adopted AI faster than other functions) without checking that 'adoption' often just means a career-site chatbot.
- Making the application process harder to reduce volume: this doesn't yield better candidates, only more desperate 'survivors' willing to jump through hoops.
- Keeping the 'create a profile' step at the top of the application funnel, which causes the majority of candidates to abandon before applying.
Fun fact · Tim Sackett
Tim Sackett has more Twitter (X) followers than his three Gen Z sons combined.
If this landed, see these
↳ Go deeperThe Human Hiring Blueprint: Fixing Recruiting in the Age of AIGives the Filter, Find, Feel, Finish playbook for exactly which parts AI should touch.⇄ The counterpointThe Art and Science of the Interview - Navigating Pay Transparency, AI Bias, and other Hiring LandminesComplicates the easy AI-on switch: those same features carry pay-transparency and bias landmines.✦ The unexpected oneAI & HR: Enhancing Opportunities Responsibly in a New Era of WorkFlipping on those recruiting AI features quietly triggers the state AI hiring law patchwork mapped here.