99% of Hiring Leaders Now Use AI. Most Are Using It Wrong

May 11

AI belongs in your hiring process - but only where it makes you faster and smarter.

The moment it starts making judgment calls, you are no longer hiring. A machine is. That is gambling.

A survey of 1,005 U.S. hiring managers found that 99% report using AI in some capacity in hiring. The question is no longer whether to use it.

The question is where AI helps you hire the best - and where it exposes you to risk. Insight Global

Add these four plays to your hiring game plan to significantly improve your ability to hire the best - avoid the rest - and limit risk.

GAME PLAN

AI HELPS SOURCE CANDIDATES. NOT SELECT THEM

AI finds more qualified candidates faster than any recruiter working alone. That is its job. Deciding who is worth your time is yours.

OBJECTIVE: AI-powered sourcing tools scan résumés, job boards, and LinkedIn at a scale no human can match. Teams using AI screening report up to 40% faster time-to-shortlist for volume roles. Used correctly, AI gets more qualified names in front of you in less time. Truffle

EXAMPLE: You post a role. AI screens 300 applications overnight against your defined criteria and surfaces the top 30 for human review by morning. Your team spends zero time on the bottom 270.

AVOID: Letting AI make the final cut without human review. A three-year study of a global consumer-goods firm found that their AI hiring system privileged a rigid definition of fitness - locking in one version of "qualified" and excluding candidates who did not match the historical mold.

Your next superstar may not look like your last one. Harvard Business Review

Also, you may want to scan discarded resumes by AI. Sometimes a person with an aptitude, background, skillset, or achievements outside of your “ideal candidate profile” may be a positive tipping point to your team. An Aladdin - a diamond in the rough.

HUMAN MANDATORY: A leader reviews the AI shortlist before anyone is contacted. You are looking for candidates the algorithm may have ranked lower - but whose background signals potential your criteria did not capture.

Is your AI sourcing tool surfacing candidates - or making decisions you should be making?

Sources: Eightfold AI, AI Screening Benchmarks, 2025 (eightfold.ai). Harvard Business Review, "New Research on AI and Fairness in Hiring," December 2025 (hbr.org/2025/12/new-research-on-ai-and-fairness-in-hiring).

AI CAN DEFINE A ROLE. LEADERS DEFINE GREATNESS

AI can draft the structure of what a solid role player looks like in a position. However, only the leader who owns the position can define what great actually means on their team.

OBJECTIVE: Most leaders waste hours writing job descriptions that attract the wrong candidates - because a job description only describes tasks.

Our approach is better - an Employee Strategic Plan ("SP") - a document that defines the role, the qualifications, the time allocation by activity, the cultural expectations, and the career path.

Based on the same role, or a similar one - AI can draft the Culture, Role, and Qualifications sections of an SP faster than a human.

There are two other areas of an SP that AI can draft based on the same position or a similar one:

Game Plan (first page): The Goals, Fundamentals, and Career Path.
Expectations (second page): The behavioral expectations of the manager for the employee - but it should never draft the future employee’s expectations of the manager. That is for the new hire to do.

EXAMPLE: You give AI the SP for the role or a similar role. It creates the draft.

If you do not have an example SP to provide, you can give the AI this information and it can provide a draft SP to be edited:

Content sections of the SP.
Your industry.
Role title - option: You can list 2-3 similar titles and encourage it to search the web to consider content from similar roles in your industry.
A job description you have used in the past for the role.
Draft goals for the role.
Draft career path for the role.
3 Fundamentals (tasks) where the person in the role must excel.
Your company’s mission, vision, and values.
The manager’s behavioral expectations for a person in the role.

Your hiring manager then edits for accuracy. Total time to a better hiring document: A fraction of what it took before.

AVOID: Publishing any AI-generated hiring document without a leader's complete review of every section. AI writes to patterns in existing data. It will describe the industry standard for this role - not the specific standard your team requires. Those are rarely the same thing.

Today, AI often writes AI-slop. Long narratives and generalizations. Impersonal. Uninspiring.

HUMAN MANDATORY: Job descriptions are static documents that die after someone is hired. Never viewed again.

In contrast, an SP is a living plan for the individual’s success. The Game Plan is reviewed weekly with the manager, and possibly daily by the team member to confirm they are on track.

AI cannot emotionally connect the career opportunity you are offering with the individuals trying out for your team. Only a trained, mentored, systematic leader can do that.

When is the last time you created a strategic plan for someone’s success in a role - and consistently supported them to success again and again - instead of a shortcut job description or generic job ad?

Sources: Manage 2 Win Employee Strategic Plan (“SP”) framework (www.manage2win.com). LinkedIn, Future of Recruiting 2025 - skills-based hiring and quality of hire as primary AI-era differentiators (business.linkedin.com).

AI CAN MANAGE YOUR PROCESS. NOT INTERVIEW

AI can eliminate scheduling friction and keep players moving through your hiring process at a Goldilocks pace - not too fast, not too slow - just right.

However, only trained, coached humans lead interviews. No exceptions.

OBJECTIVE: AI scheduling tools, candidate communication bots, and automated reminders remove the back-and-forth that slows most hiring processes.

AI-assisted messaging correlates with a +9% likelihood of quality hire, according to LinkedIn's Future of Recruiting 2025 report.

Faster, more consistent communication improves the candidate experience and reduces drop-off. Truffle

EXAMPLE: Someone applies Monday. Your AI sends a confirmation, schedules a phone screen, and delivers a pre-interview questionnaire - all before your team arrives Tuesday morning.

Your first human touchpoint is the conversation that matters. But the process to connect the potential superstar and your hiring coach is streamlined, effective, and lower cost.

AVOID: Never allow an AI to conduct an interview.

Nearly 20 million video interviews and assessments were conducted on HireVue's platform in just the first quarter of 2024 - demonstrating scale, not wisdom. Volume is not validation.

An AI scoring of a candidate's word choice and facial expressions is not an interview. It is more of a liability. HeroHunt

HUMAN MANDATORY: Every player interview for your team is conducted by a trained hiring coach, who is often the hiring manager or a member of the team with the open position.

AI schedules it. You run it. The goal is to see how this person thinks, communicates, and handles pressure - in real time, with real humans across the table.

Are you using AI to free up time for better interviews - or to replace the interview itself?

Sources: LinkedIn, Future of Recruiting 2025 (business.linkedin.com). HireVue/Spark Hire, Interview Summaries ROI, 2024-2025 (hirevue.com).

AI REPORTS METRICS. HUMANS DEFINE PERSONAS

AI identifies patterns in your hiring data in much less time than you would manually.

What those patterns mean - and what to do about them - requires a wise team lead.

OBJECTIVE: AI can track which sourcing channels produce your best hires, interview answers indicate higher retention, and where your process breaks down.

AI can identify which sourcing channels produce your best hires, which interview answers correlate with retention, and where your process consistently breaks down. The data is real and useful.

But the World Economic Forum notes that 90% of employers are already using automated systems to rank or deselect candidates - and Harvard Business Review warns that accuracy and trust in those AI decisions are being widely questioned.

Patterns are not conclusions. Be discerning where data may be missing or biased.

EXAMPLE: After 12 months of hiring data, your AI tool reveals that candidates sourced from one specific job board have a 40% higher 90-day retention rate than those from another. That’s time-consuming to identify that pattern in a spreadsheet.

AVOID: AI can provide metric-related insights about people, but its data set is too small to allow it to make final conclusions.

AI data can tell you what happened. It cannot tell you why - and it cannot tell you what to do next.

The talent war is intensifying - in part due to AI. Do not jump to conclusions because signals are getting harder to read, not easier. HeroHunt

HUMAN MANDATORY: Schedule a post-mortem after every hire. Bring your data. Ask your team what the process revealed and what it missed.

AI gives you the numbers.

But having multiple people on the hiring team to fill a role provides additional insights that lead to more complete, fair, and accurate hiring decisions.

When is the last time you used your hiring data and lessons learned to improve your hiring system - not just have casual conversations and check the box that you had a post hire review with your hiring team?

Sources: Harvard Business Review, SAI Has Made Hiring Worse - But It Can Still Help 2026 (hbr.org). HeroHunt.ai, AI Adoption in Recruiting: 2025 Year in Review (herohunt.ai).

Want more?

The full HBR research draws on a three-year field study of a global consumer-goods company processing more than 10,000 job applicants per year - and is worth reading before your next hire. Find it at hbr.org/2025/12/new-research-on-ai-and-fairness-in-hiring.

Email us your questions at info@manage2win.com.

Learn more at www.manage2win.com/htb-home.

Every play above improves your game plan - apply them to make better hiring decisions.

See you next week!

- David

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