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8 min read

Empowering Candidates: Embracing ChatGPT in Skills Testing

Artificial Intelligence is no longer a far-off concept or idea. It has become integrated into our day-to-day lives, simplifying tasks like research, education, and even recruitment and skills testing.

One of the most popular AI tools on the market is ChatGPT, a generative AI platform with numerous applications, especially in recruitment. By allowing candidates to use this tool, companies can save time and boost candidate motivation during skills testing in recruitment. Tag along as we explore how you can embrace ChatGPT in skills testing to empower your candidates and bolster hiring efficiency. 

Empowering candidates: embracing chatgpt in skills testing 1

Understanding candidates’ perspectives on ChatGPT

ChatGPT, one of the most impressive conversational Al tools from OpenAI, can be applied in more ways than just research. This tool can make it super easy for candidates to find out more about a company, its goals, and its core values. However, beyond the landscape of what you can achieve from a quick Google search, ChatGPT has more potential benefits to candidates than you might think.

With ChatGPT, candidates can generate interview questions based on industry standards to help them prepare for their physical or virtual interviews. This helps them prepare beforehand, familiarize themselves with similar interview questions, and develop enough composure to showcase their skills during the screening properly.

The best part is that ChatGPT can help these candidates prepare for screenings by simulating the interview experience. According to OpenAI, this tool conversationally answers follow-up commands, making it the perfect mock interview platform. As such, candidates can converse with ChatGPT like they would in a real interview.

Furthermore, with the correct prompts, ChatGPT can build mock skills tests for candidates and assist them in organizing their portfolios. It can also help them craft professional cover letters and break down job descriptions so they can understand what the role entails.

Benefits of allowing candidates to use ChatGPT

Hr managers in a meeting

As a recruiter, it’s easy for you to develop reservations about a tool with this many functionalities, especially when it comes to candidates utilizing it in recruitment. However, just as it benefits the candidates using it, ChatGPT can also benefit you. 

Below are some of the merits of allowing candidates to use ChatGPT:

1. It encourages creative problem-solving

One of the major ways ChatGPT works is by providing suggestions to its users on how to write, answer questions, and much more. This usefulness can come in handy to help candidates see new perspectives and ideas.

For example, when tasked with developing a new marketing strategy or solution, candidates can use ChatGPT to generate promotional ideas from which they can refine and draw inspiration. This way, when they face scenario-based questions in your skills testing, the candidates can develop refined and unique ideas for solving problems.

2. It demonstrates digital literacy

We live in a digital age where most workplace tools, such as Slack and Trello, have AI embedded in them. In addition, a PWC survey says that 54% of companies have implemented generative AI in their businesses within a year of ChatGPT’s release.

So, without a doubt, AI tools have become a significant part of many companies’ day-to-day operations. As such, your employees need to understand how to use and navigate these tools to succeed in their roles.

Allowing your candidates to use ChatGPT will enable them to demonstrate their ability to apply AI to solve practical role-based problems.

3. It can help you save time

By leveraging ChatGPT to prepare for a skills test, candidates can familiarize themselves with common problems associated with the open role and their solutions. This reduces the time they spend answering questions in the actual skills assessments, as they can quickly identify and solve similar problems.

This significantly accelerates the assessment process, enabling you to identify and hire skilled candidates in no time.

4. It boosts candidate motivation for a role

One way candidates can use ChatGPT is to understand the requirements of an open role. They can simply upload a job description to the AI platform and get a breakdown of the role’s duties, skill requirements, and benefits.

Allowing your candidates to use ChatGPT enables them to analyze your offers effectively and ensure they meet their expectations. This reduces the chances of candidates getting disappointed or unmotivated for the job. In the long run, it can also boost employee retention.

Best practices for candidates using ChatGPT in skills testing

If we’re being honest, too much of a good thing can cause issues. In this case, allowing candidates to utilize ChatGPT in skills testing could open doors to problems such as cheating during online written tests.

However, there are numerous ways to curb this. Below, we will discuss some best practices for candidates using ChatGPT in skills assessment.

Establish clear guidelines

Before your skills assessment, provide clear guidelines to your candidates about how to use ChatGPT. It’s always best to specify these guidelines in the job description or within the details of the assessment test.

To establish guidelines for candidates to use ChatGPT, outline what tasks they can use the tools for. You can also mention examples of commands they can use. For instance, you could tell the candidates they can ask ChatGPT to design questions related to your open role so they can practice. 

Also, stress the ways they shouldn’t use ChatGPT, which include using the tool to answer test questions during the assessment. 

Avoid generic questions in your assessment

When generating questions for candidates, ChatGPT analyzes industry trends and studies resources available online to craft commonly asked questions. However, this process is limited because it can’t craft specialized questions unique to your company’s open role.

As such, before crafting your assessment questions, study your company’s needs and discover the challenges your current or past employees have experienced in the role. Then, curate specialized questions for your assessment.

Another way to ensure your questions are unique to your company and your open role is to incorporate virtual job tryouts into your hiring. This screening method provides candidates with an immersive experience of the role by asking scenario-based questions that require critical thinking and a deep knowledge of role-specific technical skills.

Train your recruitment team on AI capabilities and limitations

Before integrating ChatGPT into your recruitment process by allowing candidates to use it, you should prepare your team for the new development. To do this, you can host training sessions, showing them how ChatGPT works and how to create prompts to produce various functions. 

In addition, you should train them to understand some of ChatGPT’s limitations, such as the possibility of producing outdated information and wrong answers. Doing this ensures your team can tackle any issues that might arise as you embrace ChatGPT. It also empowers them to exploit ChatGPT’s strengths and weaknesses to your advantage.

Ensuring fairness and accuracy in candidate-driven ChatGPT testing

People in an office meeting

Where candidates use AI tools like ChatGPT, maintaining fairness and accuracy is vital to ensure the integrity of the testing process. Luckily, there are many ways you can encourage fairness in candidate-driven ChatGPT testing, and below, we’ll go over some of them.

Implement testing platforms with anti-cheating features

As with any screening method, candidates can cheat on a skills assessment, especially online ones. However, you can tackle this issue with an online testing platform equipped with features that prevent candidates from cheating, such as job simulations and plagiarism checkers.

Vervoe, for example, uses immersive questions to simulate a day in the life of the open role, which pushes candidates to use their skills to solve problems. This platform also uses AI tools to compare each candidate’s answers with sources on the web, check for plagiarism, and identify those generated with ChatGPT.

Incorporate human oversight to analyze candidate performance

While AI-powered recruitment takes the burden off virtual skills-based hiring, it can’t do all the work. For this reason, you should assign the role of performance evaluation to a member of the HR team. The assignee should review how candidates applied ChatGPT to demonstrate their problem-solving skills in the assessment.

Verify authenticity with follow-up interviews

After the skills tests, perform an online or virtual interview with each candidate, where they can explain the reasoning behind some of their most creative answers and solutions.

In this interview, you can ask them if they used ChatGPT and how they incorporated it into their preparations. This helps verify whether the candidates’ responses genuinely reflect their knowledge and skills.

The final step to empowering candidates using ChatGPT

With Artificial Intelligence in recruitment, the possibilities are endless, and ChatGPT is one tool that can help you harness the efficiency AI offers. As such, allowing your candidates to use ChatGPT is less of a setback and more beneficial.

Of course, various things must be in place to ensure the seamless integration of ChatGPT. One of these is the availability of an anti-cheating assessment platform. The good news is that Vervoe has you covered. With plagiarism detectors, immersive question types, and job simulations, you won’t have to worry about inconsistencies in your skills testing.
Schedule a demo with us today, and let’s make ChatGPT integration much easier for you.

Picture of Raji Oluwaniyi

Raji Oluwaniyi

Raji Oluwaniyi is a seasoned Technical Content Writer at Vervoe with a rich background of over five years in the intersection of HR technology, consumer data protection, and SaaS. He has garnered significant recognition and has worked with industry stalwarts like TestGorilla, Brightlio, MakeUseOf, and Careerkarma. Oluwaniyi has a continuous drive to evolve and keep himself up to trend with the latest technology trends and best practices in writing. Beyond his professional pursuits, he is a genuine soccer fan and profoundly values his quality time with his close friends.

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