Guest on the A-Players Podcast: ChatGPT applied to Sourcing with Vanessa Raath.

How to use ChatGPT to enhance your sourcing

👉 Listen to this episode on Apple podcast
👉 Listen to this episode on Spotify

If you follow me on Linkedin, you know I’ve been a big advocate for ChatGPT since January. I don’t think ChatGPT will replace recruiters, but rather, I consider it a powerful text-generation tool. It would be a shame not to use it, as generating text (like job descriptions, outreach messages, etc.) is a significant part of a recruiter’s job. I’ve recently discussed this with Vanessa Raath, one of the most competent sourcing experts you could find. In our podcast episode, she revealed the best use cases she has found for leveraging ChatGPT in sourcing.

According to both Vanessa and me, here are the two best use cases where ChatGPT can assist us with sourcing:


1/ Generate Booleans strings

Generating Boolean strings is tedious. Hopefully, ChatGPT is good at it. And the prompts are straightforward. Example: “Write a boolean string that targets software engineers with experience in any back-end language. List all important back-end languages”.

You can also use ChatGPT to write Booleans strings with information you don’t have, for instance: “Can you generate a list of popular cybersecurity certifications? Can you generate a Boolean string from this?”.

I’ve listed all my favourite
ChatGPT prompts to write booleans here:

Library of Booleans prompts builder


Warnings: Always double-check the results as they might often not be accurate or exhaustive – that’s your human job to check! You’ll get much stronger results using GPT-4, and you can ask the questions several times to get different answers. 


2/ Generate outreach messages

ChatGPT is particularly useful for writing outreach messages, as it’s a purely text-generation task. But the prompt will be slightly more advanced.

Here’s a good prompt for drafting a high-performing recruiting outreach

You’re an expert recruiter with years of experience, and a strong copywriter. You know how to write messages that get replies from candidates, and I need your help. We need to draft an outreach email that I can send to candidates. Can you ask a list of 510 questions to help me refine the role? Ask questions one by one and not all at once. Wait for my reply and then ask the following question when I have replied. Stay in character until the end. When you have asked all the questions you need, draft a short, impactful, differentiated outreach message that I can use to engage with passive candidates over email.

The probability that ChatGPT will give you a perfect message after this prompt is low. You’ll have to ask it to refine it a little. Here are a few prompts to help you refine the message:

Prompt 1: Can you rewrite this message to make it about the person instead of the company?Use more “You” than “Us” or “We”. Explain what’s in it for them.

Prompt 2: In this message, can you pinpoint what areas are the most useless, containing superlatives not backed with actual data, vague adjectives?

Prompt 3: I’m looking for diferent ways to end this message – can you suggest a few open-ended questions that make it very easy for the candidate to reply?

If you want to go deeper about how to use ChatGPT to write high-performing recruiting outreach, I’ve recorded a complete webinar about it.


Listen to the episode to find out more.

Vanessa gives many other pieces of advice, like how to generate competency-based interview questions or when to use ChatGPT plugins. Listen to the full episode to find out more!

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