How is Zillow Developing its AI Recruitment Solutions?

Since late 2023, real estate tech giant Zillow has been experimenting with how recruiters can use AI efficiently. 

Currently, it has six AI recruitment tools in place – a combination of in-house and vendor tools, that the team have either been early adopters of or helped develop. 

However, implementing AI within the hiring process can be challenging to deploy effectively. A recent survey by hiring platform Greenhouse found that 46% of job seekers in the US trust the hiring process less now than they did a year ago, with 42% directly blaming AI processes. 

To ensure the hiring process retains candidate trust and streamlines processes for prospective employees and recruiters, Zillow’s recruitment team have worked closely to devise solutions that work within their roles and business practices.

Using prompt-a-thons to develop new solutions

Roz Harris, Vice President, Talent Acquisition and Engagement and Belonging at Zillow, told HR Brew the strategy for developing these solutions came from prompt-a-thons, where participants practise prompt engineering for generative AI. 

During one such prompt-a-thon, teams expressed a need for further support when having difficult conversations with hiring managers. 

To develop this, the team devised a prompt to be used on ChatGPT, with a focus on capturing details about the issue while maintaining trust and rapport with hiring managers. 

Roz says: “The problems that they would go to tackle were ones that, I think, if I had to put my leadership team in a room and say, ‘Let us go do this,’ we wouldn’t have come up with the same questions and challenges at all.”

After these prompt-a-thons, Roz assesses the AI solutions and determines their usability alongside the legal, enterprise tech, engagement and belonging and TA teams. So far, these prompt-a-thons have resulted in the creation of six AI recruitment tools, focused on helping both recruiters and candidates. 

What AI solutions has Zillow developed for recruitment?

For potential candidates, Zillow has developed assistants to help job seekers find and apply to roles suited to them, as well as a tool to analyse and provide feedback on interviews. 

On the recruiter side, Zillow’s AI-powered interview scheduler has been designed to alleviate workloads and speed up hiring processes. Previously, recruiting coordinators at Zillow may have spent a week coordinating schedules for interviews, with some specialist roles receiving over four thousand applications within a day of being posted. 

With this AI scheduler tool, candidates receive a text or email with a link that shows interviewer availability and schedules the meeting, cutting time spent scheduling an interview to half an hour – a 97% reduction. 

But Zillow is keen to avoid removing human decision-making from the hiring process entirely. 

Roz explained to HR Brew that part of the reason none of her recruitment team’s tool suggestions have been turned down by the wider business is that they have made sure to follow Zillow’s best practices, avoiding decision-making tools and personal identifiers such as race or gender to assess candidates. 

“I’ve been around for a while, and so has my leadership team. We kind of always knew we didn’t want AI to make decisions,” she said. “We stayed away from tools and things that did that.”