November 3, 2025
November 3, 2025
Photo by BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash
AI is going to change everything in HR! (...is what we’re hearing everywhere nowadays.)
While many HR pros are using AI in their work, the tech will continue to disrupt their processes. That’s why Google’s recruitment team has positioned itself somewhere between actively using and continuing to experiment with AI, according to Brian Ong, Google's VP of recruiting.
“There’s a lot of tasks in the recruiter’s day job, and more and more AI can take care of some of those tasks in different ways,” Ong told HR Brew.
How Google recruiters are using AI. When interviewing international candidates, Ong said recruiters typically brush up on geographical and cultural differences. Nowadays, Google recruiters use the company’s AI language learning model (LLM), NotebookLM, to educate themselves, inform interview questions, and improve the candidate experience.
Recruiters also use Google’s chatbot, Gemini, to role-play conversations with candidates and hiring managers before having them face-to-face, Ong added.
“[When] all these little tasks go away, the administrivia goes away, and now I’m spending more time getting educated, but I can get educated faster too,” Ong said. “The combination of those two things that make me more impactful as a recruiter. It’s less task orientation and more value orientation.”
Google’s AI-enabled applicant tracking system helps recruiters identify candidates who, based on information from previous applications, might be “more likely to respond” to outreach, Ong said, before offering an example of a time when a recruiter on his team reached out to a candidate designated as likely to respond, and they did, in just five minutes.
“We’re trying to reach out to them for roles they are a better fit for…which means they go further down the pipeline,” Ong said. “It just makes sure that we’re making better use of our time, instead of just reaching out to tens or hundreds. We can reduce that amount of reaching out.”
How AI will continue to impact recruiters. Recruiters often have to chase down hiring managers and interviewers for candidate feedback, Ong said. He wants agentic AI to take over this task.
“It seems nominal, but, if you multiply it by the number of times somebody has to do that over the course of a week, it really starts to add up,” Ong said. “It frees recruiters up to do other things versus this administrative nudging type thing that they’re kind of stuck doing.”
Ong said he hopes to reduce the amount of applications recruiters have to sift through by giving candidates access to an AI-powered feature that will match them with roles based on their résumés.
“The breadth of tasks that AI continues to pull away will increase, and what that will then do for the recruiter is they’ll continue to move up that value stream,” he said.
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