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Seneca Polytechnic and recruitment marketing agency build AI tool to support job recruitment

Employees at webTactics have one less tedious task on their plates thanks to a recent collaboration between the recruitment marketing agency and Seneca Polytechnic researchers.

The time-consuming work of creating unique job postings — a small subset of the services webTactics provides — is now the domain of a custom generative AI app developed at Seneca.

And it’s already made the team at webTactics more efficient, according to the Toronto-based company’s vice-president of business development, Jeff Hurrell.

“I see it as a productivity tool. We’re not looking to replace swaths of people with it or anything like that, but we are looking to enable them to be better at their jobs.”

He said part of what makes the task of creating job postings so time consuming is that each posting needs to be customized to each client’s preferred template, language and other specifications and then repeatedly refined.

“A customer sends us a job description or a version of a job posting, and then the person who manages that account spends a lot of time formatting and structuring it and refining it to make sure it’s in the right format,” Mr. Hurrell said.

“And then we just thought, maybe this is something we can automate with an LLM.”

LLMs, or large language models, are powerful AI tools that can process huge amounts of data to understand and generate human language.

Using data supplied by webTactics, an Applied Research team led by Dr. Amit Maraj, Professor, School of Software Design & Data Science, taught a custom version of OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 LLM to generate webTactics’ job postings.

Through a simple user interface, the user fills out fields with the job title, description, client-specific guidelines and any other information provided by the client, and the GPT creates the posting. If the user isn’t satisfied with the response, they can adjust the prompts.

The model doesn’t just produce job postings, the researchers concluded — it produces reliable, high-quality postings with minimal errors.

“Because of that, webTactics is not only saving money, but they’re more efficient,” Mr. Maraj said. “They’re getting more things done. They’re taking on more contracts and being able to move forward as a business using tech enablement.”

For webTactics, part of moving forward means thinking about its next AI collaboration with Seneca’s Applied Research department.

“We’ve got some ideas of what else we can do,” Mr. Hurrell said.

“There are other areas of the business that could use AI as an assistant to help them do things better and faster.”

This article is republished with permission from Seneca Polytechnic.