Skip NavigationDaniel Chait, CEO of hiring platform Greenhouse, says job seekers should incorporate this question into their interviews.CNBC Make It; Greenhouse
The interviewer has asked their questions of you as a candidate. Now, it’s your turn.
There are the usual suspects: What would success look like in the role? What do you love most about the company culture? What trait do all your top performers have in common?
These days, you should throw another question into the mix, says Daniel Chait, CEO of hiring platform Greenhouse. Job seekers need to ask about the expectations and rules for artificial intelligence use both throughout the interview process and on the job, he told CNBC Make It at Forbes’ Future of Work Summit in New York City on Oct. 6.
When it comes to using AI at work, “expectations and rules are very different by company, by job,” Chait said. In a Greenhouse report from April, roughly four in five U.S. candidates who’d experienced AI evaluation in the hiring process said employer AI policies are vague, rare or completely absent.
Rules around AI use can also differ depending on the stage in the interview process.
Many recruiters, for example, would frown upon candidates using AI in real time to answer questions during a screening call, but they might encourage candidates to use AI to complete a take-home assessment to mimic doing the actual job if they, like many employers, want their staff to adopt AI.
“The rules are often not published, not known and changing very quickly,” Chait added. “Don’t make assumptions about where you are and are not allowed to use AI.”
There’s also the matter of using AI when applying to jobs, well before any interview process.
Roughly 47% of workers said they’ve used AI to apply to jobs, with resume writing assistance being one of the most common use cases, according to a CNBC and SurveyMonkey Quarterly AI and Jobs Survey of 1,686 workers in July.
When it comes to applying to jobs, Chait warned that heavily using AI when preparing your resume can hurt your chances.
“It’s making all the resumes look the same,” he said.
You should “never use AI to write your entire resume,” ZipRecruiter career expert Sam DeMase previously told CNBC Make It. Instead, DeMase suggests putting the job description and your resume into an AI tool, asking it what skill or experience gaps exist and jogging your memory for any (honest) relevant additions you can make.
While Chait said AI can be a “great creative tool,” he cautioned against “offloading the writing job” to it when crafting your resume. Instead, he recommends spending more time on fewer applications, researching the company and role and putting yourself in the recruiter’s shoes to “think skeptically” about how your resume will be received: “Thinking about it not from your own perspective, but from the perspective of the reader, can give you some insights.”
At the end of the day, Chait said, the goal of your resume is to “tell your story as well as you can to the right audience.”
