Why should talent attraction teams care about AI? 

The rise of AI has led to both big challenges and opportunities for those working in the recruitment industry.

On one hand, developments such as advanced candidate screening and super smart AI chatbots are providing greater efficiency. On the other hand, auto apply apps and Chat-GPT generated cover letters are blurring the picture, making it harder to identify the best candidate for the role.

One far less publicised trend meanwhile is the role that AI plays much earlier on in a candidate’s journey. In 2025, candidates aren’t just using tools like ChatGPT to rejig their CVs and prepare for interviews. They’re also asking AI questions to work out what their ideal career is, to learn what skills they need to gain and to find the best employers for their desired role.

The growth in AI platforms as a career research tool

In the last 6 months, there has been a 1,300% rise in the number of visits to major career sites coming directly from AI platforms. We discovered this after measuring the average rise in AI-driven traffic for our biggest clients, counting visits from tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and Perplexity.

“Careers sites traffic from AI platforms has increased 14x in the last 6 months.”

We believe this steep rise was largely as a result of the following factors: 

1. AI platform usage is growing rapidly – According to a recent TechCrunch article, the number of weekly active users for leading AI chatbot, ChatGPT, doubled in that same 6-month period (from 200 million in August to 400 million in February). 
2. Launch of ChatGPT live search – At the end of 2024, ChatGPT rolled out their new live search feature to all users. This enabled the use of live web data for more accurate and up to date answers, blurring the line between using AI or traditional search engines as the go-to for finding information online. 

Whilst the upward trend is quite astonishing, it’s important to note that the level of referral traffic is still relatively tiny, and dwarfs in comparison to the levels of traffic arriving via established channels like Google. 

But AI driven traffic to careers sites is just the tip of the iceberg. When it comes to the impact of AI on candidate behaviour, there are more things to consider.

Discovery of your employer brand in AI tools

For every user that clicks from ChatGPT to your career site, many hundreds more are likely finding information about your employer brand without leaving the platform – a “zero-click” experience of your employer brand. 

According to an Adzuna survey in March 2025, 65% of the 1,200 candidates asked have used AI in their job search and half of those who’ve used AI have done so to research the job or company. Another survey by Arctic Shores from late 2024 confirmed this rapid rise in adoption with 88% of students and graduates now using AI tools (up from 72% the previous year). 

These stats show that AI tools are becoming a major part of a candidate’s job seeking journey. As an employer its becoming more and more vital to maximise your visibility on these platforms. AI platforms are not only becoming a key channel for employer brand awareness, they’re opening up another window into the heart of your working culture. 

“AI platforms are opening up another window into the heart of your working culture.”

AI’s perception of your employer brand

Some candidates may be presented with your company when they ask AI tools unbranded questions like “what companies offer graduate roles in London?” 

Other candidates meanwhile will ask AI about your business specifically. With questions like… 

• Is your company good to work for?  
• What are the best benefits you offer employees?  
• Does your company offer good training and upskilling opportunities?  

The answers AI provides to questions like these may be formed from information on your own careers site as well as from across the web, from sites like Glassdoor, Indeed and Reddit. The balance of information AI uses to provide answers to candidates depends on a variety of factors – many of which, surprisingly, you can control. 

The first thing you might ask is how can I control what AI tells candidates about my employer brand? Before you get to that to that stage, it’s important to first know where you stand. This will ensure your AI optimisation actions have a real impact. 

“It’s important to know where you stand to ensure your AI optimisation actions have a real impact.”

Know where your employer brand stands

We knew it was crucial to shed more light on AI’s perception of our clients’ employer brand, as well as their overall visibility for thousands of important queries. 

So that’s why we’ve developed our Employer Brand AI Audit. This audit provides everything talent attraction teams need to know about their employer brand presence in AI tools together with clear actions to optimise for to improve visibility and sentiment in AI tools.