Use AI to Build Better Interviews, Not Make Hiring Decisions

Grant Calloway

Forty five thousand dollars. That's the salary. A small business marketing firm called AdVenture Media says a bad hire at that level can cost two to three times that amount, once you stack up recruiting fees, training, lost productivity, and then replacing the person. So, um, call it ninety to a hundred and thirty five thousand dollars for one mistake. If you run an eight person shop, that's not a line item. That's a bad year.

Grant Calloway

So here's the small mystery I want to chew on. Everybody tells owners to point ChatGPT at a stack of resumes and ask, who should I interview? And I, I, I get the appeal. A hundred PDFs, one tired owner, a Tuesday night. But that's exactly where it goes sideways.

Grant Calloway

A recruiting software company called Truffle put it in a way I liked. They say the resumes you'd feed it were increasingly written by the same model, so you'd be grading ChatGPT's homework with ChatGPT. Think about that. The applicant asked a language model to make them sound sharp. You ask a language model who sounds sharp. That's two machines shaking hands over your payroll.

Grant Calloway

And what comes out is a confident shortlist that rewards who prompted best. Not who can do the job. Now, that's one company's take, and they sell a competing product, so, you know, salt to taste. But the logic holds up on its own.

Grant Calloway

Here's my rule, and it comes from the floor. Use AI for words. Don't use it for judgment. Job descriptions, candidate questions like is this remote, what's the range, when will I hear back? Fine, that's language. But deciding whether somebody has character? Back on the exchange, some of the sharpest clerks I ever saw had rough, ugly resumes. And the slick talkers, the ones who interviewed like a dream... well. A few of them blew up desks. The polish told you nothing about what happened when the tape went red.

Grant Calloway

Hold on, I'm, I'm getting ahead of myself. Quick break.

Grant Calloway

This episode's sponsor is Jellypod, at jellypod.com. They automate podcast generation, which buys an executive back some hours in the week. And that's the right use of the machine, I'd say. Let it handle the logistics. The final handshake with the person you're hiring? That stays with you.

Grant Calloway

So if the machine can't judge, what can it do for a hiring owner? Let me show you a contrast. Employment Hero, an HR software company, describes a retail business with 30 staff hunting for a new store supervisor. Write the ad, post it everywhere, sift dozens of applications, find interview time. They say their AI matching and screening tools turn what used to take two to three weeks into days.

Grant Calloway

Now, that's their pitch, and it's a hypothetical example, not a named shop. And notice where the speed comes from. The tool screens and scores applicants. That's the part I'd hold at arm's length. But the speed itself? I want that. I just want it from a different place.

Grant Calloway

So, here's my version. Use Claude or ChatGPT as an interview architect, not a judge. You hand it three real headaches from your own shop. Say a supplier shipment shows up damaged. Or, um, somebody walks out mid shift with no warning. Or the register count is off and nobody knows why. And you ask it to turn each one into an interview scenario, with a scorecard, one to five, and describe what a one looks like, what a three looks like, what a five looks like.

Grant Calloway

Why does that work? Let me say it plain. A resume is a document somebody can polish. A scenario is a fire you make them walk through, out loud, on the phone. Your shift walks out at four o'clock, you've got a line at the door. What do you do in the first ten minutes? And an AI written resume can't, can't, can't answer that for them. They either have instincts or they don't.

Grant Calloway

Now you're thinking, Grant, won't they just have ChatGPT open in another window? Sure, maybe. But it's a live conversation. You ask the follow up. Why that first? What if the manager's not picking up? That's where the homework runs out, and the actual person shows.

Grant Calloway

So here's your homework, and it's the honest kind. Forty five minutes. Take your open job posting. Pull your three worst customer or inventory headaches from last quarter, the ones that made you swear in the parking lot. Feed them to Claude or ChatGPT. Ask for five standardized scenario questions, and for each one, a clear red flag answer. The answer that tells you, nope, next.

Grant Calloway

Then ask every candidate the same five, and score them one to five before you talk to anybody else about them. Same questions, same scale. That's how you keep your gut honest.

Grant Calloway

Go back to that forty five thousand dollar hire. The machine can draft the questions in minutes. But the one who sits across the table and decides? That's still you. Alright, that's it from me.