To allay recruiters’ fears of being replaced by AI, Zillow experimented with “prompt-a-thons”

Real Estate Tech Giant Zillow has launched several AI tools for recruiting since beginning its experiments in late 2023. HR Brew recently sat down with Roz Harris, Zillow’s vice president of talent acquisition, engagement and ownership, to discuss how her recruiting team identified and adopted AI solutions.

Where to start? In November 2023, Harris’ team began studying how AI could be used by recruiters.

“We started looking at the possibilities of AI. And what we found was that when you look at the role of a recruiter and what they do, about 80% of our jobs were what you would hear at conferences about mundane tasks” that AI could replace, she told HR Brew.

To help ease recruiters’ fear of being replaced by AI, Harris and his team experimented with AI with marathon invitations.

Zillow has previously used hackathons to develop consumer-facing features and products; Harris’ team adopted this practice for its internal use of AI. For example, prompt-a-thon teams have expressed a desire for more coaching during difficult conversations with hiring managers. They designed a prompt that could be used on ChatGPT, including capturing details about the problem, as well as emphasizing soft skills such as maintaining a relationship or trust with hiring managers. The result: solutions designed by the recruiters themselves, and not a decree imposed by managers.

“The problems that they were going to solve were ones that I think if I had to get my leadership team in a room and say, ‘Let’s do this,’ we wouldn’t have asked the same questions and the same challenges at all,” Harris said.

After identifying problems and solutions, Harris would bring in what she called the cavalry – the legal, business technology, engagement and membership, and TA teams – to evaluate the tools and determine their usability.

The Prompt-a-thons have resulted in six AI recruiting tools so far, Harris said. Some were developed in-house, but most are vendor tools that Harris’ team was an early adopter or helped develop. Harris said the Cavalry hasn’t told him “no” yet, largely because it has followed their best practices, such as avoiding decision-making tools and personal identifiers (like race, gender or identifying keywords) to evaluate candidates.

“Luckily, I’ve been around for a while, and so has my management team. We always knew we didn’t want AI to make decisions,” she said. “We stayed away from the tools and things that were doing that.”

Measuring success. The tools Harris’ team uses aim to both help recruiters and improve the candidate experience.

On the job seeker side, Zillow’s AI tools include assistants that help candidates find and apply for jobs, as well as schedule and prepare for interviews. On the recruiter side, recruitment marketing software or LinkedIn The recruiter helps find high-quality candidates, while another tool analyzes and provides feedback on interviews.

“If you apply for a job at Zillow, you can get assistance to help you do that, and it will also help you fit into certain roles. We also use AI to help the recruiter,” Harris said.

Zillow’s AI-powered interview scheduler is intended to accelerate hiring and ease recruiters’ enormous workload; Some positions, such as sales or marketing specialists, receive more than 4,000 applications within a day of posting.

“As someone who started his career as a recruiting coordinator, I think it’s the scheduling tool that’s actually my favorite,” Harris said.

In the past, Harris said recruiting coordinators spent more than a week coordinating interview schedules. Now candidates receive a text or email with a link indicating the interviewer’s availability and schedule a meeting, which has reduced the time spent scheduling an interview to 30 minutes, a 97% reduction saving recruiters up to 450 hours per month.

For any recruiting coordinator sweating at that statistic, Harris shared some good news: “They’ve improved their skills. They’re all still working at Zillow.”

Many former coordinators now work in Zillow’s employee services center, or in executive assistant or program manager roles; others help manage the scheduling tool. (And, when the AWS outage in October crippled the Internet, these former coordinators helped manually schedule interviews.)

Zillow has also leveraged AI to recruit candidates of a wider geographical area.

After adopting his remote working modelcalled Cloud HQ, Zillow found it wasn’t a well-known employer in some cities. Harris’ team used tools including newsletters and targeted actions to generate applications, as well as LinkedIn Recruiter To save time searching for better candidates, Appcast, a recruitment advertising technology provider that Zillow says has helped recruit in every region. Thanks to these three channels, 558 recruitments were made in 2025 until mid-December.

“We had a reputation in the areas where we had offices. Well, when you turn that around and say we’re going to become a cloud headquarters and we’re going to be able to hire across the country, we don’t have a reputation everywhere,” she said. “AI has helped us build our reputation.”

This report was originally published by RH Beer.