AI Assistant Best Practices

Bullhorn AI Assistant is a prompt-based AI writing tool, designed to help staffing teams streamline their workflows. Unlike external tools, the AI Assistant operates directly within Bullhorn ATS, ensuring alignment with existing workflows. This article contains tips and best practices for building effective prompts, either ad-hoc on records or via the AI Assistant Prompt Studio.

Looking for inspiration? Check out our AI Assistant Use Cases for ideas to get started.

Getting Started: Implementation Tips

Start with Recruiter Feedback

Meet with recruiters to understand where they spend time creating or reworking content. Build prompts around their most common or time-consuming tasks. Focus on small, high-impact use cases to build trust and adoption.

Standardize the Prompt Library

Create, test, and refine your prompt library before rolling it out. Organize prompts by use case, role type, or workflow to make them easy to find and apply consistently.

Encourage Testing and Editing

Train recruiters to review and revise AI-generated content before saving. Reinforce that the AI Assistant is a starting point, not a final product, in order to build confidence and ensure accuracy.

Prompting Best Practices

Data Quality

A foundation of good data is the most important factor in the AI Assistant generating a useful message. Make sure that your Candidate, Contact, and Job records are fully filled out. In addition, select the appropriate fields to be included in the context to the LLM An LLM, or Large Language Model, is a deep learning model that has been pre-trained on vast amounts of data and is used to power generative AI. in the Data section of the AI Assistant Admin > Prompts tab.

Choose the Right Role

Roles are used to guide the LLM’s understanding of a prompt and to help it generate more accurate and relevant outputs. There are pre-defined roles within the AI Assistant Admin. If none of these fits your prompt’s needs, you can add more roles via the Data Management tab. When creating a new role, be specific and consider the context in which the role will be used. Roles should be relevant to the task or question being asked.

Make your Prompt Specific

You make your prompt more specific by using the Custom Action option on the AI Assistant within Bullhorn records, or by creating a Custom Task within the AI Assistant Studio. While tone and length can be adjusted each time the prompt is used, you can include any other direction for the prompt in a custom action or task.

Examples of custom actions or tasks may include formatting instructions, summarizing with short bullet points, and requests for analysis.

Iterate

Take advantage of the opportunity to generate and regenerate when editing prompts in the AI Assistant Studio. As you refine your prompts, it is important to test them by generating, making some tweaks, generating again, and so on. You can generate your prompts multiple times using actual Bullhorn records before saving in order to refine the parameters and get to the output you need.

Converse

After using a prompt with AI Assistant, follow your request up with additional context by conversing with the Assistant as if you were speaking to a person. As you provide more information, the AI Assistant will continue refining its response for you. Be specific, use natural language, and provide context that may not have been included in the original prompt to tailor the AI Assistant’s response to your needs.

Still Not Seeing Expected Results?

If you're following the best practices above and still not getting the results you need, we recommend starting from scratch. The LLM may be receiving conflicting instructions from the role, prompt, or follow-up messages.

Here are a few tips we've had the most success with:

Create a New Role

Roles help shape the LLM's behavior, so a new role can make a big difference. From the Data Management tab in the AI Assistant Admin, you can create a new role to define how the LLM should act.

A typical role defines the point of view or voice the LLM should use.

“You are an expert recruiter for a healthcare staffing firm. Be sure to write professionally.”

You can also include specific grammar and formatting rules if they're relevant at the role level, such as:

• Do not use any sentences from the original job description verbatim.

• NEVER state the name of the client or hiring company.

• NEVER state the specific industry for the job.

Create a New Prompt

Try building a brand new prompt in the AI Assistant Prompt Studio. A typical prompt defines what the LLM should do.

“Write an offer letter to the candidate. Sign the email with the recruiter’s contact information.”

When writing your prompt, include clear, detailed instructions. If there's a specific call to action or template you want the LLM to follow , include that directly.

“At the very end, always include this exact ending: "Not ready to apply? Contact Bullhorn Recruiting at bullhorn@recruiting.com or call 555-234-2345""

Simpler templates tend to perform best. From the AI Assistant Prompt Studio, you can test and iterate until you find a template that works well with your data.

Include all Relevant Data Points

Don't forget the data! In the AI Assistant Prompt Studio, data points must be selected as "default" to be included in the preview pane on the right side of the screen.

• For primary entities, only default-checked fields are used.

• For secondary entities, all selected fields are automatically in scope.