AI in UX hiring plays a huge part of how your UX application gets reviewed. Steph McDonald, a lead UX recruiter at HubSpot, uses it every day, and she's just as clear about where it stops.
Steph has spent 25 years in recruiting, finding and vetting candidates in product management. HubSpot is an AI first company, so her team is expected to use AI in their roles. For her that means an AI notetaker in her interviews, which she says saves at least 30 minutes per candidate per day, and a scoring tool that ranks applicants against the skills she sets for each role.
She still looks at every resume. She starts with the lowest ranked ones so she can check the bot's reasoning and move people forward when she disagrees.
Then there's what she sees from UX candidates. ChatGPT answers pasted straight into an application, follow up question from the chatbot included. Auto apply services sending software engineers and product managers to UX design roles. One resume that came back with the job description dropped in as the work experience and a product manager's title changed to lead UX designer.
Her take on using AI to write is simple. Write it yourself first, then use ChatGPT to tighten it up.
If AI is part of your UX job search right now, this is what it looks like from the UX recruiter's side of the screen.
Topics Discussed
✅ How HubSpot uses AI in hiring, from an AI notetaker in interviews to a tool that scores resumes, and why Steph still wants to control resume review herself
✅ Why Steph looks at the lowest ranked candidates first, and what she's checking when she does
✅ What a knockout question looks like in a real application, using a hard requirement like building payments products
✅ Why years of experience isn't how HubSpot screens candidates, as far as Steph has seen, and the one situation where she uses it herself
✅ Why Steph doesn't buy the advice to stuff hidden keywords into your resume to please the bot
✅ The mistake that shows a UX recruiter you never read your own AI generated answer
✅ Why auto apply services backfire, and the strange case of four back to back resumes with identical formatting
✅ A resume an AI tool rewrote into something that made no sense, and what it says about handing your own story to a bot
✅ Where Steph draws the line on using ChatGPT to polish your writing
Links & Resources
🔗 Connect with Steph McDonald on LinkedIn
🎯 How I can help with your UX job search
📋 Get my UX case study template
👋 Follow me, on LinkedIn, Instagram, & YouTube
