To ease recruiters’ fears of being replaced by AI, Zillow experimented with ‘prompt-a-thons’

Real estate tech giant Zillow has launched several AI tools for recruitment since it began experimenting in late 2023. HR Brew recently sat down with Roz Harris, Zillow’s VP of talent acquisition, engagement, and belonging, to discuss how her recruitment team has identified and adopted AI solutions.

Where to begin? In November 2023, Harris’s team started looking into how AI could be used by recruiters.

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

To help ease recruiters’ fear of being replaced by AI, Harris and her team experimented with AI with prompt-a-thons.

Zillow already used hackathons to develop consumer-facing features and products; Harris’s team adopted the practice for its internal AI use. For example, prompt-a-thon teams expressed a desire for more coaching on having difficult conversations with hiring managers. They devised a prompt that could be used on ChatGPT, including capturing details about the issue, as well as emphasizing soft skills like maintaining a rapport or trust with hiring managers. The result: solutions devised by recruiters themselves, not a top-down edict from leadership.

“The problems that they would go to tackle were ones that, I think, if I had to put my leadership team in a room and say, ‘Let us go do this,’ we wouldn’t have come up with the same questions and challenges at all,” Harris said.

After identifying the problems and solutions, Harris would bring in, what she called, the cavalry—the legal, enterprise tech, engagement and belonging, and TA teams—to assess the tools and determine usability.

Prompt-a-thons have so far resulted in six AI recruitment tools, Harris said. Some were developed in-house, but most are vendor tools that Harris’s team were either early adopters of or helped develop. Harris said she hasn’t yet been told “no” by the cavalry, largely because she has followed their best practices, such as avoiding decision-making tools and personal identifiers (like race, gender, or identifying keywords) to assess candidates.

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

Measuring success. The tools used by Harris’s team focus both on assisting recruiters and improving the candidate experience.

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

“If you’re applying to a job at Zillow, you can have assistance in helping you do that, and it’ll help match you to some roles as well. We also then use AI to help the recruiter,” Harris said.

Zillow’s AI-powered interview scheduler is intended to speed up hiring and alleviate recruiters’ workloads, which are huge; some roles, such as sales or marketing specialists, receive 4,000+ applications within a day of being posted.

“As someone who started their 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 would spend over a week coordinating schedules for interviews. Now, candidates receive a text or email with a link that shows the interviewer’s availability, and schedules a meeting, which has cut time spent scheduling an interview to 30 minutes—a 97% reduction saving recruiters as many as 450 hours per month.

For any recruiting coordinator sweating at the sight of that stat, Harris shared good news: “They’ve upgraded their skills. They all still work at Zillow.”

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

Zillow has also leveraged AI to recruit candidates from a wider geographic area.

After embracing its remote-first work model, called Cloud HQ, Zillow found it wasn’t a well-known employer in some cities. Harris’s team used tools, including newsletters and targeted actions to drive applications, as well as LinkedIn Recruiter to save time sourcing better candidates, Appcast, a recruitment advertising technology provider that Zillow said helped recruit across regions. Using those three channels, 558 hires were made in 2025 through mid-December.

“We had a reputation in those areas where we had offices. Well, when you flip that on the head and say, we’re going to be a Cloud HQ and we’re going to be able to hire across the country, we don’t have a reputation everywhere,” she said. “AI helped us build reputation.”

This report was originally published by HR Brew.