AI Academy/Free course
AI Recruiting Academy: Free AI Training for Recruiters
The AI Recruiting Academy is a free, self paced AI training course for recruiters who know their desk but not the technology. It covers AI in recruiting from the basics to sourcing, screening, hiring law and your own AI stack, in 42 short lessons. Each lesson answers one question in plain English, shows how it plays out in a real recruiting workflow, and points you to the tools that do the job.
- 8modules
- 42lessons
- Freeno signup
Start here
Eight modules, each lesson about ten minutes. Start at lesson one or follow the week by week plan.
Who is this for?
Agency recruiters, corporate recruiters, sourcers and small business owners who hire. If your manager just asked you to “start using AI” and you are not sure where to begin, this is where to begin.
How the Academy works
There are eight modules. Modules 1 to 7 have five lessons and Module 8 has seven, and each lesson takes about ten minutes to read. Every module ends with a short quiz so you can check what stuck. Every lesson opens with a short answer you can use straight away, then goes deeper for readers who want the detail. At the end of each lesson you will find links to the matching tool categories in the Work Insiders directory, so you can see which products actually do what the lesson describes. Every lesson also ends with one thing to try on a live req that week.
Alongside the lessons are free resources for putting them into practice: a playbook builder, a task checker, an AI instructions builder, a prompt library, automation recipes, an eight week plan and an interview prep guide you can send to candidates.
Pick a learning path
Short on time? Each path picks the lessons, prompts and free tools for one kind of recruiting desk and puts them in four stages, with a live req task at the end of each. Compare the paths.
Agency recruiter
Win clients, fill jobs fast and close offers: business development, sourcing, outreach, submissions and offers.
Start this pathIn-house recruiter
Intake, job ads, screening, interviews and scheduling, with the hiring law you need at each step.
Start this pathSourcer
AI sourcing, Boolean and semantic search, contact data, rediscovery and outreach that reaches the inbox.
Start this pathTeam lead or tool buyer
Agents, risk and law, choosing and budgeting tools, rolling AI out to a team and measuring the return.
Start this pathThe curriculum
Each lesson is tagged Beginner, Intermediate or Advanced. Hands-on lessons also show roughly how much time the skill can save a recruiter who does that task every week. Those times are our estimates, not measured results.
AI basics for recruiters
What AI is, how it works, and the words you will hear in every vendor demo.
Finding candidates with AI
Sourcing, search, contact data and outreach, with and without AI.
Screening and interviewing with AI
Resume screening, AI interviewers, note takers, scheduling and fraud.
Risk, law and fairness
Bias, audits, hiring laws, candidate notice and data privacy.
Putting AI to work
Agents, buying decisions, ROI, automation and your own stack.
AI across the recruiting desk
Intake, job ads, candidate chatbots, references, offers and winning new clients.
When candidates use AI too
AI written resumes, auto apply bots, AI help in interviews, and your career.
- How are candidates using AI to apply for jobs?
- What do you do when auto apply bots flood your job posts?
- Can you tell if a resume was written by AI, and does it matter?
- How should you handle candidates who use AI in interviews and assessments?
- Will AI replace recruiters, and which skills keep you valuable?
Claude, ChatGPT and Grok for recruiters
What the assistants do on their own, when connecting them to your tools adds something, AI teammates such as Grok Bot, and Copilot and Gemini inside Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace.
- ChatGPT, Claude or Grok: what can they do for a recruiter, and which plan do you need?
- How do you set up projects for your recruiting desk?
- How do you analyze recruiting files and data?
- How do scheduled tasks work for recruiters?
- When should you connect ChatGPT, Claude or Grok to your ATS and CRM?
- What is an AI teammate like Grok Bot, and when should you use one?
- Microsoft Copilot or Google Gemini: what can they do for a recruiter?
Put it into practice
Free resources that turn the lessons into work you can do on your desk this week.
AI readiness check
Answer 24 quick questions and get a score in six areas, with the lessons and free tools that close your gaps. Results show straight away, no email needed.
Recruiting playbook builder
Write down your title variants, exclusions, ideal profiles, intake questions, AI limits, CRM fields and weekly routine, and get a playbook to copy or print.
Prompts for recruiters
53 copy ready prompts for ChatGPT, Claude and Grok, from intake to offers, each ending with a check line that stops the assistant inventing details.
Automation recipes
Four workflows that run on a schedule once built: hiring companies every Monday, a daily applicant digest, quiet candidate follow ups and a weekly CRM clean up.
Your first 8 weeks with AI
A self paced, week by week plan through the Academy with a live req task each week. Tick boxes save in your browser.
Which recruiting tasks can AI do?
Tick the tasks in your week and see which to hand AI, where it assists and what to keep human, with the lesson for each.
AI instructions builder
Custom instructions for ChatGPT, Claude or Grok that know your desk, your tone and the rules AI must never break.
Interview prep guide for candidates
A page to send your candidates: how to prepare for interviews with AI, what is fine, what gets people disqualified, and prompts to copy.
Where else to learn AI
Free courses from Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and others, recruiter training worth paying for, and the official hiring law pages. Every link checked.
Training for your tools
The official academies for Bullhorn, Greenhouse, LinkedIn Recruiter, hireEZ and 29 more tools, with who can use each and which give a certificate.
Yeah, but… the doubts we hear most
Most recruiters who hold off on AI have a good reason. Here is how the Academy answers each one.
“I do not have time to learn this.”
Ten minutes a lesson, one task a week
Every lesson takes about ten minutes to read and ends with one thing to try on a live req that week. Start with the lessons tagged Beginner, or let the task checker pick your first three.
“I am not technical.”
Written for recruiters, not engineers
There is no code anywhere in the Academy. If you can write a clear email to a hiring manager, you can write a prompt, and Module 1, Lesson 4 shows you how.
“AI changes too fast. Whatever I learn will be out of date.”
The parts that last come first
The lessons teach how the tools work, what to check and where the law stands, which change slowly. Plan limits and prices link to the vendor’s own page and say when we checked them.
“I will get it wrong and end up in legal trouble.”
A whole module on the risks
Module 4 covers bias, audits, hiring laws, what to tell candidates and which candidate data is safe to paste into an assistant.
“AI writing sounds robotic. Candidates will notice.”
It sounds robotic when it has nothing to work with
Give it the profile, the role and your own rules and it writes like you. The prompt library and the AI instructions builder do most of that work for you.
“Is AI going to replace me anyway?”
It replaces tasks, not relationships
Module 7, Lesson 5 looks at which parts of the job are changing and the skills that keep a recruiter valuable.
Why we built it
AI is arriving in recruiting faster than training for it. SHRM’s State of AI in HR 2026 found that recruiting is the HR function where AI use is most common, yet 57% of HR professionals in states with AI employment rules were not aware of those rules. Recruiters are being handed tools without the background to judge them. The Academy is that background.
Work Insiders tracks hundreds of recruiting and HR tools, and we do not sell rankings. The lessons link to categories, not to paid placements.
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