Anthropic’s people products head on the recruiter’s evolving role and how Claude can help

AI could give recruiters more time to design interviews around the work a new employee will perform and help candidates evaluate a consequential career decision. However, realising that opportunity depends on how HR teams use the capacity automation creates, according to Mike Boufford, Head of People Products at Anthropic.

During a keynote at HR Tech 2026, Boufford and Tim Sackett, CEO of HRUTech.com, explored how conversational AI tools could change the work involved in hiring. Their discussion put recruiting process design at the centre of the case for investing in automation and AI.

Designing interviews around the role

Boufford, former chief technology officer at Greenhouse, described how AI could help a recruiter work through hiring requirements, including whether interviews adequately hit on the skills a role demands. That could make it easier to develop a tailored process, especially when a hiring manager needs something different from the organisation’s usual approach.

Sackett said automation could give recruiters more capacity for tricky searches. Automating application processing could give them more time to identify and engage strong candidates elsewhere in the market.

For Boufford, the recruiter’s relationship with a candidate remains essential. Recalling his experience joining Anthropic, he described a recruiter who helped him work through questions about the decision. He said automating administrative work could give recruiters more room for similar, meaningful interactions.

Assessing AI reliability in hiring

Boufford said that HR teams need to consider what they want AI to do and what access it will have before settling on how much trust and information to give each system. Employers should assess a tool’s reliability for each task, from scheduling interviews to recommending how candidates should be assessed. One key question is whether HR teams have given it “enough information” to help them surface what they need to make a good decision.

AI could also repeat an organisation’s existing hiring preferences, similar to how employees may inadvertently favour candidates who resemble themselves. Boufford described using AI to avoid this and hire people guided by what the team needs.

Connecting Claude to HR systems

When asked about the range of HR tech organisations represented at the conference, Boufford said many platforms remain essential to maintaining employee records and supporting compliance, with security and auditable logs among the capabilities employers depend on. Anthropic is developing partnerships with providers including Workday, Greenhouse and UKG, with Claude serving as “an integration layer across all these different systems.” Boufford described accessing Workday information and tools through Claude, an offering he said was in early access at the time of the keynote.

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Sackett suggested that connecting recruiting data with employee performance and tenure information could help employers understand how to find successful, long-term hires. Boufford confirmed that he also sees the potential for such cross-system analysis. He said employers could also build tools for their own workflows, such as an assistant that gathers candidate information before a recruiter meets them for interviews.

Boufford encouraged HR leaders to ground experimentation in work that needs attention. He said to start by asking, “What are the problems that I have?” then consider whether AI could help and whether the investment would be worthwhile.

About the Author: Jill Barth is HR Tech Editor at HR Executive, where this article was first published.