We talk about the latest tech that’s emerging in Recruitment, chatbots and what they could mean for the industry.Chatbots have sprung onto the market very recently but many companies have been quick to develop fast automated systems that make the lives of many professionals quicker and simpler. The recruitment industry has not been left out of this technological boom with Chatbots appearing to be part of the future of recruitment. Chatbots can work on many different platforms, such as:
- SMS (Text Messaging)
- Social Media
- Messaging Apps like WhatsApp, Slack, Skype etc.
- Recruitment-specific Software such as an ATS
Chatbots work on a version of artificial intelligence, some are simple and binary, some work from advanced machine learning. Don’t panic though, this isn’t to say that you’ll be replaced in the next five years. We strongly believe this tech has its place in the world, but ultimately recruitment is a human-led industry and the need to deal with a real person at some point in the cycle is not going anywhere. Chatbots are designed to take over the repetitive tasks and leave the recruiter with the qualified candidates.
An effective chatbot is here to make your life easier and speed up your hiring process, like stripping out bad candidates or fact-finding to help report building. Chatbots are the dream assistant for the busy recruiter, taking on all the heavy-lifting and boring jobs and doing them in an efficient manner, in bulk!
Let’s take Mya for Example
Mya is a fascinating piece of tech designed solely for the recruitment industry. This advanced chatbot will talk and engage with candidates and applicants through a simple messaging app. It’s able to record data and will also answer questions posed by the candidates. A recruiter using this chatbot will be able to qualify a large number of candidates without doing any extra work.
Something that can handle the pre-screening process in a large quantity is obviously creating a lot of a buzz and ushers in a new way of working for savvy recruiters that want to increase their productivity!
How can Chatbots Help the Recruitment Industry?
They improve the candidate experience
Providing a great experience to your candidates is absolutely vital and is one of the biggest trends we’re seeing adopted by recruitment agencies. When you want to stand out from the noise, one of the most effective ways is to offer an experience better than your competition.
The most obvious quick win with great experience is to eliminate the ‘Downtime’ between a candidate submitting a CV and the recruiter getting back to them. With some roles, the volume of candidates can be huge and it can be a taxing task to individually message every candidate.
Chatbots can make this process almost instantaneous for the candidates, pushing them along the hiring cycle quicker, making both the candidate and client happy. A quick turnaround when finding a job, and a high volume of qualified candidates to interview is a positive result for both parties.
Build report and fact find your candidates
The ease of use with Chatbots through the intuitive messaging app interface makes responding and talking to the bot easy for the customer. Chatbots are smart enough to ask choice questions and record specific details that make for a better conversation where the candidate eventually meets the recruiter and/or the clients.
Replace your FAQ
Some basic Chatbots that you can set-up yourself can offer a great platform to create an easy to use FAQ section, for roles and your business.
Setting up meetings and calls
Chatbots are very clever and can take out the hefty amount of admin you have setting up calls and meetings. This gives you time to prepare for a meaningful human interaction with the candidates.
Qualify Candidates effectively
Chatbots can ask a variety of questions about a candidate’s skills, qualifications and experience. This helps to qualify and rank a whole group of candidates against the criteria from the employer, meaning the recruiter has access to the most qualified people for a brief.
Some of the Popular Industry Chatbots (Courtesy of Hung Lee)
Jobpal is able to integrate with the major chat apps such as Facebook, Whatsapp and Slack. If a question is too difficult for Jobpal, it’ll be passed on to a Recruiter, making sure the most likely and time-consuming questions are answered.
Features:
- Answer FAQs 24/7
- Qualify candidates
- Schedule interviews
- ATS/HTM Integration
- Onboarding
Ari has three main features, Textrecruit, JobChat, and TextHR. These allow team management options as well as live chat options, however, it also attempts to allow greater control of some HR functions.
Features:
- TextRecruit – Message multiple candidates at once
- Onboarding
- Collaborate with others on projects
- 3 Features – TextRecruit, JobChat & TextHR. Encourages application from text
Roborecruiter has two main components which aim to refresh your current database as well as help in qualifying new candidates.
Features:
- PALS – This reaches out to your database of contacts and aims to get up-to-date information on candidates and their availability.
- JOBVET – This aims to qualify candidates by asking questions about their suitability for the role.
My Ally focuses on email AI rather than live chat integration, with a focus on three key aspects.
Features:
- Co-ordination of interviews
- Automated interview feedback collection
- Pipeline management and candidate prioritization
RecruitmentBot has similar features to Jobpal and can integrate with the major messaging apps.
Features:
- Job Search – Allows candidates to find jobs that suit them
- Candidates can apply and upload their CV
- Candidate Screening
- Marketing
- Events
Debra is similar to the other chatbot AI’s, but it also offers psychometric testing of candidates.
Features:
- Candidate applications
- Candidate Screening
- Psychometric testing – Recommended personality traits for each job & customize personality traits for each job
Mya tries to utilize natural language understanding and processing to communicate with candidates, Mya claims to reduce the time spent dealing with candidates by 75%.
Features:
- Candidate sourcing
- Candidate Screening
- FAQ answering 24/7
- Scheduling and job updates/feedback
Xor is a chat bot which aims to qualify and schedule the hiring of new employees, similar to Jobpal and Mya. Xor claims to learn from hires and ensure there is a cultural fit.
Features:
- Qualifying candidates
- Scheduling of interviews
- Calendar integration
- Learn from past hires and aim to find a cultural fit
VCV is a chatbot which aims to dramatically reduce your hiring process by qualifying candidates as well as interviewing them.
Features:
- Chats with candidates to qualify them
- Screens CVs
- Uses voice recognition to interview over the phone
- Can record video responses to interview questions
- Uses analytics of hires to predict who would fit
A prediction of chatbots come 2020, they just can’t screen anymore candidates…
Tips Before you Invest in a Chatbot:
- Only choose one which integrates with your current systems. If you invest in a Chatbot which doesn’t work with the way you operate, it’ll create more work for you. To avoid this, you should choose one which integrates with your calendar/candidate management system as this will save you time on admin tasks. Chatbots in recruitment are very effective at screening candidates and arranging interviews/appointments.
- Be conscious of the fact that a lot of Chatbots learn from conversations and therefore, you might not see perfect results from the beginning.
- Whilst you don’t have to programme the Chatbot, you will need to set up the questions you want it to ask. If it can’t qualify your candidates for you, then you need to consider whether it’ll be useful in your business.
- Some questions won’t be answerable by your chosen bot, so whilst you will have 24/7 responses to frequently asked questions, be aware that for a lot of them, some human interaction will be needed.
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