How a digital colleague can help recruit new employees
Lisa de Laat
| 4 min
Chatbots have already proven their value for customer service, marketing and sales. But there’s still so much potential. A digital employee can help recruit new talent to the team. Using a chatbot to recruit new employees lends a solid helping hand, especially considering the pressure in the current labour market. Recruiting new team members is a time consuming process that can be made much more efficient with automation. The role a chatbot can play in this process is described in detail below.
The advantages of chatbots have become much more visible over the last couple of years. A digital assistant can optimise your operational workflows, especially since they’re available 24/7 and can easily take over routine work and make those processes much more efficient.
The recruiting process
Let’s start with the fact that a chatbot can never take over the entire recruiting process, but can play a valuable role in automating parts of it. Whether or not there’s a click between the candidate and the company needs to be confirmed in a real life discussion. Recruiters still have a major impact on whether or not a candidate chooses to pursue a role at your company. That being said, recruiters could use some support at several points in the recruiting process, and that’s the kind of support a chatbot can provide. This gives them more time to do what they do best, and whatever is needed to bring that candidate into the fold and over the finish line. It’s also useful for candidates to not need to engage live with recruiters at every single step in the process. But what does this equate to in practice? We’ll give you a few examples below.
Automating repetitive and administrative tasks
If you’re a recruiter, you probably take on a lot of administrative work. That’s often not the most fun or challenging work, and it’s probably quite repetitive. In this tight labour market, it’s asking a lot to attract and convince (good) candidates - and this process can be incredibly time consuming. If a chatbot takes over specific administrative tasks, a recruiter has more time to work on more complex tasks, like assessing whether there’s a click with a given candidate. A chatbot relieves the pressure and stress of administrative tasks. Some tasks it might take on could be:
Collecting and saving information from candidates, such as a resume and contact details;
Screening candidates by asking questions about experience, knowledge and skills;
Ranking candidates based on statistics such as qualifications, engagement or recent activity;
Answering frequently asked questions about jobs and the application process;
Planning interview appointments with human recruiters.
It’s also great for candidates to not need to have a live moment of contact with the recruiter, constantly playing phone tag or chasing each other over email. The applicant can get direct answers to typical questions without needing to wait for a response from a busy recruiter. By integrating a chatbot with internal tools, like the calendar of a recruiter, the chatbot can plan interviews and make it easy for both candidate and recruiter to come together for an interview or an intake.
Moreover, a recruiting chatbot is available 24/7, while it can be a few days before a recruiter has the time to respond. A chatbot won’t ever take over the entire recruitment process, but by supporting part of the process there’s much more time for recruiters to do what they do best. Ultimately face-to-face contact between the candidate and the recruiter will determine whether or not there’s a good match.
Make a pre-selection for jobs with high application volume
Especially in today’s market, nearly every candidate is encouraged to apply. The flip side of this is that some job postings get hundreds of applications that can take ages to filter and sort through. In this case, a chatbot could make a pre-selection by asking candidates a number of specific questions about where they live or what their educational qualifications are. This is an interactive way for both candidates and recruiters to get what they need, and reduce the time it takes to find qualified candidates for a given role.
Keeping the conversation personal
The human factor is incredibly important in the world of HR and recruiting, yet not every single moment needs to have two humans involved. Chatbots can take on tasks that recruiters might not have enough time for, or for moments that happen outside of typical office hours. No more boring forms - instead, a chatbot can have a ‘personal’ conversation with a candidate about the role. Thanks to artificial intelligence, the conversation seems natural, and the chatbot continues to learn to answer more questions over time. The chatbot’s personality can be set up to match the brand’s tone of voice, to the extent it really feels like a digital colleague.
A ‘hybrid model’ is always a suitable solution as well - start the conversation with a chatbot, and then allow a recruiter to take over when needed. This can provide the best experience for your potential new hires and reduce the workload on your recruiting team. A win-win situation!
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