How can chatbots help in recruiting?

A strong employer brand boosts your organization to create a sustainable hiring pipeline. Companies are integrating AI to support the work that goes into that. Brand-building basically refers to communicating the company culture, growth opportunities, diversity, and inclusion. It can also be used to show a job preview. The role of the chatbot in this scenario includes screening hundreds of candidates in seconds, helping employers plot and build out a whole series of touchpoints, and scrubbing off hiring biases through a fair selection process. This makes the chatbot a very important functionality for the candidate to explore the fit with the company, and it also helps to lift the employer brand.

As observed in many cases, a candidate applying for one role may also be suitable for another role. In this case, a chatbot can collect basic information about the candidate and help show them recommended roles based on their resume. Not only does this help the candidate find the perfect fit for her/his skills, interests, and experience, but it also aids in increasing the relevance of job applications for the recruiter.

This functionality of a chatbot allows you to collect basic information from the candidate to evaluate their eligibility for the role. Concerns like do they have the legal right to work? Are they able to travel to the job location if needed? What are their notice period and salary expectations? Here’s where the chatbot takes care of things- if the candidate is not eligible for the job, this information can be communicated before the candidate invests a lot more time on the application. This means that the candidate, as well as the recruiter, saves ample amounts of time. While an AI chatbot screens out unqualified candidates more quickly, recruiters can focus their efforts on creating connections and building relationships with interested and qualified candidates.

It’s not news how filling out a job application can be tiresome and time-consuming. Even a form that simply asks for resumes as part of a standard application process observes a significant drop off in the number of candidates. A similar result is observed when they are asked to produce their LinkedIn profile. This could probably be due to the possibility that the candidate doesn’t have an updated resume or a profile. Chatbots resolve this issue by acting as an extremely effective tool to collect the necessary information because of their interactive nature, and the fact that the entire engagement is based in real-time. This interaction also adapts based on the data received from the candidate. The entire process gives an impression of progress and simultaneously helps reduce the drop-offs drastically.

a. Automated scheduling

Interviews include scheduling tasks that take up to 15 minutes. This can take a much longer duration when multiple interviewers are involved, thus making it impractical to schedule interviews manually. Chatbots handle this task much more feasibly by triggering automated scheduling right after an eligibility check or right after the candidate has completed the application form and certain assessments.

b. Assessments

A chatbot’s ability to deliver basic assessments within a conversational experience makes it quite an asset for the recruiting team. This is mostly because it automatically advances the candidates to the next stage or schedules interviews if the candidate passes the assessment stage. Chats can also trigger specialised suitable tests that can be integrated into the system. Although the compatibility varies across different providers, our customers report that a straight-through processing system can reduce the time it takes to complete multiple job applications stages from a span of days to a couple of minutes! This is done by minimizing the intervention of the recruiter at early stages.

c. Document collection

Following up with candidates for documents is usually a tedious process. But a chatbot link system makes that easier by helping you keep track of the documents submitted and even helps retrieve missing documents. This makes document collection less of an administrative task for the candidate and more seamless on the recruiter’s side.

d. Answering queries

Applying for a job using a form on the applicant tracking system can be a one-sided experience. This is simply because applicants are asked several questions but they don’t get to ask any. Fortunately, an AI chatbot steps in to ensure two-way communication. Automated query answering can help answer candidate queries fast and avoid the need for the recruiter to answer thousands of questions manually. Our clients report that they are typically able to resolve over 90% of queries asked by candidates without recruiter intervention. Besides making it feel like an engaging communication between the two parties, this feature of the AI chatbot results in the candidates feeling appreciative of the fact that the company put in the effort to make their experience better.

•   We use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to have meaningful conversations with candidates.
• Chatbot interactions are based on deep learning models to ensure a realistic and smooth interview process.
• Our chatbot shares shortlisted candidate profiles, along with assessment scores and interview transcripts directly with you.
• You get to choose which assessments to evaluate candidates with, whether that’s behavioral and cognitive skills, technical skills, competencies, or cultural fit.
• Our chatbots also integrate with video interviewing platforms and can use the score from video interviews to decide if candidates move to the next round.

• With impress.ai, our client (leading Asian Retail Bank) is achieving massive reductions in their overall candidate qualification time (>75%), through automating and integrating their screening, interviewing, and shortlisting processes via impress ai.
• 400 candidates were hired annually and there was also a reduction in candidate qualification time.
• About 30,000 candidates applied for the role. This serves the client’s goal of utilizing their personnel for comparatively higher-value work, such as greater quality candidate engagement.

Here’s our CEO, Sudhanshu Ahuja, sharing information on how chatbots help in recruiting: https://youtu.be/_IMK5akzgB0

Curious about whether to add a chatbot to your recruiting process? Talk to our team for a free consultation today by clicking here.