Why do you need virtual assistants in your recruitment process?

Gartner predicts that by 2025, 50% of knowledge workers will use a virtual assistant on a daily basis. Often misunderstood as chatbots, virtual assistants are much more empowered and capable than them. They leverage disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, etc. to automate operational tasks or assist people. Recruitment or Talent Acquisition teams are widely adopting VAs as they are sailing through this tight candidate market to onboard quality candidates accurately. 

This blog discusses some of the use cases of AI-powered virtual assistants in different stages of the recruitment lifecycle. 

Candidate screening

Candidate screening is one of the most crucial stages in the recruitment cycle but is often the most time-consuming and resource intensive. Talent acquisition professionals don’t want to overlook a gem, but it’s easily done when manually reviewing a high volume of resumes. In addition, human bias and manual limits can impact the hiring outcome. 

AI-powered VAs allows talent acquisition professionals to screen and shortlist quality candidates quickly and accurately. They consider all evaluation elements and data points, from skill-based assessments and case studies to candidate engagement, analyze candidate responses to find the best fit for the open position, and score and rank candidates based on the selected criteria to provide recruiters with a pre-screened shortlist. A well-structured, self-serve VA can streamline the entire screening process, saves time and effort, improves recruitment efficiency, and increases hiring accuracy.

Candidate engagement

For successful onboarding of quality candidates, it is not just about attracting them to the recruitment funnel but also about keeping them engaged throughout the hiring process. Engaging candidates manually is an easier task when dealing with a handful of candidates and become tedious and almost impossible while scaling up. 

Intelligent virtual assistants enable recruiters streamlines & simplify candidate engagement. They can act on behalf of recruiters to provide a more satisfying experience at every stage of the recruitment process. VAs can respond to candidate queries, and provide insights on company culture, growth and learning opportunities, etc. intelligently and in real-time while enabling recruiters to focus on strategic activities. 

Candidate assessments and evaluation

Traditionally, talent acquisition professionals have been shortlisting/filtering candidate resumes manually. Manual evaluation of candidate parameters against the job description requires more effort and time, leads to reduced recruitment efficiency, poor candidate quality, and is subject to human bias. 

Virtual assistants can be leveraged to automate the parsing, analyzing, scoring, and ranking of candidates’ resumes. Leveraging natural language processing algorithms and conversational AI, VAs parse the candidate’s resume, evaluate weighted keywords, analyze candidate responses to suggest a cumulative resume score based, and ranks candidates based on the score, helping recruiters quickly sort and target best-fit candidates accurately.  

Candidate onboarding

Talent acquisition professionals have to undertake various recruitment tasks that are time-consuming and require enormous efforts while onboarding candidates. Spending huge time and effort on mundane tasks such as candidate reference checks, document collection, etc. can impact the recruiter’s productivity and efficiency. 

VAs can be used to conduct candidate reference checking. Leveraging conversational AI, virtual assistants can capture the referee’s responses and generate personalized reports and dashboards that give recruiters critical insights about the candidate. Recruiters can also use VAs to automate the document collection process that removes manual dependency and human errors, increases efficiency, saves significant time, and offers a seamless and hassle-free experience to candidates and the recruitment team.