Every chatbot promises similar things: to digitise AND automate the recruitment process. But for this article, we went searching for hard data — and accumulated these 4 cases.
What can chatbots do?
For recruiting new staff, chatbots can essentially imitate human dialogues. They are also called conversational agents or conversational interface platforms. Chatbots then perform the first part of recruitment. They are responsible for the monotonous tasks that take up recruiters’ time and allow HR staff to perform more urgent, important tasks.
On the HR side, chatbots help HR managers recruit new staff using artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML). HR managers usually use them when they receive an application from a candidate through a job site. Then an HR bot engages with the applicant. Not only are they able to ask candidates questions about the applicant’s work history, but they can also gauge the candidate’s capabilities in line with job expectations.
After identifying free slots, they can also book interviews with candidates who fit them.
An HR bot can also check your calendar to find out which dates you are available to schedule job interviews. After identifying free slots, they can also book interviews with candidates that suit them. Then, chatbots can answer certain questions from your candidates or applicants about the job. But what happens in practice? We list four cases.
Case 1: Objectivity and Alexander Mann Solutions
Alexander Mann Solutions had to deal with many recurring questions from candidates and it was a very time-consuming process for recruiters to answer them all on time. The added challenge was that queries were not forwarded to the right person the first time or the person was not available. Applicants and clients tend to call with similar requests, especially in the early stages of the recruitment process, which gets employees involved and creates a lot of repetitive tasks.
“Our intention was not to replace a human, but to support employees in their role.”
For Alexander Mann Solutions, the need to improve responsiveness, accuracy and end-to-end experience for both applicants and recruiters. So the company decided to partner with IT outsourcer Objectivity, which saw a chatbot as a logical solution. “The main goal was to deliver a bot that would provide a new conversational experience to support candidates,” the company states. “Our intention was not to replace a human, but to support employees in their role.”
The results: Using the Objectivity chatbot meant Alexander Mann Solutions improved its time-to-hire and increased the speed at which it processed documents by 20 times.
Case 2: Kindly and Adecco
To find the right talent and then offer the right talent advice, Adecco uses tech to screen candidates. To streamline their recruitment processes, they chose Kindly’s recruitment chatbot, which is powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) to connect with candidates, learn more about their personality as well as make decisions on whether or not to pass on their information to their clients.
Kindly’s AI recruitment chatbot acts as an engine that retrieves qualifying questions, stores them in Adecco’s system and then sends the questions to the applicants.
For Adecco, it was especially necessary to filter out non-qualified candidates from the selection process early on, so that the recruitment funnel was only filled with top talent. Kindly’s AI recruitment chatbot acts as an engine that retrieves qualifying questions, stores them in Adecco’s system and then sends the questions to the applicants. The candidates answer the questions, which are processed again. Qualified applicants move on to the next stage, while non-qualified applicants are rejected.
The results: Adecco saw a 75% reduction in the number of live chat queries directed to their HR and customer support departments. Telephone queries from both customers and candidates were reduced by 50%.
Case 3: Paradox and US Xpress
US Xpress is one of North America’s largest asset-based truckloaders, an industry that has been struggling with a huge driver shortage for years. Reason for the trucking industry giant to partner with Paradox, best known for chatbot Olivia, in 2020. US Xpress and Paradox collaborated on a unique feature that uses real-time personalisation to instantly present a diverse framework of AI assistant personas to drivers who visit the company’s job site or apply by phone. In a fraction of a second, the technology automatically personalises the AI assistant for each driver, using geolocation and demographic data.
The results: 35% of candidate interactions take place on evenings or weekends when candidates do not normally have the opportunity to interact with a recruiter. 38% of candidates who start a conversation with the AI assistant end up becoming job applicants.
Case 4: HireVue and Randstad
For Randstad, its talent database is at the heart of its mission to quickly match smart people with the right jobs. Ensuring the database is filled with up-to-date data and maintaining large-scale relationships, however, is a challenge for the agency. But that wasn’t all Randstad’s Canadian operation had to contend with. New privacy laws requiring explicit consent made it even harder to deliver on the promise of quick talent matches.
Randstad capitalised early on a marketing automation of a landing page and form fields to collect profile data. This made an integration with HireVue a logical step, to engage candidates in a modern and scalable way – mainly by combining email with a natural language-based and multilingual chatbot.
The results: Randstad experienced a much higher engagement rate. Within 4 weeks, they contacted more than 1.6 million profiles and discovered 12,500 new active job seekers.
Fotocredit: Arthur Caranta via Flickr
