In today’s digital world, chatbots are readily finding applications in various businesses. Enterprises are adapting to this technology, especially in the recruitment industry to easily navigate through administrative tasks like resume screening, answering frequently asked questions, sharing updates about application status, and screening the resumes.
Chatbots are soon becoming a norm and are also helpful in collecting customer data through simple conversations instead of filling out lengthy forms. In fact, according to a survey by Allegis, over 66% of people said that they were comfortable with AI and chatbot handling interview scheduling as well as preparation. Here, we will explore the various ways in which chatbots augment the recruitment process.
Candidate Screening
Almost 50% of HR professionals find screening candidates very challenging. Things like the absence of a designated assessment process, lack of feedback, depending too much on employment portals, and ignoring the candidates who are interested in the job role is what hinders the recruitment process! Finding the best fit for a role is a challenge in itself. Moreover, when a lot of time is spent on screening the candidates, recruiters also end up losing potential hires. Close to 60% of recruiters say that they lose candidates before even scheduling an interview.
The good news is, a chatbot can make the screening process all the more efficient. Right from collecting resumes to scanning the social and professional profiles of candidates, their recent activities, and much more. The bot can shortlist the best candidates from the pool of applications. It all begins with a simple conversation with the HR bot which collects resumes and screens the candidates.
Saving Time and Resources of Recruiters
According to a survey done by SHRM, the cost-per-hire for companies can be as much as $4,129, and takes an average of 42 days to fill a position. Recruitment chatbots can exponentially reduce the cost-per-hire and time-to-hire by weeding out the unqualified candidates and only proceeding with the potential applicants. A chatbot can automate interview scheduling and engage hundreds of applicants at the same time. With businesses increasingly adapting to automation in recruitment, a chatbot can reduce the workloads of the HR team. Not only does this help the organization but even the applicant saves a lot of time.
Moreover, isn’t it wonderful to simply hand over all repetitive and mundane tasks to the chatbot? You don’t have to go through the heap of applications and everything is done automatically.
Engaging Employees
After the employees are onboarded, they still have a lot of questions even after the orientation session. New employees find it very difficult to keep up with the organization’s procedures. They can definitely reach out to the HR manager but it can be overwhelming for a small team to cater to a lot of new hires simultaneously. Moreover, the nature of questions is very common and redundant too. So for anything related to leaves, holidays, reimbursements, and the like, the candidate can speak to a chatbot.
A chatbot will essentially act as a self-service portal. The talent acquisition team can answer FAQs via the chatbot. Everything from company policies, training schedule, reviews, and polls can be made available to the candidate. HR bots from HybridChat can also provide quick query resolution for employees. This is very helpful in large enterprises where a bot can engage employees at scale. Moreover, chatbot conversations also save the user data for future analysis. This gives the management teams a good idea about the sentiments of their employees. The chat logs can be used for improving the processes further.
Collecting Candidate Feedback
There are a lot of talented individuals out there but finding the right fit for a role can be a task! Did you know that 75% of applicants research the company online before applying for a job? Therefore, taking feedback about the interview experience of candidates could be really crucial. You might have a great team structure and awesome perks for employees but a potential candidate will never know about it if you have bad reviews online.
With the help of recruitment chatbots, you can easily collect applicant feedback about their screening and interview experience. At the end of your conversation, you can also ask them whether they have any suggestions. Chatbots can instantly connect with customers before they entirely drop it off and ask them why they aren’t proceeding further. As a result, the organization delivers a great candidate experience and reduces their costs at the same time. This newly acquired knowledge, because of feedback, can help brands in providing a good recruitment experience.
Handling Candidate Queries
As per Juniper Research, chatbots will become so fluent that they will answer up to 75-90% of queries. Isn’t that astounding? No wonder companies like Marriott International Inc. have turned to recruitment chatbots for automating query handling.
The chatbot by Marriott became very popular among applicants and it answered basic questions such as “Do you have any manager job openings in Chicago?”, “How can I contact the recruiter? And “Is there any job opening in New York?”. This particular bot grouped the candidates based on the job position, potential of the applicant, and their location to navigate the application and make a hire easily.
Making Employee Data Available for the Team
Recruitment data is often confined to the recruitment team alone and it hardly ever gets shared with leadership teams. Oftentimes, this data is not available to other members of the HR team either. Less than 25% of companies make this recruiting data available to the entire HR team. Some reasons for such a lack of transparency is the usage of emails, spreadsheets, and the like for sharing updates. With a chatbot in place, the entire team can access its real-time analytics and derive insights. So all the recruitment information is easily accessible on a single platform.
Final Take
Recruitment chatbots are soon becoming a norm and companies across various domains are adapting to this technology. Deploying a chatbot for your recruitment department will save hours of screening candidates and you can then directly interview them. It seamlessly engages newly onboarded employees and shares the data access with everyone in the recruitment team. Lastly, it handles redundant candidate queries and simplifies the work process within your team.
Would you be interested in trying out the much famous Recruitment chatbot? Connect with us for a free demo!
