The Conversational Job Search Bot- 100,000 messages, from 106 countries, in 30 Days.
GoBe — The Job Bot, a job search #chatbot on Facebook Messenger, launched quietly on December 12, 2016, via a single Facebook post.
In a short 30 day period, while still in beta testing, GoBe racked up some impressive statistics; GoBe managed over 100,000 messages, with job seekers in over 106 countries, and almost all of the traffic and users came from social media shares, likes, and comments, like the one below.
“Omg I love this thing! 98 jobs found from two words in 4 seconds. Yes please more!!!!”, T. Johnston, Topeka, KS
When we set out to help job seekers find jobs, we knew that the current job search process wasn’t working for a lot of job seekers. As a 20 year veteran of the Internet recruiting technology market, and founder of one of the first Internet job boards, I knew there were ways to improve the process, but didn’t know what would work best.
So, Mike (co-founder) and I decided to provide free live job search help via online chat, to help job seekers find jobs, and learn what a recruitment chatbot could do.
This lead to a lot of short back-and-forth messages with job seekers. We’d ask them a couple questions about their job search. They’d respond. Then, we’d perform the job search for them and send them a link to the results. Then, we’d ask more questions, like “Are these the types of jobs you were looking for?”.
In many cases, the first search results were close, by not perfect. So, we’d ask another sequence of short questions, wait for the response, modify the search, send them results, etc. We’d continue this back-and-forth of messages several times until we got closer to what the job seeker was looking for.
As experienced growth hackers and analytic junkies, we tracked every single click and watched every user interaction in real-time.
“Getting accurate job search results wasn’t due to some algorithm, or artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning, it was through a “conversational job search” with multiple back-and-forth, short questions and answers.” Jonathan Duarte, Co-Founder, GoBe- The Job Bot
The “Conversational Job Search” is consistent with how most people might help a friend look for a job, essentially, through a series of short conversations and responses.
Messaging applications, like Messenger, are perfect facilitators for a Conversational Job Search, because of the engagement and response rates. It also doesn’t hurt that Messenger has over 1 billion monthly active users, which if you put it in perspective, is about least 10 times the monthly active users of LinkedIn.
GoBe is gaining loyal followers because it’s unique, fun, and worth sharing.
Users say GoBe feels like they’re messaging an actual career coach, or recruiter, who is helping them with their job search.
That’s what seems to be getting the users to come back and share GoBe with their friends. It’s not an accident, it’s by design.
In the first 30 days, GoBe is attracting large followings from the US, UK, India, Philippines, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.
Mobile-first job seekers seem to be the first primary users. It makes as these users are the largest segment of the 2.3 billion members of the global workforce. These users are also “desktop disconnected” and are already using Messenger on a daily basis to communicate with friends and family.
The early adopter job seekers seem to be searching for all types of jobs, but retail, sales, part-time, driving, manufacturing, and other “non-desktop” type of jobs, seem to be getting the most views and applies.
When first creating a GoBe, we didn’t know what to expect from job seekers. Would they use Messaging to look for a job? What would the engagements be like compared to traditional web based job search methods?
GoBe is still in the early development stages, but we’ll keep testing, tweaking, tracking, in an effort to help our employer clients automate recruiting and find the candidate they need for their business.
About GoBe:
Go Hire is the leading recruiting automation platform helping companies leverage messaging and AI to speed the recruiting process, while providing a better candidate experience. To find GoBe, visit https://gohire.com/gobe-the-job-bot-released/.
