The Future of Recruitment: Welcome the Chatbots!
In this two-part series, I look at chat bots from the perspectives of the recruiters and the recruited respectively. This is the first part.
It’s not just our homes and phones, Artificial Intelligence has made inroads in our work places and how we hire and get hired. OCR and keyword filtration technologies that help to go through job applications are not new. However, the future of recruitment is in far more advanced technology with its own brain like Mya.
Mya chats and engages with all the different applicants in different channels of their choice and aggregates data to pre-screen the applicants. She also answers the different questions the candidates have about the company and its culture. Then she presents a recruiter with a handful of candidates ranked based on different metrics. Smart! Right?
Mya is a chatbot which is powered by machine learning and natural language processing and evolves with practice. Mya handles large applicant volume while working with the existing teams and systems. She handles the pre-screening processes, creates rich candidate profiles and ranks them to help recruiters and hiring managers take the decisions.
What are chatbots?
As everywhere else, Artificial Intelligence has penetrated the domain of recruiting technologies. Simply put, a chat bot is software program which interacts and converses with humans over the internet. You may have already come across one if you have chatted in a customer service window, asked for weather or bus timetables. The latest to hit the markets are recruitment chatbots. The buzz about chatbots on the recruiting circuit started last year and now there are more than half a dozen chatbots in the market.
A bot for every recruitment need
The chatbot ecosystem is growing and encompasses third party chatbots, native bots, distribution channels like Skype, Slack and Facebook Messenger.
XOR, the omnichannel recruiter
XOR is an intelligent chatbot recruitment assistant, that helps companies engage, pre-screen and talk to every candidate 24/7, from the convenience of a messaging platforms. XOR has to be integrated with your job vacancy so that when an applicant clicks to apply through the messenger, XOR takes over and carries the process forward.
Stanley, the voice recorder chatbot
Stanley’s differentiating factor is that it captures voice. Stanley engages every candidate as soon as they’ve expressed interest in applying, chats with them over messenger, gathers their career interest, collects their contact information and conducts a screening interview with them.When the interview is complete, Talkpush the company behind Stanley, creates a profile for the candidate and sends it to the recruiters for them to review. Once a decisions is made, Stanley notifies the candidate via messenger to ensure that the candidate is updated.
As the unique selling point of Stanley’s is the voice capturing feature, the question is whether applicants will be comfortable recording their voices and speaking to a bot as a part of the job process?
TARA- an integrator of sorts
TARA goes beyond just recruiting by offering an integration of a project management platform with a pool of human resources to develop a software product. Once the project details are submitted, TARA conducts a pre-screening process and ensures that the contractors hired for the project are qualified and reliable, and as a dedicated project manager oversees the project from beginning to end.
How does it impact an organization’s hiring process?
Chatbots claim to automate around 75% of the recruitment process. Finding suitable candidates to fit your company, creating better experiences for your applicants and strengthening the reputation of your brand just got easier.
Valuable and effective recruitment process
It is not a secret that companies find it difficult to create a connection with every applicant. This is something a chatbot is ought to do. As they engage with every applicant, the chatbots answer the applicant’s questions about the company’s culture and work profile. They also keep the applicants updated and hence provide a positive and helpful experience throughout the process. The chatbots learn and improve their algorithms every time they interact with an applicant, hence enhancing and enriching the engagement with the next applicant.
Saving time and money
Channel agostic chatbots help an organisation reach a large number of candidates in a short period on any device and at any time, which is humanly possible only if you have an army of recruiters working 24/7.
The Challenge for the machines
The crux of the exercise is for the bot to pick out the most suitable profiles which may not be just a keyword matching exercise. Training and improving their algorithms on those important behavioral cues is going be a game winner.And if all are at par on technology, the key differentiator would be the user experience of the recruitment process and how seamlessly it can switch between AI and humans.
Organisations are gearing up to use AI in their future recruiting processes.So very soon we will up up against the AI when applying for a job. Is it fair? In my next post, I will share the AI developments and arsenal for the job hunters. Stay tuned! for the next post in this series.
