Chatbots In Recruitment: How Do They Help?

Chatbots have finally arrived. Gartner predicts by 2021, 50% of enterprises will spend greater budget on chatbot creation and bots than traditional mobile app development. Chatbots are the future of interactions happening between you and your customer. They will define the quality and outcome of conversations between people and digital business services and data.  For recruitment industry, this is the newest addition to the already happening family of AI and Machine learning.

While it’s still early to predict whether these bots will ever take place of a human, the coming future is surely full of exciting possibilities. The future will belong to organizations that make data their best friend and adopt artificial intelligence and AI tools fearlessly in all of their processes, especially in recruitment. Talent acquisition specialists need to rise for the occasion and think beyond the normal; automation of routine tasks is mere tokenism. What you need is a revolution fostered by innovations like chatbots.

Know more about the benefits of chatbots in recruitment:

• Arrival of Recruitment Bots
• Benefits of Using Bots for Recruiting
• Will Chatbots Replace Humans?

Arrival of Recruitment bots

Chatbots are essentially the evolution of automation. These tools not only perform repetitive manual tasks efficiently but also have the potential to transform the entire recruitment process by removing bias and enhancing the decision making capabilities of the HR. But what is a chatbot and how old are they?

While we are hearing about Chatbots a lot these days, you will be surprised to know that the first program which resembled the functions and abilities of a chatbot was first developed in 1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum.  Named Eliza, the program mimicked the language of a therapist. While the intelligence of Eliza was limited, it opened the gates to a world of possibilities where we could converse with technology the same way we do with each other. Fast forward to 2016, and today we are finally able to see fully functional bots which are able to converse with humans the way the humans would like them to.  But what is it about bots that make them so attractive?

Click here to know more about the history of chatbots.

Few years ago, the world of technology was all about creating stuff that could be used “on the go.” The smartphone revolution led to creation of websites which were responsive in nature. Responsive design is still the buzzword. Later, mobile app development arrived on the scene in a big way as developers began creating apps for everything. But you know what’s funny about apps? The most popular apps on all mobile platforms are all messaging apps, whether it’s Facebook Messenger or Whatsapp. Humans love to converse as it turns out and that’s where the real potential of a bot lies.

(Also Read: Innovation in recruitment industry)

Benefits of Using Bots for Recruiting

While Chatbot technology is still in nascent stage, its creators have already found ways of implementing it in different industries, and industry leaders are also upbeat about this new shining weapon in their armor. Recruitment is one of the major focus areas of chatbot developers. Take a look at some of the aspects of recruitment that Chatbots aim to address:

1. Using chatbots in HR saves screening time
2. HR chatbot benefits in scheduling of interviews
3. Advantage of HR bots in answering jobseeker’s queries
4. Recruitment chatbots help trigger notifications to candidates

Using chatbots in HR saves screening time

Screening is a basic yet important part of hiring, but it most definitely takes up more time than it actually deserves. Automating it with chatbots makes sense as it will save crucial time.

HR chatbot benefits in scheduling of interviews

Once a candidate goes through screening, successfully scheduling their interview should be an automatic follow through. Chatbots can do that too. Again a big time saver!

Advantage of HR bots in answering jobseeker’s queries

For every job description out there, there are plenty of doubts that a jobseeker can face. Without any established communication channel, these jobseekers would not be able to clear those queries and may opt against applying to that job, even if they are the perfect match. Bots equipped with artificial intelligence and access to data can not only understand the questions but also come up with the closest matching answer through machine learning algorithms.

Recruitment chatbots help trigger notifications to candidates

Most job seekers complain that they never hear from recruiters after crucial events like submission of job applications or interviews in case they didn’t satisfy the matching criteria. Most recruiters don’t do this intentionally but they are so tied up with their schedule and the menial manual tasks that they have to let go of communicating with the rejected candidates. This creates a major communication gap and acts as an employer brand killer. With bots in action, such communication gap can be plugged as the bot can trigger an automatic notification email after an event.

All these are only some of the initial use cases of a chatbot in recruitment. As the recruitment process evolves, there will always be more that can be achieved through these amazing applications of AI.

So now we understand the real benefits of using chatbots in recruitment:

Now coming to the debate that surrounds AI and will inevitably come to chatbots also:

Will Chatbots Replace Humans?

First, with evolution of automation tools like ATS, then Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning and now ultramodern AI tools; chatbots, there is an undeniable dominance of technology. But is this dominance a sign of dependence? Does it make the humans redundant? The answer is NO.  Gartner predicts that in 2020, AI will generate more jobs (2.3M) while only eliminating 1.8M jobs.  Thus up through 2020, all industries and that includes recruitment, will experience a varying level of “time and effort saving with most of them witnessing no job loss.”  So is there any reason to worry for HRs? We don’t think so.

In fact, HR-Tech collaboration is the best thing to ever happen to the HR industry.  For instance, making subtle observations about the nature, weakness and strengths of a candidate will be difficult for a bot. These traits, human values are best judged by a human and that’s why the human factor will never go out of fashion in case of human resources.

(Also Read: HR technology disruptions for 2018)