Recruitment and AI: meet our new chatbot solutions

Recruitment and AI seem far domains, yet can evolve together. Recruitment is indeed one of the fields in which the digital revolution results in an actual paradigm shift. The report Global Recruiting Trends 2018, published by LinkedIn, is about a “new era of recruiting” and states that new technologies and a new vision of a resource’s selection process are the basis of a more and more advanced management structure.

The role of a recruiter is one of the most delicate and crucial ones for a company’s future and he/she has to have decision-making, strategic skills. Good recruiters can see beyond data and CVs and forsee the company’s future. Data are their raw material. If these are an unstructured large quantity, heterogeneous in structure, channel and content, recruiters will have to spend a lot of their time archiving them, thus doing something that is not strictly bond to their job. On the other hand, if data are already well structured, pre-categorized and easily accessible, recruiters’ time and effort will be optimized at the very best.

Delegating this preparatory stage to automation is the primary objective of the digital revolution and leaves to humans what it’s actually among their responsibilities. Recruiters can count on a tool that pre-selects the best candidates on the basis of criteria that they have previously identified. They will thus be able to invest more time and resources in the direct knowledge of these candidates and thus devote their typically human care to building a resource-company relationship.

Moreover, according to the Global Recruiting Trends 2018 report, the means that make this revolution possible are:

• New interview techniques, thought to recreate more informal contexts so that a candidate’s soft skills can emerge.
• Data analysis
• Artificial Intelligence, in order to optimize time in the most difficult recruiting phases and guarantee objectivity.

What’s the role of Chatbots in this revolution?

Chatbots definitely have what it takes to be central tools in this revolution. Our chatbot solution is apt for different levels of the recruitment process and can work hand in hand with human recruiters.

Our chatbot solution can:

• Manage an entire interview with a candidate, handling a dynamic flow that changes after every answer of the candidate
• Bring together all data acquired and put them in a management platform, structured on the basis of recruiters’ needs
• Do an early screening on the basis of the requirements of each job position
• Answer to a candidate’s questions about the company and the job position for which he/she’s sending an application

Test a candidate’s skills

Human recruiters, however, must have a total control of all the stages of the selection process: if the aim is to overcome some past biased standard procedures, a chatbot can’t be a rigid tool, product of a one-time implementation. And that’s why we talk about chatbot-recruiter synergy.

Recruiters:

• Have a total control over the interview with a candidate: among the numerous choices at their disposal, there’s the possibility to ask the candidate to upload files in chat (e.g. CVs, certificates,…) and to record audio files.
• Design dynamical flows tailored to the candidate’s answers.
• Autonomously create, add and modify real-time all job applications, using the bot’s managing platform
• Set specific filters for each job position, that will allow the automatization of the early steps of the screening.
• Can consult and evaluate all applications real-time, using the bot’s managing platform

What’s it like to be interviewed by a chatbot?

The first step of the recruiting process is entirely based, also from a candidate’s point of view, on sharing data and information. Let’s see, then, if also on his/her perspective a chatbot can be an optimizing tool. For a candidate, having his/her first job interview with a chatbot means:

• Certainty of sharing with the recruiter only relevant information, primary objective of candidates at their first interview
• Logistical advantages: a job application can be submitted anywhere, anytime, from any device that has access to internet.
• Guarantee of objectivity and uniformity: an interview can’t endure arbitrary variations linked to the human factor; no cognitive bias risks to corrupt the procedure
• The naturality and linearity of a conversation: the familiarity of a chat as a means of communication and the fact that questions are asked one after the other are designed to help the candidate feel at ease
• Getting in touch with the company: the tone of voice and the way a chatbot interacts can be customized and personalized in every detail, so that it can really represent the company’s personality.

Considering these aspects, we are convinced that a chatbot represents an added value also for the candidate.

Recruitment and AI: the future is today

The new Recruitment era has already begun. Artificial Intelligence is among the first characters of this change. According to the Global Recruiting Trends 2018 report, 76% of HR experts thinks that the contribution of AI on the field will be meaningful. Chatbots are revolutionizing the Candidate Experience offering a unique synthesis between human and digital.

According to Juniper Research, no farther than 2022, chatbots will be able to reduce recruitment costs of 8 billions. Today, the contribution of AI finds its more natural application field in the earlier steps of a selection process and then leaves the ground to a human recruiter, who is more intuitive, empathic and whose evaluations skills are so far irreplaceable. However, we cannot exclude that AI will have a more and more important role in the future, also in more advanced steps of the process.

The road ahead has been mapped. Cooperating with the recruiters of its clients, Heres developed some new product features in order to launch the new domain “Chatbot Recruitment”. This product will continue to be improved with features defined by our clients’ needs and by the new opportunities offered by technology.

We have officially entered the New Era of Recruiting joining a paradigm shift thanks to which an AI actually becomes a useful colleague that helps human recruiters to find the right candidate.