People are the most important asset of any company, so recruitment is something everyone needs to get right. But finding the perfect talent for a role is not an easy process. It takes time, energy, and targeted effort to get it right, and this can make it an expensive pursuit.
Technology has changed the way businesses recruit in recent years, and it continues to disrupt the industry in exciting ways. One development has been the use of chatbots to automate key parts of the recruitment process.
In this article, we explore some examples of how AI chatbots can be used to help businesses simplify recruitment and find the best possible candidates.
What are recruitment chatbots?
All chatbots fundamentally operate in a similar way i.e. by having conversations, usually text-based, with human users. The most basic examples have only a few preset responses, but AI technology has advanced modern chatbots dramatically. These advanced chatbots can often understand highly complex inputs and offer adaptive, more useful responses and actions, making them far more useful for a wide range of applications.
Chatbots for recruitment are simply standard chatbots that have been specifically designed to help with recruitment-related tasks. For example, they may be used by candidates to ask questions about a role, but there are many more possible applications.
Potential use cases for recruitment chatbots
Cutting down employee workloads
Recruiters are regularly overworked, and this can lead to suboptimal productivity in many ways. Particularly during busy periods, it may be simply impossible for recruiters to research, interview, onboard, and regularly engage with enough clients as they would like.
Chatbots can be an integral part of any recruitment team’s efforts to reduce workloads by simplifying or even automating all of these tasks and more.
Attracting more candidates
A key part of any successful recruitment drive is attracting enough people to ensure you’re getting a good chance of finding the right candidates for the role. This can be difficult, as you are often competing with various other businesses and agencies vying for the same top talent.
Recruitment chatbots can help to attract more candidates by reaching out automatically to large numbers of people. This could, for example, be done via text messages, instant messaging apps, and so on. This kind of direct contact can help to engage large numbers of candidates without taking up extensive internal resources.
Filtering for the most suitable candidates
It doesn’t matter how many candidates you can attract if none of them are suitably qualified for the position in question. In the past, the only way to filter out the suitable people from the rest was to conduct one-to-one interviews, either by phone or in person. This is effective, but it also requires a lot of time, meaning it is an expensive process.
AI chatbots can enable you to automate much of the candidate filtering by asking a few quick questions to narrow down the field. This automated filtering can help to cut costs and save time.
Onboarding new candidates
The onboarding process is another time-consuming part of recruitment that requires companies to commit significant resources. Often, onboarding needs to be done in person and information may need to be manually entered into a database.
An alternative to this is to utilize AI chatbots to collect relevant candidate data via an instant messaging platform. For example, candidates can input details about their name, social security status, employee references, experience level, and so on. When linked with existing IT systems, chatbots can then automatically archive this information in the appropriate place without any need for intervention from recruiters.
Ongoing candidate management
Day-to-day management of candidates is another vital but time-consuming role for every recruiter. It is unavoidable that many candidates will need to contact recruiters with questions throughout the recruitment process, and each response takes time.
By deploying specialized recruitment chatbots, companies can automate much of this work. Candidates will have an instant channel to access support and get answers to their questions, 24/7, 365 days per year.
Scheduling appointments
Even in today’s highly digitized world, face-to-face interviews, whether they are in person or via video calls, are still a necessary part of recruitment. But these interviews need to be scheduled effectively, particularly when recruiters are dealing with large numbers of people.
Chatbots offer recruiters a way to simplify the scheduling of meetings. They can be linked to existing timetabling systems and calendars to enable candidates to directly inquire about availability and book slots, without any need for recruiters to be involved.
Sending job alerts and updates
Recruitment chatbots can streamline candidate engagement by automating important job alerts and updates. By sending these updates directly to candidates in a highly targeted way, companies can expect to make more of an impact, boost engagement, and reduce the time and money wasted through missed appointments or errors in communication.
How can Skil.AI improve your recruitment process?
Skil.AI’s advanced chatbots for recruiting are powered by cutting-edge AI technology to streamline recruitment and find the best candidates faster. We can customize our chatbots and virtual assistants to work seamlessly with your business, integrate them into your existing IT systems, and add result-focused functionality to your recruitment operations.
Contact us to learn more and start improving your recruitment today, with Skil.AI recruitment chatbots.