Recruiting chatbots are popping up everywhere, and for good reason.
Our peers in Marketing use chatbot technology to humanize a company, communicate their customer service standards and availability, engage website visitors and increase leads and conversions.
For similar reasons, chatbots are a great idea for recruiting purposes too. Recruiting chatbots can live right on your careers site or can be programmed to interact with candidates by text message, email or on a social media page.
Recruiting chatbots can capture a candidate’s contact information early in the candidate experience, answer candidate questions to direct them to the right job, help with screening and scheduling, increase the number of candidates that complete their application, and provide automation to supplement the work your recruiters are doing to clear up more time to focus on strategic initiatives.
So, if all that sounds appealing, here’s the scoop on what you need to know about chatbots, along with some examples of how top companies are using recruiting chatbots to engage candidates!
If you’re already using chatbots, or are looking for more tried-and-tested ideas you can put into place, take a look at more examples in the new Rally Ideabook: 11 Big Impact Recruitment Marketing Ideas.
First things first, how do recruiting chatbots work?
Recruiting chatbots can offer a high-touch interaction with candidates throughout the candidate journey. A few things chatbots can do for a recruiting team include:
- Capturing contact information to add leads to your CRM or ATS, so that your recruiters can follow up later
- Answering questions about jobs or the company to encourage candidates to apply
- Screening candidates to know if they’re the right fit for a role
- Scheduling interviews to eliminate the back-and-forth emails and voicemails
- Updating candidates on their status in the hiring process
Recruiting chatbots are typically created and maintained with a combination of artificial intelligence, natural language processing or/and machine learning technology. They can be programmed to respond automatically to a wide range of questions and interactions. And most get smarter over time.
Chatbot technology has become very good—to the extent that it can be tough to identify if you’re chatting to a human or a chatbot in some cases!
The reason that we’re starting to pay more and more attention to chatbots today in recruiting is because their automation features can help teams increase efficiency, help employer brands provide more responsive candidate communications, and overall deliver a more positive candidate experience. Here are a few examples of chatbots in action doing just that:
How are Talent Acquisition teams using chatbots for recruiting?
1) Zappos uses chatbots to share their employer brand and help candidates find the right fit
Zappos’ user-friendly chatbot, Gracie, offers up a few options for candidates right off the bat: “Match me to jobs,” “Why work at Zappos” or “Hiring FAQs.”
The “Match me to jobs” option walks candidates through a series of short questions to find out what roles might be applicable to them. This streamlines their candidate experience and helps pair the right people with the right roles. It is also infused with emojis to humanize the interaction and bring the Zappos brand to life.
The other two options, “Why work at Zappos” and “Hiring FAQs,” provide key information that candidates need to know about a brand to assess if the organization is a good match for them. This helps candidates to self-select in or out of the hiring process, hopefully reducing the number of candidates that aren’t a good fit for a particular role or the overall company culture.
2) Yodel uses chatbots to conduct screens and schedule interviews
The Yodel chatbot asks candidates specific questions about themselves and the role they’re looking for, then recommends jobs that fit based on location, work permit, skills, etc. Like Zappos, these questions help candidates find roles that are the right fit, but Yodel’s very specific questions also work to screen out candidates who don’t meet the basic requirements for package delivery.
This saves the recruiting team time by ensuring recruiters are only interacting with qualified candidates. The team also saves more time by using chatbots to automatically schedule interviews with candidates, which moves them faster into the talent pipeline.
3) Dierbergs Markets uses chatbots to convert customers into applicants
The Dierbergs Markets team advertises text shortcodes across their Recruitment Marketing campaigns, from their in-store recruiting ads to signs in the parking lot to digital and social ads. Once candidates text the shortcode TEAM to 97211, a chatbot the call “Ellie” responds immediately to answer any questions, collect information and encourage applications.
The recruiting team says that one of the best benefits is that the chat feature captures a candidate’s interest in the moment even while they’re shopping—which is valuable in the competitive high-volume retail market.
The Talent Acquisition teams at Zappos, Yodel and Dierbergs Markets use recruiting chatbots to attract qualified candidates and clear up time for recruiters to focus on higher value work. On top of that, the immediacy and 24/7 availability of chatbots provides an improved experience for their candidates.
We hope these examples of how to put recruiting chatbots to use is helpful for you! If you’d like to be inspired with other fresh ideas from real practitioners, take a look at the new Rally Ideabook: 11 Big Impact Recruitment Marketing Ideas.
