Here are a few words on why I think its time every company added a chatbot to the hiring journey.

The world we live in is changing all the time. As more technology is introduced into our daily lives, the more expectation it creates for the hiring process. And with that the expectations of candidates are increasing. Never before have candidates had so much choice to find and search for jobs. Before we answer the question of why, let’s remind ourselves more closely at what today’s candidate needs versus what they actually get.

What candidates want

• Full Transparency of time, effort and number of hoops
• Seamless hiring process
• Reasonable waiting times, whilst you decide on shortlists
• Actionable Feedback to help them grow
• Preparation to help them succeed

What candidates (usually) get.

• Almost no visibility for their hiring track
• Stop/Start hiring journey
• Great execution for candidates who get the job. Not for the rest.
• No to little meaningful feedback
• A licence to trash your hiring process on Social Media for not executing your employer brand promise.

These are not new problems and technology is not the silver bullet. As one of our clients says, if you don’t have a vision of what you want to do for candidate experience, a chatbot is not going to solve the problems you have. In fact, no tech will.

But why should you want to use a chatbot?

Let’s take FAQs on your careers site. You might find that this is something a candidate does not look at so much but you would be wrong. Candidates want to know information about your brand, about your culture, about the salary, and about anything else that is relevant to the job or the company. FAQs are called frequently asked questions, and yet on many careers sites it’s buried on a sub page with the assumption that everyone only asks certain questions. We limit ourselves when we do this approach because there are only so many FAQs and answers you can store on a static webpage before it starts to look like a dog’s dinner.

But there is another way. And that way is to use a jobpal chatbot. jobpal is an expert in the world of chatbots for recruitment. Based in Berlin, they specialise in a number of use cases that help candidates to find the answers they are looking for but struggled to find on the careers site. With FAQ automation, companies from McDonald’s, to Airbus, to Deutsche Telekom are benefiting from scaling their candidate experience to new levels of engagement.

Firstly, Candidates can now get a 24/7 service. In fact, benchmark data across all jobpal clients suggests that we can get 59% of candidates checking outside normal office hours. Find me a human who can put up with that 24/7. Candidates want answers to their questions, not tomorrow, but now. Chatbots can do this much better than humans can at scale. That’s just common sense.

The types of questions asked come up frequently. So rather than shouting FOR FAQS SAKE. Simply automate the most popular answers to a whole bunch of common questions. Our NLP engine and machine learning platform takes care of this so the recruiter can do something more impactful, like building relationships with candidates further down the hiring path.

Some of our earlier customers who had the benefit and foresight of seeing this scale are now using the questions that are asked as primary research into their content planning and delivery. It’s not just improving parts of your content strategy but also to continue talking about these popular topics all the way through the hiring process. In one year alone, we have seen enterprise clients create a candidate question knowledge base of over 25000 individual questions. And it’s this data which helps the chatbot become more accurate. Along with the help of one or two experts in the hiring team who are on hand to train the chatbot.

When you have acquired candidates through costly campaigns to your careers site, you have already spent that money. ROI is important for everyone and the chatbot is there to help you make the most of that engagement. A concierge on your careers site that never gets tired, does not need food or drink to perform (not like me :P) and can answer questions immediately is only ever going to help as it supplements the candidate with the information needed. Engaging in a way we know very well. Conversations. In fact, doesn’t everything start with a conversation?

That’s what makes chatbots so good at creating commitment with candidates to make the next step, which is either a job discovery or to go all in on an application. The chatbot makes this fun, intuitive and easy for the candidate, and extremely efficient for hiring teams to do more value add tasks. This is why many companies are looking to implement this not as a feature, but more as a longer term talent acquisition strategy as they look to scale their candidate experience into the future.

You can find out more about some of the use cases companies like Airbus, McDonalds, or Deutsche Telekom are doing by contacting myself, Ven, or Christoph and see how we can get you started with conversational hiring.

This blogpost is a repost from Chris Raw's Medium Blog.