HR Tech thought leader Hung Lee interviewed Luc Dudler, Founder & CEO at jobpal, at the UNLEASH Conference and Expo on how chatbots can help companies automate tasks by integrating with existing technologies and also provide a great experience for candidates, even without applicants talking to a recruiter directly. Watch the short video interview below! We've also added the full transcript further down this page for you to read just in case you forgot your headphones at home.

Hi! I’m Luc from jobpal, we build chatbots for recruiting. When we started in 2016, not many companies had it on their radar, but that started to pick up quickly. There are many reasons for this - we at this point mostly work with larger companies. One of the huge advantages is that chatbots integrate with the technology the company already uses, but then enables them to give the candidate a great experience. And on top of that, we can automate some of the repetitive tasks recruiting teams have to do. So for companies it's a really doable project or initiative because it integrates with existing software but it's a great interface for candidates.

What is your view about candidate acceptance of interacting with a chatbot? I think someone from the outside would automatically assume ‘actually, what is the difference to calling somebody and there’s a voicemail robo type of thing going on’ - that's probably not the most welcoming experience I guess.

And that is exactly the really ironic point about it. You start to talk to a company, some people say that it would be great, other people want to speak to a human. Then I let people have a look at their career page, have a look at your process. You just mentioned you would like to talk to a human - yeah, I totally agree with you but which company offers that? At what point is it actually possible for a candidate to speak to one of the recruiters? In almost 100% of the cases it's very late into the process. Before it was like ‘Here is our content, few years old, look at it and now please make a decision whether you want to apply or not’. There is no human interaction. A chatbot is not human, but it can support people. From the candidate adoption rate, people who use a chatbot don’t expect human interaction - coming back to we need to think about how technology can help the candidates. Because if the candidate is knowledgeable and understands the proposition immediately, the person uses the technology and the person wants to do something very quickly and that's where the chatbot comes in.

And where you guys are now, where are you going to be in 12 months - so where are you going to be in 12 months, Luc? 

In 12 months I think we will have tripled our team size. We’re really growing mostly in the development team of course to further bring the technology to the next level, but then also in project management because we need to give the guidance and support to our clients and help them because most of the time none of them have launched a chatbot before - not even to think about a recruiting chatbot. So that's about team size and then we will have offices not only in Berlin but also in London and one office also in the US.