How to use a Facebook Messenger chatbot for recruiting and HR

While it is relatively fast to create a recruitment bot for an individual job opening, this brings the challenge for a recruiter to present the questions in a way that optimally attracts job seekers. P9 pointed out that recruiters and other HR professionals are used to creating traditional job descriptions, which, as a form of communication, is far from creating a sequential script for a chatbot. Building on the aforementioned classifications, we interpret current recruitment bots as task-focused chatbots that utilize button-based or textual inputs.

• A chatbot is a software application used to conduct online conversations with customers.
• The chatbots’ purposes and forms of interaction were further clarified during the study interviews .
• Access tools that help your team create a more inclusive culture and propel your DEI program forward.
• As a job seeker, I was incredibly frustrated with companies that never even bothered to get in touch or took months to do so.
• Eight interviews were conducted at the participant’s workplace, three remotely using a teleconferencing software, one at university facilities, and one in a meeting room at a public library.
• Say you’ve posted a role on LinkedIn or another job site and worked on your marketing and SaaS SEO strategy to gain attention.

For instance, P4 believed that the proactive chatbot offers a chance to opportunistically approach web site visitors and offer customer service that might, indirectly, result in high-quality open applications. This consolidates our classification in Table 1 that a customer service bot serves not only HR activities but also marketing and other external communication. Some participants highlighted that chat interface can be a great way to approach young job seekers. This was reasoned both by companies’ target groups and the younger generations’ assumed familiarity with chatbots. The chatbots you’ve likely seen and thought “ooohhhh and aaahhhhh” at the trade show are those that pop up when you land on the career site.

Company

A recurring theme in the interviews was that attraction bots are a complementary technology in relation to the conventional applicant tracking systems or other recruitment channels. Notably, at least in the current phase of emerging, recruitment bots are typically developed outside the company by a vendor. Therefore, they were not yet connected to the existing e-recruitment systems. P11 highlighted that in their organization the recruiters get an email notification when they receive a new application from an attraction bot. In contrast, applications from traditional recruitment channels end up to an applicant tracking system in which case the recruiters need to open the software to see the application. Also, in the applicant tracking system, the application presented just as another line among other applications.

In fact, many successful chatbots are structured rule-based experiences. Indeed, for a bot to be able to engage with applicantsin a friendly manner and automate most of your top-funnel processes,using AI isnot necessary. You need to realize that not only there are hundreds ofcandidates competing for your position,but also, at the same time, there arenumerous talent-hungry companies competing for the same pool of skilled applicants. If your hiring process is putting people off, you need to start working on improving the candidate experience. Otherwise, you are risking losing the best talent before you even publish the new job opening.

Why are recruiting chatbots important now?

Pre-screening, qualifying, scheduling interviews, and answering candidate questions are just a few of the jobs a chatbot can take off the recruiter’s plate. Repetitive actions plague many of the most time-consuming recruitment tasks eating up a recruiter’s Recruitment Chatbot valuable time. Recruiters spend more than 80 percent of their time on low value-add activities. These, productivity issues, along with today’s tight labor market, drives many organizations to seek alternatives to traditional, manual hiring practices.

• Should recruitment bots become more popular, it would be beneficial to run more quantitatively oriented follow-up studies.
• You need to realize that not only there are hundreds ofcandidates competing for your position,but also, at the same time, there arenumerous talent-hungry companies competing for the same pool of skilled applicants.
• One of the most valuable features of chatbots is that they’re able to recruit 24/7.
• Hence, we contribute to the emerging research thread in HCI that focuses on the understudied recruiters’ perspective .
• Zhou et al. highlighted that chatbot interviewer’s personality influence job seekers’ behavior and it seems that in a high-stakes situation like job interview, a more assertive agent is preferred.
• Facebook chatbots enable candidate engagement within the social media platform.

It means that recruiters and HR departments must find the best way to partner with the technology that augments their capabilities. Human resources will always have some element of “human” as human-touch is necessary for many activities, but humans will play a lesser role in monotonous tasks. From lower costs to faster time-to-hire and improved candidate experience, automating the recruiting process with a chatbot is beneficial to candidates, recruiting staff, and the company. These statistics demonstrate how AI and NLP are improving the recruiting and hiring processes. Career page Chatbots engage with job seekers by providing answers to some helpful questions about the company’s values, vision, journey, and work culture. Applicants can directly upload their resumes on the career page and see the suitable open positions in the firm.

Future work

Ideal’s chatbot saves recruiting time by screening and staging candidates throughout the hiring process, all done through their AI powered assistant. Also worth checking out is their ATS re-discovery product which will go into your ATS, see who is a good fit for your existing reqs, resurface/contact them, screen them, and put them in front of your recruiters. They are doing all sorts of interesting things including using the data from your performance management system to continually get better at screening candidates so you can make the right hires.

If you manage to frustrate them before you hire them, they aren’t likely to last long. If you choose your questions smartly, you can easily weed out the applications that give HR managersheadaches. So, in case the minimum required conditions are not met, you can have the bot inform the applicant that unfortunately, they are not eligible for the role right on the spot.

Careers

The so-called “war for talent” between organizations (Michaels et al. 2001) and the job seekers’ demand of good candidate experience may reverse the traditional recruiter-job seeker power relationship . Such trends have led to the introduction of various digital services in recruitment (Holm 2012; Wirtky et al. 2016; Thite 2019). E-recruitment refers to the use of corporate web sites, social media, and various other information systems (Chapman and Gödöllei 2017; Holm and Haahr 2019) in workforce hiring. Numerous organizations, large and small, have made recruitment chatbots part of their daily business activities. Fusing the technology with their processes is not always smooth, but when done right, it can tap into enormous benefits, including an increased adoption rate.

In the broader context of Human Resource Management, the target of recruitment is to find the right person for the right job at the right time . Acquisition of new human resources typically takes place through external recruitment . Common challenges in this process are settling the requirements and deciding the recruitment channels (Holm and Haahr 2019; Koivunen et al. 2019). Further, according to market research surveys, organizations’ top priorities in recruitment include acquiring candidates, engaging them during the recruitment process, and developing the employment brand .

Retail recruitment

More recently, specific e-recruitment software (e.g., applicant tracking systems) have emerged for finding, attracting, and communicating with the applicants (Chapman and Gödöllei 2017; Holm and Haahr 2019). The benefits of e-recruitment include managing talent pool, potentially reaching new applicants, and branding (Chapman and Gödöllei 2017). However, empirical research on the effectiveness and appropriateness of various e-recruitment tools is scarce (Chapman and Gödöllei 2017) and the existing tools have been strongly criticized . According to a critical view by Cappelli , companies are generally obsessed to decrease the enormous costs of hiring and the market is full of vendors that offer new technology. At the same time, it remains unclear whether the various e-recruitment tools result in better hires or not (McCarthy et al. 2017; Woods et al. 2020). Organizational success is argued to depend on the social composition of employees .