“This is on behalf of Happy Company. Thanks for applying for the job. We've got some quick questions for you. Are you ready?”

“Yes”

…………

…..

…..

…

“Thanks for your time. We'll get back to you ASAP. Meanwhile, you can go through our website to know more about us: www.xyz.com.”

This is how the conversation would start and end. As it has happened, since times immemorial. As an HR or a recruiter, you come to office, get the list of candidates how have to call the entire day and then dial away!

In the meanwhile, there is a meeting scheduled with the stakeholders to decide on the job description, some new research for job posting, some meetings with vendors and there you are, juggling between tons of work all at once; and then getting friendly jokes from your colleagues that you have an easy job!

I bet you have shot them twice in your mind already!

An average HR or recruiter of a company which is in hiring mode, have to dial more than 35-40 candidates per day(I am not even counting the switched off and not responding cases). If one call takes around 10-15 minutes, it is going to cost you 400-600 minutes of your time or 7-10 hours.

Not an easy job, is it?

When time and resources are finite, but the requirements sure are not, it calls extra help. And that’s what chatbots exactly can be.

When we initially started with AirCTO, wanting to make hiring a quicker and less painful process, we did not imagine that the problem was so much broader. We started off with tech-interviewing solution through our AI and Human powered platform, but then we realized that a major portion of the time of a recruiter goes(or rather is wasted) in calling the candidates for getting the basic information, like salary, CTC, location and other details.

That’s when we realized, there has to be a solution for this. AI came to rescue and we started building HR Chatbots. It was not easy, we were trying to do something which no one in India had done before. There were a lot of speculations regarding the product flow, the use cases etc. Our only advantage was our experience of being in the recruitment domain since the past two years and understanding the pain points of the HRs and the recruiters(sometimes also the candidates, almost 2k of them) in a precise way.

There are various providers offering chatbots specifically for recruitment, like Ari, GoBe etc. The US Army already uses a recruitment chatbot for years, the famous sergeant Star.

Also, there are various chatbots to determine how successful your new recruit will be, while some deals with onboarding sessions.

Here is how, chatbots can help the HRs in screening the candidates, initially.

Automation and Speed

An HR chatbot can get your entire screening process on autopilot. In an ideal case, you just have to dump all your candidate candidates in a portal and put them on scheduling. The HR Chatbot will then take care of all the hassle of speaking to your candidates via a messenger or a similar application, get all their data and store it in a database in text format.

It is just like getting a help, you put the candidates on scheduling the night before, and the next day after you come to office, there it is, your database of questions and answers ready for you!

There is no chance of going wrong, no taking down notes and definitely it saves the hassle of entering all the data from your notepad to your excel file.

Intelligence

There is a standard template every company follows which is generally custom for each company. I was speaking to a Lead Recruiter of a renowned consultancy in Bangalore, he said, “Man, my team spends a lot of time in the calls. And each candidate has different queries, it’s very easy to get lost in all the mess.”

A chatbot can not only create custom templates according to your requirements, but also generates follow-up questions based on the response of each candidate. The best part the candidate would not even be able to figure out if its a bot, because of the wide range of personalized features that it can offer.

No messed up data

There is no scarcity of data, but the challenge lies in what do you make out of it. Candidates can give ambiguous answer or unusual responses and you have 100s of them. It is very difficult to convert them in a meaningful way so that you can derive more information out of it.

One such instance can be, if most of the candidates, even in the initial call, seems to be a bad fit for the job, you might want to question, Is my sourcing channel accurate?

Chatbots can help you in identifying the loopholes of your hiring funnel and the major red flags and dropout points, in the form of a clear and structured data, which is humanly impossible.

Also, if everything goes well and say you get 20 candidates throughout of 100. You will then call them. Chatbots can help you in getting comprehensive insights on each candidate before you talk to them. This might include their apprehensions, current situations or any other doubts which are not a part of your standard template.

This saves 100s of hours of a recruiter’s time every month and also saves the company’s time in the process.

These are the pain points we are looking ahead to address with our HR Chatbots. Do you think chatbots will bring about a revolution in the recruitment domain? Would love to know your thoughts.