What is a Recruitment Chatbot? The Definitive Guide



You can’t go online, open your email, log in to LinkedIn or attend a talent acquisition conference without being bombarded with ads, emails, LinkedIn posts and conference sales sheets talking about something related to chatbots for recruiting, artificial intelligence, machine learning, predictive analytics or natural language processing for your company. At best, all this information can be overwhelming. At its worst, it can be debilitating. Scary. Paralyzing.

Paralysis By Analysis

I get it. I went through the same thing a few years ago when marketing technology began the same transformation. And, at the time, I wished for a comprehensive guide to answer all my questions on these new technologies, processes, and methodologies. Even with extensive work with algorithms and in predictive analytics, the market was littered with information. I was getting bits and pieces here and there, but never all in one place. I was looking for something like a Wikipedia page, but for technology.

When I joined Brazen a couple years back and we started immersing ourselves in recruiting chatbots, I promised the team I wouldn’t let our audience of talent acquisition professionals go uneducated. I promised I’d create a simple way to get the most basic questions answered as it relates to all this new stuff. All in one place.

And that’s exactly what I’ve done on this page. I’ve created the Wikipedia for recruitment chatbots, with an easy to use design. Want to jump directly to the answer to a question that relates to recruiting chatbots our how they might fit into your recruitment strategy? Click on the question below and it’ll take you right to that section on the page. Want to immerse yourself in all there is to know about recruitment chatbots? Be my guest and read away. Bookmark the page to reference for later. Or email me with any questions you may have at joe.matar@brazen.com.

No more questions about that? Great. Now let’s get down to the questions that brought you here in the first place. Hope this page helps!

Table of Contents

What are Recruiting Chatbots?

Let’s start with the basics about candidate sourcing. Recruiting chatbots (also called AI-powered chatbots, recruitment chatbots, and recruiting assistants) replicate many of the basic communication tasks that recruiters are typically responsible for such as:

  • greeting job seekers that come to a career site or a job requisition landing page
  • collecting contact information from the job seeker for follow up later with an actual recruiter
  • pre-screening candidates by asking screening questions about experience, interests, etc.
  • scheduling time to chat with a recruiter at a future time
  • answering basic candidate questions that can help the job seeker with his or her job search
  • bridging the gap between technology and human connection

Recruiting chatbots mimic human interaction and in many cases, a chatbot can give the impression that the job seeker is actually talking to another person on the other end (and in case you were wondering, don’t worry, we don’t think AI will replace actual recruiters any time soon).

Chatting typically takes place online and can occur on a career site, job requisition landing page, through text messaging apps or through social media channels based on your recruiting team's bandwidth and preferences. 

Why Should Companies Use Recruiting Chatbots?

Chatbots in recruitment can help recruiters with conversions, time savings, decrease time to hire, cut costs, and boost the candidate experience at multiple points during the application process. Let’s explore each in detail.

  1. Conversions: Think about it. If applicants come to your career site because they might be interested in a job but are hesitant to fill out a cumbersome application, the recruiting chatbot can automatically initiate a conversation with the job seeker, making the candidate less likely to leave and more likely to enter your recruiting funnel and talent community. Voila! Instant talent attraction that leads to more conversions of qualified candidates.
  2. Time and cost savings: Communication is the bulk of a recruiter's job. This is very important because the recruitment process is mostly about relationship building. But some of that communication is less about relationship building and more about getting answers and screening candidates to help move the process forward. And this can take a lot of time, especially if there are lots of candidates. Recruiting chatbots can help recruiters with some of the more menial administrative tasks that take place at the top of the funnel of a recruitment process like collecting candidate contact information, interview scheduling, candidate screening, and pre-qualifying candidates, thus enabling a swifter and cheaper process overall.
  3. Time to hire: Since recruiting chatbots can automatically qualify job seekers and schedule interviews for you, then you'll be able to spend more time with the relationship building aspect of the hiring process rather than on repetitive tasks. This means human recruiters have more time to spend on meaningful conversations with the candidates in their talent pool. By devoting more of your time moving candidates forward, you'll be able to decrease the overall time to hire.
  4. Candidate experience: Since a recruitment chatbot is always on, it means no candidate will have to wait to talk to a “recruiter.” Plus, if the recruiting chatbot is built correctly, it can alert an actual human recruiter to enter the conversation when the bot identifies a really good candidate. For both candidates and talent acquisition teams, the recruiting chatbot acts like a concierge, thereby creating a smoother and more engaging candidate experience..

Which Employers are Using Recruiting Chatbots?

As you’d imagine, the use of chatbots in recruiting is exploding. They can be found in any industry for a myriad of job types. Below, we’ve included a few examples of employers that have recruiting chatbots on their career sites. You can check these chatbot examples out right now! Here are some examples from companies and organizations in technology and education:

Presidio hires for all sorts of jobs from engineering to sales to business analysts.

Hamilton County Schools uses its recruiting chatbot to engage and chat with candidates for hard-to-fill roles like teachers and support staff.


What are the Best Recruiting Chatbots?

There are plenty of companies that offer recruiting chatbots. Here is a list of the leading providers:

BrazenBot by Brazen

Well, of course I’m going to list our recruiting chatbot. You’re on our site! But let me try to be as unbiased as possible. In addition to our recruiting chatbot, we also offer the most comprehensive conversational recruiting platform on the market. That means we provide a wide variety of ways for recruiters to chat with candidates and job seekers. This includes our recruiting chatbot, scheduled chat, QuickChat, and online events. Furthermore, Brazen has been in this space for more than five years, longer than any of the other tech companies on this list. And in that time we’ve been able to perfect our approach to recruiting chat.


Olivia by Paradox

Olivia by Paradox is a newcomer to the recruiting chatbot space and, according to their website, provides an AI assistant obsessed with improving and reinventing the candidate experience.

Textrecruit

Textrecruit started as, you guessed it, an SMS messaging platform. They recently added an AI component called Ari.

Hiremya

Hiremya states on their website that their mission is to improve the hiring process for everyone. They want to do this through their AI chatbot called Mya.

Additional Recruiting Chatbot Resources

Check out these additional articles answering other common questions on recruiting chatbots:

Conclusion

Recruiting chatbots are not going away and are quickly becoming an invaluable tool in many TA professionals' recruiting process. Hopefully this guide gave you answers to your most pressing chatbot questions. If you're thinking of implementing a recruiting chatbot on your career site or job requisition landing pages, reach out directly to me to set up a demo or fill out the form on this page and we'll get back to you ASAP!

For more about how chat is helping recruiters hire top talent faster, read our Chat Revolution Guide.

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