Chatbot for recruiters?
Chatbot for recruiters?
Well, that’s what exactly came into our internal discussion at RoadToNaukri, a few months back. At that time, RoadToNaukri used to help employers in sourcing the right candidates for high-volume entry-level job roles. We offered a web-based system to smartly manage and track applicants (ATS), manage hiring teams, and conduct efficient interview drives. Employers were happy about our candidate quality ( we groomed candidates before lining up for interviews) as our source-to-hire ratio was far better than other sourcing channels.
But to make this happen, our in-house recruiters had to put in lots of effort (despite having our in-house ATS). They struggled to follow up with each candidate on time (After all, whether you select or reject, you must update the applicants on time and with complete and transparent information). Instead of focusing on connecting with quality candidates, a big portion of their time was spent collecting basic information (e.g., education, preferences), asking screening questions, scheduling (and rescheduling) interviews, grooming candidates, and resolving their basic queries. Few of our recruiters (as well as our clients) were influenced by their unconscious biases, especially in early screening rounds.
And this was the exact problem statement before our product team — how to help our recruiters to achieve more? How to turn them up into “Super recruiters”? While speaking about efficiency, an easier and obvious answer is — automation. Shall we automate this job and replace recruiters with a robot? The answer to this ambitious hypothetical question is - No.
With state-of-art artificial technology and machine learning, it is still impossible to replace human from recruitment process (wait till robots learn and mimic the most powerful human trait — empathy!). But, definitely things can be made efficient, convenient and streamlined.
This is where we started early experimentation with our integrated recruitment chatbot Ira - a virtual assistant that can supercharge the entire recruitment process. And today, we are very excited to launch our early adopter program (EAP) for Ira (sign up here).
Before coming to the details of EAP, let’s first take a look on how Ira can help the recruiters:
Automated screening: Ira can ask basic screening questions about education, experience, and preferences. She can conduct a telephonic screening interview, record the conversation, and rate candidates. Even she can extract, ingest and rank candidate profiles by parsing resumes and public pages. You can also conduct assessments over the bot.
Application tracking and management: Ira has an inbuilt Application Tracking System (ATS) and can do almost every tracking-related tasks (e.g., schedule interviews).
Better candidate engagement: Ira is available 24x7 to answer candidate queries. Automated human-like conversation improves the candidate experience and saves precious recruiter time. All these interactions are recorded and saved for further analysis (e.g., Sentiment analysis and prediction towards offer rejections).
Seamless integration: Ira can be easily integrated with various platforms (like Slack, Office 365, Job boards, Resume repositories, SMS, Calendars, Facebook, etc.). Furthermore, with a powerful integrated ATS, she can be seamlessly integrated with existing RMS or ATS.
Predictive analysis and deep matchmaking: Ira learns from every interaction, observes the recruiter’s/candidate’s intent, and predicts outcomes. It tries to identify the patterns, and biases and match the right candidates for the right jobs.
Easier reporting: With integrated ATS, Ira can generate custom reports on the fly. As it is voice command ready (can be configured with Alexa or similar voice interfaces), rather than digging into ATS/excels, recruiters can simply “Ask” for information.
You can read more about the features here.
So, if this seems exciting to you as well, join us in our early adopter program and shape the future of recruitment together.
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(originally posted here - https://medium.com/@ankitwww/why-we-built-a-chatbot-for-recruiters-abb32d1a245f)