We all know how many challenges there are when it comes to doing recruitment right. In addition to attracting the right talent, as a recruiter, you’re also responsible for producing engaging recruitment advertisements, designing compelling recruitment strategies, and performing follow up touch points to foster candidate care.

Performing all these tasks is easier said than done. Someone should give you an assistant to take up some of those repetitive tasks and release you to focus on important strategic and business decision-related work. This is where recruitment chatbots come into play.

As Naveen Joshi reporting for Forbes explains, “We are pretty sure that everyone is aware of what chatbots are and what they do. What are recruitment chatbots exactly about? Let’s put it out in simple words. Recruitment chatbots, considered as an HR manager’s dream assistant, are basically conversational interface platforms that perform the preliminary recruitment process. These chatbots are powered with AI and NLP capabilities which make them more disruptive and powerful. Let’s check some concrete recruitment chatbot use cases, capabilities and potential that brings in breakthrough results.

Recruitment chatbot: advantages

Screening candidate applications

Once candidates visit or apply on your careers websites, chatbots can initiate conversations and ask them questions, for example, about their work experience, details about their previous organisation and role, and areas of interest.

When the conversation concludes, chatbots can then evaluate the candidates’ relevancy for the  your current opportunity. Assessing position requirements, the conversation, and the candidates’ resume, the recruitment chatbot can decide whether a candidate fits the open position or not.

Scheduling interviews

Intelligent chatbots can access yours or your line manager calendars to check for availability and schedule interviews for relevant candidates.

Answering queries

“Before joining any company, it is obvious that candidates will have a few queries or doubts about the job position, work environment and salary structure. Recruiters have to make time for such calls. However, with chatbots, recruiters gain some much needed assistance. With prompt replies and instant availability, chatbots have become one of the disruptive newcomers in the tech market.”

Improving candidate experience

To stand out from your talent competitors, tweak your recruitment strategy to make it more candidate-centric.

“The time that candidates take to send resumes and recruiters get back to them should be negligible. Chatbots can make this happen. Chatbots can get back to candidates almost instantaneously, making both applicants and recruiters satisfied on that front.”

Recruitment chatbot: disadvantages

Chatbots offer a wide range of benefits and opportunities, and are certainly disrupting the recruitment space. But along with these comes a number of challenges. Chatbots aren’t immune to technical faults and glitches!

Lack of Empathy

Though chatbots are powered with highly advanced AI, ML and NLP capabilities, they fall short while gauging candidate emotions and sentiments – especially humour!

“No jokes, no human touch, no empathy, no humor while talking might make the conversation less than engaging for candidates. Sometimes, chatbots are designed with limited information about the company. If candidates ask questions that are unfathomable to chatbots, these chatbots can get confused, and they then provide irrelevant answers. Incidents like these can disappoint and frustrate candidates.”

Language barrier

Everyone inevitably has a unique talking style, slang and writing style. Sometimes, this makes it hard for chatbots to understand certain queries and statements.

Decision-making capabilities

While recruitment chatbots can learn from previous conversations, they can’t make decision on their own.

“For example, consider a situation where a chatbot asks a question like, “Do you have fair knowledge about big data?” and the candidate answers “Yes, but I haven’t worked on any projects yet.” Here, the candidate states that they have sound knowledge on the concept and yet no hands-on experience. It’s obvious that big data concepts make sense to data scientists, software developers, and other such highly experienced employees. A newcomer will not be suitable for the position. A not-so-well-designed chatbot will get confused at this point, and it might schedule an interview with the newcomer, thereby making a wrong decision.”

Unpredictable candidate replies

“Humans are highly unpredictable. Some candidates might love talking with chatbots, some candidates might interact with chatbots by using abusive words, just for fun (sometimes), while some might just terminate the conversation. Dealing with such unpredictable behaviour is not an easy undertaking for chatbots.”

Malicious attacks

While it’s unpleasant to think about, hacker and unscrupulous people may target your online framework through chatbots. Chatbots are susceptible to being attacked, scripted and turned into evil bots! These evil bots might schedule interviews with only irrelevant candidates or send abusive replies to candidates. It seems far-fetched and scary, but it’s in the realm of possibility.

Having a high potential to connect with great talent, taking mundane tasks off your hands such as scheduling and answering queries, chatbots truly do fulfil a recruitment need. But is all the hype around recruitment chatbots worth it? If chatbots can streamline the recruitment process, reduce a recruiter’s burden and help save time, perhaps they’re worth a shot.

But, before designing a chatbot for your organisation, be mindful of the potential challenges that might arise and set a strategy for overcoming each one if they do. Ensure your chatbot’s underlying infrastructure is robust and tighten your security policies to safeguard against hackers.

Source

Recruitment Chatbots: Is The Hype Worth It?

Naveen Joshi

Forbes

The post Recruitment trend alert: are recruitment chatbots worth it? appeared first on Recruitment Marketing.