The recruitment industry is vastly changing with the introduction of new digital hiring tools, virtual reality (interview) experiences and now also the introduction of the chatbot.
Chatbots are commonly used by ecommerce retailers, but now the recruitment landscape has adopted this new technology into the hiring process. A recruitment chatbots is a software that uses AI technology to understand a person’s messages and know how to respond [1]. These recruitment chatbots are used for the sourcing screening and messaging of candidates.
Time consuming tasks, such as answering FAQ’s, asking screening questions, ranking candidates and scheduling interviews with a human recruiter, can be automated and executed by chatbots rather than human recruiters. For candidates this allows for easy access to information and a quicker response, whilst recruiters become more productive and can focus on more complex, non-computerized tasks. Morover, the hiring process can become faster, according to XOR, that developed a recruitment chatbot, the recruitment process can become 33% faster, whilst saving 50% of recruitmtent costs and increasing candidate’s experience [2].
Now this all sounds very promising and you might even ask yourself why not every company has installed such a recruitment chatbot already?
In order for a chatbot to become effective in answering questions human training, supervised learning and a knowledge base are necessary. Learning capabilities also depend on the depth of the technology behind the chatbot. Since humans help train their chatbots, one of the biggest challenges to overcome is that human biases might be passed on to chatbots, as they will be programmed to think like the recruiter [3].
Furthermore, humans have a lack of standardization in texting, meaning that chatbots will not kow how a candidate will react. This means significant time must be invested in order for the system to function, and it still might not respond perfectly.
Personally, I believe chatbots are useful in making the recruiters more productive, since providing information to candidates, scheduling interviews and asking initial questions that might help selecting and ranking candidates, are not the most value adding tasks. However, recruitment is still a very ‘human’ process, as both candidates and companies need to ensure fit with the organization. Completely automating the selection process might result in companies not hiring the right candidates, as human biases and errors are hard to predict for.
Why do you think the introduction of chatbots in recruitment processes has a positive or negative impact? And do you think recruitments chatbots will eventually take over more, if not all, recruiter’s tasks?
Hi Iris, thank you for your interesting post.
More and more processes are being standardized these days and are taken over by machines. I definitely agree with you that the introduction of chat bots will have a positive impact on the recruitment process. AI technology is getting increasingly better at performing all sorts of tasks and I believe that it definitely could be of use in the first (basic) part of the interview process. In this way the job applications will be handled faster and smoother, and the basic screening process at the first part of the selection process can be automated. The second part of the process, however, is the part in which humans should play – at least in the coming years – the dominant role. At the end of the day a job applicant does not only need to have the right background and other characteristics that can be asked in a standardized way, but he or she also needs to ‘feel’ like the right person for the job. It is important that the potential new employee fits within the team. I believe that machines do not have the ability – not yet? – to make decisions based on their ‘feeling’. Therefore, at the end, recruitment will, in my opinion, stay a human process. At least for the coming few years.
Hey Iris,
Thank you for the interesting post!
During my gap year, I’ve already collected some experiences with the new hiring tool chatbots in the company where I’ve worked.
The tool was a huge help especially during high-volume applications in summer. Without chatbots we wouldn’t be able to manage the high amount of applications and to focus on qualified candidates who met out expectations. Further, scanning through all applications on time was impossible without chatbots. In the hiring process timing is a really important aspect, since finding good talents, which match the company is not always easy. Though a study from Indeed we discovered that people search for jobs especially during the evenings. Chatbot made it possible to respond to during that period of time consequently, more people sent their applications out to us, due to vanished concerns.
Whereas, chatbots was not aware of some questions candidates were asking, which led to miscommunication. By using it several months, it became clear that it did not matter with how many information we fed chatbots with, it wouldn’t turn the application into a human – but isn’t that what HR should be about?
We concluded for the company, that it is important to find the right balance between technology and humans how Dennis already said. Technology can help HR to get more efficient and faster but at the end of the day, the personal sense counts.