How do you leverage a conversational recruiting assistant as part of the sourcing and hiring process?
We asked hiring managers and C-Suite executives to share their best ideas. From gaining actionable insight to keeping passive talent engaged, there are several ways you can leverage a conversational recruitment assistant to help find the best candidates for your needs.
Here’s a sampling of what we heard
Use AI To Gain Actionable Insights
Incorporating a conversational recruiting assistant into the hiring process can help you gain actionable insights that hiring managers might miss during the first or even second screening. This kind of technology effectively qualifies candidates on its own, then gives you the details to make a more informed decision. If your talent pool is very large, conversational assistants can help you find the best candidates for your needs, and more quickly, from among all potential candidates.
Ryan Nouis
Founder and CEO, TruPath
Be Clear and Concise in Messaging and Setup
It is important to be clear and concise in your messaging and setup. This will help the AI to understand your objectives and target candidates more effectively. Additionally, you should keep up with industry trends so that your messaging remains relevant. And finally, make sure to always have current job postings available for review so that the recruitment assistant can find the best matches for you.
Paw Vej
Recruitment Manager and Team Leader, Financer.com Ltd
Compile a Robust FAQ for the AI
When training an AI-based conversational recruiting assistant, compiling a robust and complete FAQ is hugely important. Recruiting AI is most helpful and effective when you’ve fed it all of the information it needs to properly guide candidates through the sourcing and hiring process. Research the most commonly asked questions – in general and industry-specific – and be sure to thoroughly train your recruiting assistant with everything you’ve gathered.
From interview details to remote work policies to company culture, the more data you can feed your robot, the more truly helpful it’ll be – especially if you can include some less obvious questions. That’s the major thing to remember about AI: It’s incredible technology, but you have to set it up for success.
Stephen Light
CEO and Co-owner, Nolah Mattress
Schedule Hands-Off Interviews
Scheduling appointments and interviews is a simple yet time-consuming process that slows down every recruiter’s day. Rather than focusing more on finding the right individual, they must split their time between critical tasks and the day-to-day “housekeeping” that comes with the job.
Use a conversational recruiting assistant for hands-off interview scheduling, especially if you’re interviewing several applicants in a short timeframe. Give the AI access to your calendar, enter a few parameters regarding your availability, and it will handle the rest. When a candidate inquires about setting up an interview, the assistant can successfully walk them through the process without your involvement.
John Li
Co-Founder and CTO, Fig Loans
Optimize Conditional Logic Function for Pre-Screening
Use “Conditions” blocks in your recruitment chatbots to pre-screen applicants and find top candidates for better efficiency. One mistake companies often make when using conversational recruitment assistants is not setting it up to quicken decision-making. To improve your process and speed up hiring, pre-determine the fundamental qualities you want for an applicant to qualify as a top candidate. Set up a conditional logic function for the chatbots to identify those that match your qualifications.
Kris Lippi
Founder, I Sold My House
Gain Insight into Candidates’ Media Engagements
The recruiting and hiring process is now able to be automated in all ways except for the intangible assets a person possesses – how do the candidates actually interact?
Leveraging a conversational recruiting assistant allows you to gain insight into how the candidate engages over several different media forms (email, in-person, chatbots, phone calls, social media, mobile, etc.) rather than just a question-and-answer format with hiring docs.
Use the conversational recruiter to give insights into response time, familiarity with common tools the company uses or willingness and ability to learn them. In short, use the automated tools for qualifications for the job duties and leverage the conversational recruiting assistant for the intangible assets your company requires.
Jason Reposa
Founder and CEO, Good Feels
Use Conversational AI for Candidate Attributes
There’s more to a candidate than just their skills and experience. Hiring based on these factors alone can skew your decision-making process and bring turbulence into the workplace. Ill-suited onboards may find it harder to assimilate, leading to increased rates of employee churn.
To best leverage a conversational recruiting assistant, equip them with a set of attributes that you’d like to see in your next onboard. This may include descriptors such as “talkative”, “analytical” or “extroverted.” These terms can be greatly beneficial during the screening and sorting process, providing plenty of context as to the kind of worker you’re looking to attract. While the list doesn’t have to be long, providing at least three separate descriptors should ensure that the conversational recruiting assistant fully understands which qualities you prioritize. This makes them more likely to source the right type of candidate, helping you hire and retain workers that innately fit your company culture.
Aaron Gray
Co-Founder, Agency 101
Create Human-Level Discourse Through Chatbots
Using a chatbot is the most efficient way to provide conversational recruiting, but there is still discussion about how “human” a chatbot should be. Your chatbot cannot come across as robotic and cold because that type of chat creates a negative candidate experience. A chatbot should not be deceptive and lead candidates to believe that they are speaking to a real person. If a candidate asks if they are talking to a chatbot, they should receive a truthful response. Candidates are usually comfortable interacting with chatbots, especially if they have questions they need answered right away and don’t want to wait to talk to a person. The right level of discourse will keep candidates interested in your company, and using technology for conversational recruiting should not be a disadvantage.
Ouriel Lemmel
Founder and CEO, WinIt
Use AI for Pre-screening Interviews
With the average role attracting 118 applications, conversation recruiting assistants can help cut down the candidates you’ll manually sort through later. Using conversational AI for pre-screening interviews can help you filter out applications based on the language they use. By setting up natural-language interactions with the candidate, the AI communicates with them and then processes the responses they give. By inputting the criteria most important to the role, you help the assistant determine which applicants to move to the top of the list and which aren’t a good fit.
Scott Lieberman
Owner and Founder, Touchdown Money
Connect Applicant To a Live Person for Unique Questions
The one thing those using a conversational recruiting assistant should do is either have it be able to sort through all kinds of problems or have it directly connect the applicant to a live person when there is a problem it can’t solve. Applicants get frustrated when they get stuck and ask a question the assistant can’t answer. The assistant then offers choices that don’t match the question at all, and that frustrates the candidate further. Either the assistant needs to be able to identify all types of questions or problems or immediately and seamlessly connect to a live person who can. Telling the candidate to call HR in the morning during working hours will lose the company’s good applicants in a heartbeat.
Tanya Klien
CEO, Anta Plumbing
Get a Feel of Candidates’ Personality and Demeanor
A conversational recruitment assistant can be used to get a better feel for the candidate’s personality and demeanor. As hiring managers know well, there’s more to a person’s applicability than their qualifications and work experience. More than that, it’s important that this person is a good culture fit for the rest of the team. This allows for more meaningful communication and makes it easier to collaborate — both of which are great for rapport-building.
By using a conversational recruiting assistant, which hinges upon a more “informal” style of recruitment, recruiters can engage candidates in a more personal and authentic manner. This allows candidates to simply be themselves, and to let their personality shine through.
To best leverage a conversational recruiting assistant, be sure to request these kinds of insights. Learn more about what candidates are really like beneath the staunch professionalism, and you’ll find it that much easier to source and hire quality candidates.
Max Wesman
COO, GoodHire
Keep Passive Talent Engaged
Keeping up with passive candidates in a talent shortage market is a crucial but often ignored step, mainly because organizations don’t have the resources or capacity to keep up with them. With a conversational recruiting assistant, you don’t need to sacrifice time with active candidates when you reach out to passive ones. You can reach out to passive candidates with the right qualifications for an upcoming role using conversational AI.
By regularly reaching out to passive candidates, your AI can check in with them, gather updated contact information, and learn more about their changing career goals. Given that the effort on your end is almost nonexistent and passive candidates may still be interested in working for your company, it’s a great way to keep your candidate pool fresh and full of hirable, engaged talent
James Diel
CEO, Textel
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