Even as the U.S. job market continues to report robust growth (overriding fears of recession), business leaders are facing unprecedented challenges trying to hire enough workers to close open jobs. According to data from the US Chamber of Commerce, even if every unemployed person in the country found a job, there would still be a staggering 5.4 million open jobs.
For businesses, such a crippling shortage of talent ends in a double whammy: higher candidate acquisition costs combined with lost revenue thanks to unfulfilled orders.
No wonder an increasing number of talent leaders are turning to next-gen technologies like AI chatbots and automation to accelerate hiring, lower costs and deliver an improved candidate experience that gains them a competitive advantage in this red-hot market.
Chatbots or virtual assistants are AI-based programs that simulate human-like conversations via text or voice. From ELIZA to today’s Google Assistant or Siri, chatbots have come a long way.
In our recent survey with Talent Board, a non-profit research organization focused on the candidate experience, 61% of the global talent leaders reported that AI chatbots improve the responsiveness of their candidate communications.
But what explains this dramatic improvement?
Let’s look at the candidate experience without a chatbot. The entire process spans weeks, if not months, and recruiters typically respond to only a fraction of the total number of applicants.
When candidates visit your career page, that shows their active interest in your brand. But if they have to dig around your site to find basic information about open jobs or eligibility, many will drop off.
What if they instantly connect with a chatbot that engages them just like your top recruiters would? AI Chatbots can engage 100 percent of applicants and provide contextual answers to questions about open roles, eligibility, culture, benefits, and more. And they can do this in a conversational, human voice that makes the candidate feel like they are interacting with a real recruiter. This reduces time-to-apply significantly and captures up to 4X the talent companies typically attract from career sites.
The application view-to-apply rate has dropped from seven percent in 2020 to just three percent in 2021, which means candidates are seeing more jobs than they are applying for. To fix this, companies need to fix the application process.
Submitting an application through a chatbot can be as easy as scanning a QR code, which then redirects the candidates to a few automated questions. Another way to make applications easy is to enable candidates to view suitable job openings right within the chatbot and apply on the go just by responding to a few questions.
Chatbots can completely automate manual pre-screening processes. The screening questions are customizable and can be personalized as well. This means recruiters no longer need to spend time asking the same set of questions to hundreds of candidates and can instead focus their time on engaging the ones who qualify for the next round.
Qualified candidates can easily self-schedule interviews by accessing the recruiter’s calendar via the chatbot. This ensures a seamless experiences for everyone involved in two ways:
Let’s say a candidate does not get qualified past the interview process. Generally, companies respond with “Sorry, you do not satisfy our job requirements! Please check our career site to look for a job more suited for you.” However, with a chatbot, you can engage the same candidates with additional qualifying questions and automatically suggest other relevant jobs to the candidate, right within the same chat. This can be used to either reactivate talent in your database or redeploy candidates who are on the verge of completing their assignments.
AI chatbots automate tedious recruiting tasks and maximize recruiter efficiency. Are you ready to accelerate your hiring with a 24/7 digital recruiter? Sense and Talent Board teamed up to survey 400 staffing and talent acquisition leaders around the world to understand how they are coping with the pressures of engaging qualified candidates in today’s volatile talent market.
