In today’s market, talent acquisition teams always have a list of tasks longer than hours in the working day. In times of hardship, efficiencies become more essential than ever, and making the absolute most of every resource at your disposal is top of everyone’s list.
In this climate, it’s no wonder that many businesses are looking to leverage technology as a way of offloading certain tasks and buying back some time for their overloaded teams.
When it comes to recruitment, answering queries and responding to messages accounts for an enormous amount of time, so employing some automation into those processes seems like a no-brainer. But how do you ensure that automating your FAQ processes, for example, does not have a negative impact on the candidate’s experience with your organisation?
We’ve all heard the negative stories in the press recently about what happens when chatbots go wrong. Poorly configured or untrained chatbots have been shown to have serious impacts on employer brands, and wider business reputations.
This blog is intended to explain the ways a properly configured chatbot can in fact be a boon for your reputation and the candidate experience you provide. By offering a consistent on-brand experience every time, by being available to answer questions when your team cannot, and by freeing up time and energy for your team to deal with parts of the process and enquiries that really do require the human touch, you can elevate your employer brand and reputation.
So, let’s get down to it. Here are our top tips for employing a chatbot effectively in your recruitment process.
1. Content is key
The key to ensuring your chatbot is actually used by your candidates, rather than passed through as quickly as possible until they find the ‘contact the team’ button, is to ensure you’re serving candidates the content they are looking for, quickly and effectively. Conducting research and analysis into what questions candidates ask and when, and thinking carefully about how your menus, questions, and answers are worded and formatted, are essential to guaranteeing the success of your chatbot.
2. It’s all about context
How will candidates find your chatbot? Will it be served as a pop-up on your website? Will you signpost to it in your emails? Are they more likely to access it via mobile or desktop?
Thinking about all the different ways that candidates will be seeking information from you, will aid you in ensuring your chatbot appears everywhere they are looking for help.
Our clients often embed their chatbot not just on their careers site, but also within the onboarding or in-process nurture portals we create for them – giving candidates a one-stop-shop of interactive information.
3. Planning is key
Carefully mapping out all the possible journeys a candidate may take to get to the answer they need is essential in creating a successful chatbot for recruitment. All the recent horror stories featured chatbots using large language models, such as ChatGPT, to formulate answers – enabling them to go ‘off-script’ and advise things that entirely went against company policy, branding, or processes.
The chatbots we create with our clients are preconfigured, built using a drag-and-drop mapping technology, that enables you to plot out all the possible journeys a candidate could take through the chat, and ensure they only receive answers that are on-brand, true, and relevant.
4. Surprise and delight
Stay one step ahead of your candidates! Often candidates will not entirely know what they need, so making sure you offer them up not just the answer to their question, but also the opportunity to learn more, will add real value to their experience.
5. Put yourself in the candidates' shoes
Ultimately, the best candidate experiences happen when the TA team have put themselves in the candidates’ shoes and thought about how they would feel. Making sure your chatbot gives candidates what they need, when they need it, plus some extra knowledge or reassurance they didn’t even know they were looking for, will ensure that they leave your process with a positive outlook, regardless of the outcome.
6. Keep testing and updating
Things change all the time: personnel, team responsibilities, elements of your processes, the benefits available to employees. Ensure your chatbot stays up to date and continues to provide your candidates with the information and experience they need through regular reviews and updates.
The drag-and-drop functionality of Meet & Engage chatbots enables this kind of swift review and restructure. Our real-time editing allows changes to be made without down-time, enabling you to quickly implement changes, without the need for a full rebuild. You can test and update, switching on the revamped chatbot at the click of a button once it’s ready. Real-time editing also enables teams to continually review and tweak going forward, ensuring the information and service they provide are always up-to-date.
If you’d like to know more about how our candidate experience chatbots can improve your team’s efficiency, get in touch or request a demo and one of our solutions team will be in touch.
