In the same way companies have invested to understand and listen to their customers, it is important they listen to and create a positive recruitment experience with candidates through the hiring process. In high employment and competitive candidate markets, candidates will make employment decisions on how they are treated through the recruitment process. For this reason, it’s key that recruitment teams see themselves as their company’s brand hawk responsible for maintaining positive Candidate Equity.
So, what is Candidate Equity and why is it important? Candidate Equity is the philosophy and recruitment practice that strategic companies use to maintain and manage a positive candidate experience throughout their recruitment cycle. Creating a positive hiring experience ensures great candidates join, refer and promote the companies where they apply. In order to manage this, companies need to be responsive; this is where automated conversional platforms like RoboRecruiter can really help.
Chatbots increase a recruitment team’s ability to provide instantaneous information to job seekers. Talent Board in their 2018 Candidate Experience Report shows that there has been a 69% increase in companies using Chatbots to enhance the candidate application experience over last year.
“More employers realize that a competitive differentiator is communicating earlier with candidates, even before they apply. Chatbots are being used to answer general employment questions and this frees up the recruiting teams to have more hands-on time with potential candidates already in play.”
Any recruitment bot worth its code should allow you to create general conversations on the company or open roles, but really is this enough? We are seeing many pioneering companies benefit from deploying recruitment bots across a great number of diverse use cases.
Beyond the pre-application phase, candidates consistently rank a difficult application process, poor feedback and too much time between application and response among their top complaints. In many cases an application process is defined by the limitations of the recruiters’ ATS systems, justifiably arguing they do not have the time to be as responsive as they need to on candidates that are not applicable. Instead they need to focus on communicating with candidates they believe are the short-term targets to fill open roles.
We believe that with the right automated messaging platform you can give all applicants the feedback they deserve, maintaining Candidate Equity and also saving time!
Why is this important? Besides the fact that Talent Board’s Candidate Experience Report goes on to show that candidates share their recruitment experiences with both their inner circles and publicly online, it is also important to consider the impact that a strong application and communication process has on your overall brand.
So, what can you do? Here are a couple of use cases that we feel represent best practice.
Use Case #1
Our client (a leader in Medical Recruitment) has just started using RoboRecruiter to not only save their recruitment teams valuable time in sorting through online applications, but they have taken automation a few steps beyond simply providing pre-application information of their roles; they have fully embedded automation into their application process. Let’s explain.
Our Solution
Step 1: Applicants find a role they wish to apply to on the client’s Careers site.
Step 2: Once the Applicant hits the Apply Now button, they are provided information on the role and are directed to chat with the role’s virtual assistant (RoboRecruiter) that provides further information and qualifies the Applicant for the position.
During this process, RoboRecruiter is verifying the candidate’s contact information, structuring answers so that recruiters can prioritize candidates and pre-qualifying the candidate for the role. If the candidate meets the criteria for the position, they are given a calendar link to schedule an interview with the recruiter. If they do not pass the qualifying questions they are informed, politely let down and asked to search on other open roles. This level of automation is a win-win for both recruiter and candidate, providing the candidate with an instantaneous response and saving the recruiter time in vetting and scheduling qualified candidates for their open roles.
Use Case #2
Our client is a staffing agency that provides CDL drivers for a nationwide delivery client. Their openings are delivered through a Vender Management System and, once the role is in, filling it is done on a first-come first-serve basis. Managing a large pool of CDL drivers that may or may not be available costs our client time. For the drivers, being bombarded with mails and calls while they are working slowly creates a negative candidate experience.
Our Solution
RoboRecruiter integrated directly into the client’s ATS and Vendor Management system. As soon as a role is created in the ATS (seeded from the VMS), a preselected group of candidates are sent the position to solicit interest and applications. Creating this automatic workflow allows our Client to fill roles at speed. For candidates, the Chatbot registers their availability, only sending new roles to those that are marked “available”. For those that answer “not available”, it asks when they believe they will be open for a new role and automatically follows up prior to the date to keep our Client’s talent pool updated and ready to fill new positions.
Through both these use cases, automation builds Candidate Equity and saves recruiters time - giving them even more time to build client and candidate relationships, and using bots to Make Hiring more Human.
We would love to work with your recruitment teams to help do the same. For more information on RoboRecruiter contact us here.
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Posted by Thomas Jenkins, COO, RoboRecruiter
