Every manager in charge of recruitment for their team has been there – a huge pile of applications to sift through, working out who is suitable for the role (and who isn’t), and then having to deal with the expectation of providing feedback to each applicant individually on how their application doesn’t match the criteria – an unrealistic and daunting expectation when there are many applicants and only one of you.
At the moment, actually finding enough applicants is tough. The Great Resignation is in full swing, with a reported 1 in 4 UK employees actively planning a change of role. Mix that in with all the other fun we’ve got going on in the UK right now, and what we’ve got is an employee’s market. Demand outstrips supply of skilled workers. So how do you ensure that you still continue to have a steady stream of suitable applicants to your roles?
Well, the answer is: you grab them at every opportunity. Think how many times potentially great candidates glaze over your job advert and don’t actually commit to applying. Once they’ve left the page, they’re lost to the ether and you might never find that candidate again.
And, let’s be honest, there’s lots to put them off – the length of an application, the job title is a bit obscure, or the job description isn’t particularly clear. It doesn’t really matter. You want as many of these potential people to engage as possible – it is infinitely better for you to have the choice out of hundreds of qualified candidates than trying to pick the best of a bad five.
You’re probably thinking – hang on a minute, if I have that many applicants then surely that’s a load more work for me. But what if the candidates qualified themselves without you even having to be involved?
Just like magic, in steps the Recruitment Bot, part of the Leadoo platform offering and a tool that can make your recruitment process as streamlined as a bottlenose dolphin. A bit of context – Leadoo is a conversion platform that provides tools to help its customers increase the number of conversions and quality leads received via their website. In addition, our tools are well able to facilitate the recruitment process, increasing the number of applicants for each role but without increasing your workload, making it convenient, easy and rewarding for everyone involved.
In this article, we present the many possibilities of our solutions in recruitment and how they currently work for us, and our client base. We’re always up for looking at how we can create unique use cases with our solutions, so if you’re wanting to do something a bit different, get in touch with us!
If you’re impatient (like us!) and want to go straight to testing out the bot, go ahead and skip to the end of this article 👇
Bots and recruitment – what’s the benefit?
There are many benefits to be had here. Firstly, from the candidate’s perspective, they’ll receive a direct answer to their application. If they meet the requirements of the job, and/or have answered personality and culture questions and scored well, then the bot can ask for their contact details, which will be sent directly to you, the hiring manager, to continue the process.
In the same vein, the bot can immediately tell the candidate if they are not suitable for the role. This means that you’ll only receive the information for the candidates who were invited to leave their contact details, i.e. those who passed your initial qualification process via the bot. You could even refer unsuitable candidates to other, more suitable roles for them, if, for example, they scored well on culture and personality, but are not suitable for this particular role.
Sounds a bit easier on you, eh? It makes the whole process much smoother, manages expectations on both sides of the table, and means you don’t have to be the one to send soulless rejection emails to a thousand inappropriate candidates. Winning.
Speeding up the recruitment process is not the only benefit you get from recruiting. As we’ve already highlighted in this article, the benefits are huge;
- It’s the ultimate in brand consistency and corporate branding. A good, consistent image helps you to recruit the right kinds of candidates into the right kinds of roles, and ensures candidates know what kind of culture and vibe they can expect from their new potential workplace.
- The recruiter also activates passive applicants; it goes without saying that it’s much easier to apply for a job through a bot, where the conversation flows more naturally (and you can cut straight to the chase in terms of asking questions). People are going to be more inclined to engage with this. You’re therefore more likely to receive applications from candidates who would not otherwise have submitted an application – meaning you might find that diamond in the rough you’ve been looking for 💎
It is therefore entirely up to you whether your next jaunt into the recruitment process is a long and arduous one, or whether it’s a bit quicker, easier and more streamlined for everyone involved.
Screening applicants and streamlining the recruitment process
Picture the scene: you’re looking for a new employee. You need this employee to have some experience, a degree – preferably in the relevant field – and for them to have access to a vehicle to get to work or travel between locations. You write a (very) comprehensive job post listing the qualities you’re looking for. So far, so good.
Then, once the advert has gone live, the applications flood in. You go through your inbox one by one, only to find that most applicants don’t have the experience, education, or access to transport that you’re going to need them to have. Those applicants have wasted their time applying, and you’ve wasted an hour and a half sifting through applications with little joy – and to top it off, you’re going to have to be the one to send those soulless templated rejection emails.
Sounds a bit crap. But, what if you’d have had the tools at your disposal to qualify the visitors to your careers pages, and screen any suitable applicants prior to you even having had a browse through their CVs?
Well, you’d have saved time, that’s for sure. Let’s imagine the same situation again, but this time, you have some virtual helping hands sorting through your candidates, making your recruitment process much easier, and taking care of the hard work for you.
We use our own solution for recruitment. Obvs.
For each job posting, we create an InpageBot which will ask post-specific questions to pre-qualify each candidate, effectively conducting an interview with them on your behalf. For job postings that receive high volumes of applicants, this is a time saving mechanism to prevent you having to sift through thousands of CVs, and then spend hours conducting interviews to no avail. And the best bit? It works seamlessly on mobile and desktop, meaning candidates can leave an application no matter what device they’re using.
Check out how we work it here 👇
From a candidate perspective, this is also ingenious. The biggest barrier for candidates when applying for roles is often the process itself – draconian and bureaucratic, it puts people off and gives them what is perhaps an unfair reflection that your company is also draconian. We shouldn’t expect candidates to jump through a series of difficult hoops in order to leave their details with us either, because all that will do is minimise the pool of potentials you get to pick from as the hiring manager.
By making use of something as simple as an InpageBot, we make the candidate feel comfortable. The activity of engaging with a bot is perceived as low-stake, and there’s much less stress involved in answering questions if the person asking them isn’t real. There’s a psychology and magic to it that even we can’t quite put our fingers on.
And, this is a story familiar to around 90% of our Leadooers; many of whom have ended up working for Leadoo ‘by complete accident after playing around with a bot on a job advert…’
Tests and pre-qualification
Everybody loves the challenge of a test. And low-stakes quizzes such as the ones we and our clients create using our bots encourage engagement because the user doesn’t see there as being any risk in answering the questions. They haven’t committed to applying.
Take Zure, for example. Zure provide end-to-end services based around Microsoft Azure and they have a diverse team; from developers, to marketers, to architects and more, Zure has an excellent culture which they aim to maintain. One easy way for them to do this is to pre-screen applicants to their open positions, such as below:
By pre-screening all candidates for their prior experience, it reduces the time taken by the hiring manager to filter applications as this process is carried out automatically by the bot.
Increased numbers of applicants
Guidant Global made use of an Inpagebot on their Social Work Talent Hub to help to increase the number of qualified social worker applications they receive. It allows Guidant Global to identify potential candidates who otherwise may not have engaged with the site, increasing the size of the candidate pool in an industry which expects to have 1 million vacant jobs by 2025. This mismatch between supply and demand makes engagement of any potential candidate that much more important, but obviously more difficult. And that’s where the Leadoo bots step in:
Guidant both collect contact details prior to, and carry out, pre-qualification questions. This works well for industries with more complex specialisms, such as social work, and means that candidates can be automatically sent to the appropriate hiring manager.
Divide the workload – before they fill out a contact form
Revel IT, a US-based IT and Artificial Intelligence recruitment company, make use of a VisualBot on their front page to allow them to qualify visitors, work out what each visitor needs, and ensure their details go to the right person. They engage the visitor first, before asking for contact information – but now are able to determine why the visitor is making contact, and the right person can be sent their details automatically by the bot depending on what answers they provide.
Where and how can I get recruitment bots for my site?
You can get recruitment bots as part of your Leadoo package if you’re already one of our clients – just chat to your Customer Success Manager who can hook you up and advise on how best to use the bots for what you need.
If you’re not already on the Leadoo bus, find out how you can hop aboard by getting in touch today.
