Human Resources

Optimize HR Recruitment with Conversational AI

From scaling recruiter capacity, conducting candidate follow-up, triaging applicants, and more, conversational AI can help you find the right candidates.

92% of HR executives plan to increase their use of conversational AI in at least one area of HR, and it's clear why. Conversational AI improves hiring by offering a more personalized, scalable, and efficient candidate experience. Consequently, prospects have a better interview experience, and recruiters have more time to uncover and cultivate great talent.

Below are a few ways conversational AI can revolutionize an HR recruiting program and help leaders perform at the highest levels.

Overcome Recruiter Burnout

Recruiters, like most professionals, work best when they spend time doing the things that are most fulfilling to them. As such, if a recruiter spends most of their time doing things that could be automated, this is not only poor practice on the part of the company but could eventually cause the recruiter to burn out and leave. 

Unfortunately, one in five HR leaders reported their recruiters were overwhelmed. This leads to lowered engagement and productivity, missed opportunities, failure to follow up with candidates, and less motivation to seek candidates.

Burnout occurs in HR leaders when they don't have the time, energy, or resources to fulfill the tasks in front of them. Consequently, recruiters do what they can until they simply can't, reaching a mental breaking point. Most of the time, the issues weighing down a recruiter have to do with repetitive, tedious tasks that are not on their own complicated to solve. Still, they become overwhelming because of the volume and lack of time to perform or execute them.

This is where conversational AI can significantly scale the execution of these tasks and offload them from an HR recruiter who is ultimately better suited to perform more complex, qualitative, and intuition-based tasks. This is particularly important during recruitment when human judgment and discretion are needed to find the right candidate. 

Conversational AI can equip recruiters with automation and intelligent resources, allowing them to work more effectively and reduce their workload. It can scale capacity, helping recruiters thrive in their roles and avoid burnout.  

Automate Tedious Tasks

In line with the point above, when recruiters employ conversational AI to connect with applicants, they can reach more people than they could on their own. Conversational AI functions 24/7/365 with the ability to communicate with any number of individuals. It's simple to contact hundreds, if not thousands, of prospects for interview scheduling, follow-up, or management of materials such as resumes and portfolios. 

Conversational AI can collect basic candidate information and only forward the best matches to recruiters. As this takes a significant burden off recruiters, they can focus on cultivating relationships with the most qualified individuals.

Businesses leveraging conversational AI and NLP to analyze virtual interviews facilitate improved recruiting decisions. As themes are transcribed and interpreted, interviews become increasingly illuminating. Recruiting teams may ask better questions and engage in productive interactions with candidates. The better the dialogue, the better the hire, and with excellent hires, a company is positioned for development and success.

Conversational AI automates candidate follow-up emails, schedules appointments, sends notifications and reminders, and more at an unprecedented scale. The solution can also accelerate resume triage by automatically sorting and recommending candidates based on credentials.

This gives recruiters more time to meet with and pursue candidates–things conversational AI can't easily do. Conversational AI can answer applicants' questions regarding salary, PTO, benefits, and job responsibilities to create a seamless hiring experience. 

In short, conversational AI allows recruiters to focus on the skills that require the most human intuition and insight to execute, saving significant time and energy.

 

Improve the Candidate's Experience

If you have a great candidate, making them wait weeks or months to hear back on a job they care about (the one you're trying to fill!) is poor practice. Conversational AI can deliver significantly faster response time, meaning you're more likely to get the candidates you want. This provides a more positive experience for candidates while keeping them in the loop. Plus, treating candidates well in the hiring process demonstrates that your company will likely treat them well as employees, meaning lower risks of future turnover

Additionally, conversational AI can help foster a faster relationship between candidates and recruiters. Automated follow-up ensures that candidates don't feel ignored but instead valued and interested by your company.

As any good HR professional knows, hiring and onboarding is the beginning of their work, not the end. And conversational AI has uses outside of recruitment. Consider how it can be utilized to improve the employee experience, for instance. 

Employee Onboarding

Consider the onboarding procedure: once an employee is hired, HR teams must collect data for payroll, benefits, and other administrative functions. Conversational AI can significantly accelerate this process by collecting this information and responding to onboarding-related inquiries from new hires. 

As such, conversational AI can perform the majority of the HR department's tedious administrative tasks. Instead of a human resource manager manually sending out documents, following up, answering inquiries, and tracking down crucial paperwork, conversational AI handles everything. HR staff can use that time to focus on higher-priority, higher-value tasks, such as engaging new employees, defining goals, and acclimating new hires to the business culture.

Conversational AI can give an even more personalized employee experience from the employee's perspective. At each stage of an employee's journey, from onboarding to leaving, conversational AI will answer inquiries and provide them with pertinent information at any given time. And, since conversational AI may save HR teams a substantial amount of time, HR professionals can devote more energy to creating meaningful employee experiences. The demands of employees are continuously evolving, and conversational AI can help HR teams get the data — and save the time — necessary to respond appropriately to employees' needs.

Bring in a More Diverse Talent Pool

Humans are often susceptible to unconscious bias, which can negatively impact recruitment. Deploying blind hiring software that removes identifying information from candidate applications is one way to address this issue. It also facilitates a greater emphasis on the candidate's skills than their background, enhancing the likelihood of a fair review. 

95% of HR leaders use conversational AI for DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) efforts. Conversational AI can automatically remove names or demographic info from applications to keep the recruitment process unbiased–yet still have the information needed to keep applicants organized. This is instrumental in helping organizations maintain an impartial hiring process and obtain candidates recruited exclusively for their skills and experience. 

Support Your Recruiters with Conversational AI

The success of your company ultimately depends on the members of your organization. The recruitment and hiring process is critical to your organization's future. With this in mind, wouldn't you want your recruitment process to be as positive and efficient as possible?

Conversational AI helps HR teams optimize their recruitment process in a myriad of ways. From scaling recruiter capacity, conducting candidate follow-up, triaging applicants, and more, a conversational AI agent can help you find the right candidates and portray your company positively. By delegating tedious tasks to conversational AI agents, your recruiters can focus their attention on engaging with the candidates that have the potential to take your company to the next level. 

Now more than ever, conversational AI is needed by HR teams to find (and keep) the best possible candidates. 

If you're interested in learning more about DRUID's conversational AI solutions for HR, download our free whitepaper: The New Normal in HR Is Conversational.

Get the Guide on Conversational AI in HR

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