As Hureka has successfully delivered AI-enabled recruitment bots, we have an animated discussion on the benefits and scope of these bots for a small business. In this article, we discuss the benefits and challenges of recruitment chatbots and how it can help a small business streamline its hiring process, make it more efficient and improve candidate experience.

Recruitment bots, the AI-powered chatbots, can sort, organize and analyze data to imitate a chat experience as with a human. Just like chat assistants — Siri, Alexa etc., they use natural language processing to understand messages and send responses that resemble that of a human. These conversational bots can be deployed on various platforms — social media, messaging apps, email, SMS and even on an application tracking systems (ATS).

Hiring and employee retention is a big challenge for a small businesses, and could use some reliable automation. At Hureka, Roopak and I have helped businesses streamline their application screening process through our expertise & experience with AI technologies.

Any business can use a recruitment bot to improve candidate experience. Screening the CVs for a position and responses to each candidate needs to be faster. The delay in communication from the company doesn’t offer a great experience to the candidates. Recruitment chatbots can make this process of initial screening instantaneous.

In a recent Alleges survey, about 58 percent candidates are okay, even happy, to interact with a chatbot during the initial stages of the application process. With the #1 request of job seekers being about more communication, recruitment chatbots are an excellent win-win solution for both the candidate and the company. The former stays informed while the latter doesn’t have to assign manpower for maintaining constant communication with the candidate.

Additionally, recruitment bots can perform repetitive administrative tasks. Actions like collecting candidate information, asking general screening questions, ranking candidates according to the available metrics, answering FAQs, scheduling interviews, communicating the progress in the process to the candidate, pre-screening the candidates and changing status of the candidates can be done automatically, with minimal human interference and save a ton of time for recruiters.

Taking it a step forward, through technologies like text classifications, the chatbots can screen through the CVs and remove the ones that do not meet the criteria, making the initial screening process much easier and simplified.

Another major challenge faced by recruiters is candidate engagement. Challenges in dealing with FAQs involve tremendous effort. HR staff can be free to work on other issues instead of answering the same repetitive questions while maintaining candidate engagement.

Recruitment bots can take those questions and answer them immediately. With natural language processing, the AI-bots are better than usual automated answering systems and offer higher candidate satisfaction with better overall experience, showing you care right from the beginning.

Businesses can keep the candidates in the loop throughout the hiring process, ensuring that candidates are well informed about the progress of their application. Consistent follow-up improves the chances of a talented candidate pool sticking with you rather than making you lose to the competitors.

One surprising benefit of having a recruitment bot in place is its ability to attract a talented candidate pool. The same chatbots can operate on messaging apps, engage with the candidates and get them to apply for the job openings.

Recruitment bots offer bigger advantages in managing and updating the recruitment database. Imagine all the information being automatically added to your database and the bot can automatically work and interact with candidates to fill in any missing information. Recruitment bots, powered by artificial intelligence, can easily do that.

The bots can also collect candidate feedback on their recruitment experience, initiate the on-boarding process by communicating the initial details as well as key documents to the candidate.

Recruitment bots can help with several recruitment processes — applications, screening, communication, on-boarding and feedback. The recruitment bot works best for the initial process. Human interaction closes the deal. By automating you reduce your workload while saving time & money.

Addressing the biggest concern of the small business — affordability, my team at Hureka is positive that AI technologies are more affordable than ever before and they’re definitely within the reach of a small business. Though with limited resources and tight profits, it may seem like a farsighted investment, but the money you save merely by initial deployment makes it worth giving a try.

Hureka Technologies is here to help any business considering automated assistants. Contact randy@hurekatek.com or call 215.816.8300.