3 Best Practices For Conversational Recruiting

Adrian Dixon

May 24, 2018

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With the rise of chatbots, conversational recruiting has become the hottest strategy in talent acquisition.

conversational recruiting

A recent demonstration of Google’s Assistant scheduling a haircut blew people’s minds and hints at the intriguing future of what conversational recruiting could look like.

Conversational recruiting is defined as attracting, qualifying, and engaging candidates with real-time, continuous one-on-one messaging. These conversations are flexible and take place where candidates already are: on mobile, social media, and messaging apps.

Already common in sales and marketing, conversational commerce is the adoption of real-time messaging with people, brands, products, and services.

The technological advancement that enabled conversational commerce to happen was the merging artificial intelligence with everyday consumer interactions. AI allows users to interact with businesses in a cross-channel, personalized, and convenient way.

Similarly, interest in conversational recruiting is being driven by innovations in AI and chatbot technology. Here are three best practices for using conversational recruiting on your team.

Best practice #1: Respond in real time

The major benefit of adopting tech-enabled conversational recruiting is that candidates can get answers about the job and application process in real time.
Using a chatbot, information can be collected in real life and simultaneously from thousands of candidates. This information can be collected in a recruiting software like an ATS or CRM and then relayed to human recruiters to follow up.

Best practice #2: Provide additional information

The #1 request from job seekers is “more communication.”

Today’s candidates understand that the recruiting process can’t be human-to-human at every touchpoint and value the chance to receive information in whatever way they can.

If your conversational recruiting strategy doesn’t provide candidates with more information than your career page or the job posting, then candidates will fail to see its value and it’ll be a waste of your resources.

Best practice #3: Be the right level of “human”

Using a chatbot is the best way to provide conversational recruiting at scale.

But there’s still a lot of debate on how “human” a chatbot should be. Most agree that a chatbot shouldn’t be too robotic and cold because this type of “bot-speak” creates a poor candidate experience.

On the other hand, a chatbot shouldn’t be deceptive either. If a candidate asks if they’re talking to a chatbot, be truthful. An Allegis survey found nearly 2/3rds of candidates are comfortable interacting with a chatbot so using tech for conversational recruiting shouldn’t be a disadvantage.