I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I can’t really believe that I’m actually writing another post on recruitment process automation. 

I mean, after a full Corona year, when our work, our lives and our working lives have been instantly and inexorably transformed, after record employment numbers and years of relatively torrid job creation plummeted overnight, with job losses approaching numbers not seen since the Great Depression (uh oh), I mean…how. You gotta wonder. 

Table of Contents

• Recruitment Process Automation
• TA Teams & Automation Efficiency
• Register for the SmartRecruiters Webinar, “How Daxko and Pilot Are Using Automation to Drive Efficiency”

Recruitment Process Automation

How is RPA still, you know, actually a thing that recruiting and TA leaders still care about? With so much going on, from hiring freezes to redeployment to adapting to the brave new world and manifold challenges in maneuvering to virtual talent acquisition, recruitment process automation seems somehow to be among the least relevant things – superficially, at least – we should be talking about. 

I mean, the CHRO of a Fortune 100 company told me the other day that her biggest challenge was convincing her administrative and SG&A employees that it was safe to come back to the office (tentatively) in Q3-Q4. 

This is a very different challenge than when the automation conversation had reached the point of near ubiquity, when it was a talent driven market, and headcount growth demanded sustainable, scalable strategies to gain competitive advantage through hiring success. 

Back then, her biggest concern was, according to my notes (yeah, I’m that nerd) “making sure we can find enough qualified candidates to fill all of our open roles.” This seems like a luxury now, weirdly – from high volume hiring for highly skilled reqs to, well, being the poster child for OSHA compliance (which, come to think of it, how will workplace safety be protected without an employee breakroom to hang the mandatory DOL print outs?). 

This isn’t unique for people leaders in general, but TA leaders in particular – this industry wide move from filling jobs at scale to more practical concerns about worker (and, frankly, job) security, with no one really sure about what the future of work – and the future of hiring – really looks like. 

Sure, there are a lot of prognosticators and pundits out there, but anyone, present company included, who tells you that they know what’s next is probably either lying or selling you software. Don’t believe either of us. 

The truth of the matter is, the future of recruitment is still being written, and in the present, it’s incumbent for recruiters to ensure that they will still have a part in that future; the jury, largely, seems to be sort of out on whether or not hiring demand will return quickly enough to justify keeping talent acquisition, a textbook cost center, as a dedicated and strategic function. 

TA Teams & Automation Efficiency

Fundamentally, first, we have to answer this question: what do recruiters do when they’re not recruiting? Well, as we’ve seen over the past year, there are two eventualities: either they lose their jobs (which about 1 in 3 US recruiters has done in the past year) or they add tangible, strategic value that extends well past transactional hiring or filling reqs.

We used to worry that robots would replace recruiters, but that worry was always misplaced. Anyone whose recruiting job could be replicated by “AI” or by “conversational assistants” or even good old fashioned RPA wasn’t going to have that recruiting job for long. Automation was never the threat. As we’re quickly learning, not having enough automation is, in fact, much more of a liability for talent acquisition. 

Every recruiter, more or less, is being asked to do more with less. Almost every talent acquisition budget is being critically examined for possible cuts, and almost every employer is doing some form of human capital belt tightening. 

For those of us lucky to be left, adding value means focusing finite time and resources on activities that actually drive business or workforce impact. 

Recent surveys suggest for many enterprise recruiters, these activities primarily consist of workforce planning, worker redeployment, internal career pathing and skills mapping, HiPo identification and succession planning, driving process improvements or improving business alignment. 

None of this would be possible, of course, if they had to spend their time doing all that highly repetitive, highly manual and frankly insufferable stuff that automation essentially removed from the recruiting equation. 

Applicant volume has increased by an average of 50-100 submissions a post (depending on if it’s an exempt or non exempt role); without automation, recruiters would be spending a lot of their time trying to find a needle in a world of haystacks, and even more time screening and scheduling those candidates for introductory phone screens. 

Simply turning a pile of 10 qualified applicants into a diverse slate of 5 final candidates who are both interested and in range for the role is a full time job in and of itself. Of course, that’s assuming the job isn’t cancelled or put on indefinite hold when the offer stage is finally reached, which is a big assumption at many employers of late, if we’re being honest.

Who wants to do that? Well, you’d be really stupid to not at least consider some form of augmented intelligence; dirty work and busy work aren’t the type of work smart recruiters should be doing. 

They should be doing the work of helping their companies hire better talent on time and on budget today while building the people policies, processes and platforms that will help them scale hiring – and recruitment impact – in the future. Even if none of us really know what that looks like, we know that RPA is here to stay – and that’s a really good thing for those of us in the business of people. 

We know you don’t need to read any more business cases or hear any more hype around RPA; there are enough of those out there already.

What you probably don’t know, though, beyond all that talk about “AI” or the hype around machine learning, NLP or “conversational intelligence,” is how real recruiters at real companies are really using RPA to drive real recruiting – and business – results. 

Register for the March 25 Webinar, “How Daxko and Pilot Are Using Automation to Drive Efficiency”

That’s why I’m so excited to sit down with Beth Wolfe, Director of Recruiting at Daxko and Bridget Hering from Pilot Company (I’ll bring the flying Js, if anyone is down) to discuss “How Daxko and Pilot Are Using Automation to Drive Efficiency,” on March 25, at 2:00 p.m. EST. 

You won’t want to miss this exclusive webinar, mainly because it’s going to be a great conversation about the little things recruiters can do to make a big difference with RPA, from two leaders who have already been there, done that – and are willing to share their successes, failures, and everything else you need to know about RPA (but were afraid to ask).

Don’t worry. I won’t be. So register now, and even if you can’t make it, we’ll send you a recording and a deck straight to your inbox. OK, our CRM will. But still – this is going to be good content, and an even better conversation. I know what you’re thinking – should I waste my time? 

The answer is, unless you’ve already figured out all there is to know about RPA (and if you do, let me know), then you already are. Click here and save your seat. And see you on the 25th.

Introducing automation into workflows has gone from a ‘nice to have’ to a ‘must-have’ for most enterprises in 2020. This is especially true for recruitment teams who have seen their hiring needs grow exponentially due to the impact of COVID-19. 

HR leaders have had to fast-forward digital transformation from a two-year to two-week implementation, talent acquisitions leaders have either been in overdrive or helping out with internal communication while simultaneously watching their inbox pile up with questions from talent in the pipeline. 

This is where the need for automation has come to the forefront. But what are the biggest impacts automation can drive efficiency in recruiting? We’ll explore the 5 largest reasons, some of which are taken from the Airbus Case Study – How Airbus Improved Their Candidate Globally with Bessie the Chatbot. 

1. Manage High Volumes of Applications Seamlessly 

According to a study by PWC, nearly half (49%) of job seekers say they’ve turned down an offer because of a bad candidate experience. One of the most common negative scenarios candidates experience is sending their CV to a prospective employer only to never hear back or receive a response too late. 

From the recruiter’s side we know that this is a result of too many applicants and too little resources. Automation through conversational AI helps by sitting-in for the recruiter on basic candidate communication in the form of a chatbot interface on their careers site. The chatbot can answer frequently asked questions from candidates in high volumes easily. 

Because a chatbot can answer thousands of questions simultaneously, recruiters can spend less time on repetitive tasks.

2. Job Discovery Guides Job Seekers to the Best Suited Role 

Matching a candidate to the right job based on their CV is not best practice when it comes to automating recruitment. Think of the number of times you’ve been automatically recommended a job that isn’t relevant to your career. It is more efficient to use a chatbot to guide a job seeker to the right role with job discovery – this is when a chatbot asks the job seeker business-critical questions such as “What location would you like to work at?”, “Do you hold a driver’s license?” or “How many years experience do you have?”.

Think of customers in a new store, without assistance the likelihood of them leaving without buying is higher – the same thinking can be applied to users on your company’s career site. A chat interface is like a helpful store employee, they can offer guidance, provide more information and help your ‘customer’ make sure they’re not just buying the most suitable product but also engage with them instantly.

Recruiting automation can also exist outside your organization’s careers website. Being where your candidates are is a modern way to catch talent’s attention outside of traditional careers platforms. It’s now possible to integrate a chatbot on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, SMS and more social messaging networks worldwide. 

3. Decrease in Time-to-Hire 

Front-end automation can have a big impact on time-to-hire as it speeds up the beginning of the candidate journey. Taking your most frequently asked questions and automating them in a chat interface boosts candidate engagement and pushes the job seeker to convert from the curiosity stage to a commitment stage. They can move to a very efficient job discover process and apply quickly. This presents the employer with a smaller time-to-shortlist and speed up the process to the interview stage much quicker compared to traditional methods.

Jobpal makes your existing ROI more efficient as a result of guiding job seekers from your company careers website. This is even more effective if your employer branding or attraction manager is running recruitment campaigns, our chatbot can bring even more value by boosting conversion rates and decreasing overall time-to-hire.

4. Screening Applicants

Screening applicants automatically, efficiently and without bias, is one of the biggest success factors of using conversational AI for recruitment. However, if you allow technology to “match” jobs with candidates it is more likely to lead to inefficiencies in screening applicants. Instead, when you provide self-selection to job seekers with a feature such as job discovery it guides them to put themselves in the running for the right role.

Implementing knock-out questions into a chatbot pushes the right talent to the forefront, which is incredibly helpful for busy recruiters who have high job requisition counts and little to no time to screen candidates. As a result there’s more time to spend on the best candidates instead of spending time on repetitive tasks.

5. Immediate ROI after Implementation 

Although recruitment automation is not a plug and play solution, it can take a fraction of the time to implement in comparison to traditional HR tech solutions. The largest benefit of using a chatbot to automate recruitment is that you can expect immediate ROI. This is delivered through time saved and therefore money.

Imagine after 4 weeks of having a chatbot on your careers’ site there is so much engagement that you can remove the ‘careers@’ inbox. That’s exactly what Airbus could do when they saw an immediate high level of interaction from website users. Up to 60% of website their users engage outside working hours and their chatbot allows for their company to communicate 24/7, 365. You can check out their full recruitment automation chatbot in this ebook. 

Automation means greater productivity and economic growth but it is not clear who is going to pick up the tab for the displaced workers.

In December, General Motors (GM) announced plans to slash 15 percent of its salaried workforce and shut down five of its North American auto plants. Lordstown, Ohio was the first location to close its doors, to the protestations of laid-off workers who held signs reading “allocate us we’ve earned a new product” and “stop offshoring keep jobs here”. However, in this tragic story, it’s not the forces of globalization at work, rather these ousted employees are experiencing the first pangs of America’s digital transformation growing pains.

As GM cuts approximately 6,000 factory jobs and 4,000 white collar roles across the US and Canada, the company has also been hiring…. some 9,000 people in the last 24 months.

“We are going to continue to hire,” says GM CEO, Mary Barra.“Because when we look at the skill sets that we need for the future, the vehicle has become much more software-oriented, when you think about the hundreds of millions of lines of code that are in a vehicle that operates today, that’s only going to increase.”

What is happening at GM now, is emblematic of a greater shift globally, and belies the popular narrative that American manufacturing is disappearing. In fact, the U.S still produces 18.6 percent of all goods in the world (second only to China) and is expected to grow 3.4 percent in 2019… It’s the number and type of jobs that are pulling the vanishing act.   

This monumental shift in labor can be described as the 4th industrial revolution and relates to the implementation of smart technologies in factories, offices, and even vehicles, automating manual and administrative tasks, eliminating some jobs and drastically altering others.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) reports that by 2030, 210 million people are expected to change occupations. Furthermore, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reports that 32 percent of all jobs will see significant changes in how they are performed. For example, jobs that focus on trade skills such as auto mechanics, machinists, electricians, and plumbers won’t be replaced by robots, however, the digital know-how required to caarry out the work will significantly increase.

“So far, the debate on these transformations has been sharply polarized,” says Andy Haldane, Bank of England Chief Economist. “Between those who foresee limitless new opportunities and those that foresee a massive dislocation of jobs…In fact, the reality is likely to be highly specific to the industry, region, and occupation in question and the ability of various stakeholders to successfully manage change.”

The U.S. is expected to be hit hard with 1.4 million workers to be displaced from their current jobs in the next decade. However, the OECD asserts 95 percent of at least the 1.4 million displaced workers in the U.S can be re-trained if money is invested in opportunities such as vocational schools, subsidizing graduate schools, providing on-site job training, or massive open online courses.

That’s all well and good, but WEF estimates such measures will run upwards of $34 billion, which begs the question – who’s picking up the tab?

“In our view,”  says Saadia Zahidi, Managing Director of the WEF and Head of the Centre for the New Economy and Society. “A combination of three investment options needs to be applied: companies working with each other to lower costs; governments and taxpayers taking on the cost as an important societal investment; and governments and business working together.”

The WEF predicts employers could cover up to 14 percent of the reskilling bill and still maintain a profit, as not reskilling comes with its own set of costs including, redundancy pay, recruiting, and the detriment to staff morale due to layoffs. As for the other 85 percent, a small portion could come from private investment – think entreprenuers starting coding boot camps – however, the majority of funding will need to be supplied by government programs.

This long-term reskilling investment may be a hard sell, yet the price of doing nothing could be higher. Think of the lost tax revenue and GDP,  as well as the wider societal implications of high unemployment rates, if 1.4 million workers are out of the job.

Proposals for government intervention in reskilling take many forms, one suggestion is a Wage Insurance funded by premiums of about $25 per worker, per year. In this program, proposed, but not passed, by the Obama administration in  2016, the government would cover half the wages (for up to two years) of a person who lost their job through no fault of their own and was either unemployed or employed at a lower paying job.

“Robot Taxes” is another funding proposition. The idea is to shift the normal taxes on labor, such as payroll taxes, onto a company’s capital which in this case would be their automated processes. If a company ultimately chose a robot employee over a human one, their taxes would contribute to reskilling programs or social security nets such as Universal Basic Income (UBI).

UBI is not a new idea, Martin Luther King Jr. proposed a similar concept in his 1967 book, ‘Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?’ Writing, “I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective—the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.”

How it works is the whole population (of a given polity) receives a regular amount of money from the government, no strings attached. There have already been pilot projects in Canada, Kenya, and Switzerland, and the results are largely positive; give people free money and they pump it back into the local economy – cars get repaired, parents have a night out, and teens get part-time jobs.

One example of UBI is Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend. Over the last four decades, the area’s permanent residents received annual dividends from the state’s oil investment fund – to the tune of $1,000. At first, it was assumed that with this income boost, people would work less, but a 2018 study found that influx of cash actually increased part-time work 17 percent.

With all these options on the table, the only thing left is to act, but therein lies the problem. While the business sector is leaping into action – just yesterday, Microsoft announced partnerships with five colleges and universities to address the skills gap in fields such as  AI, data science, computer science, and cybersecurity – government lags behind, especially in the US.

Why? The Harvard Business Review (HBR) identifies three main obstacles: political gridlock, a focus on deficit reduction, and expensive, slow-moving K-12 education overhauls.

“We think that companies can and should take the lead in training workers to fill the middle-skills gap.” Writes HBR, referring to technical skills that require post-secondary training, but not a four-year degree. “Realistically, that can happen on a large enough scale only if business leaders cooperate with one another, unions, and educational institutions, both regionally and nationally. The key words are cooperate and nationally.”

With so much focus on how machines will automate recruiting, one researcher argues we cannot overlook the importance of human psychology as a crucial machine learning tool.

Given the amount of sci-fi films released in the last three decades involving robot uprisings, it’s clear that humans often cower in the face of machines’ intellectual superiority. However, the crux of many of these movies is that humans often win against Artificial Intelligence (AI) thanks to our creative problem solving and empathy. We point to this distinction to reinforce the idea that human labor is more valuable than robotic automation, particularly for tasks that require emotional intelligence.

This logic applies to make the argument why recruiters are indispensable to the hiring process. Whereas machines are capable of carrying out defined tasks, humans can differentiate nuances between candidates, allowing them to determine the best fit for any given role. Nevertheless, this hasn’t stopped the rise of AI technology within talent acquisition.

Industrial psychologist Dr. Charles Handler believes that organizations will fully automate, and enhance, the applicant selection and screening process by combining deep learning AI with the science of psychology. Dr. Handler sees greater potential for machines and humans after combining forces. “While a computer can beat any human at chess 100 percent of the time,” he says, “a computer and a human playing together can beat even the most advanced chess computer.”

Experts like Dr. Handler believe that automated predictive hiring decisions will soon be able to achieve near 100 percent accuracy. This means that an AI assistant or chatbot will choose candidates with infinitesimal margins of error.

In theory, this could replace an entire recruiting staff and automate the majority of HR functions, leading to billions, if not trillions, in bottom-line savings. AI assessment software like SmartAssistant, Zoom.ai, Textio, and Ideal are already in use at many forward-thinking companies. What’s more, high-impact teams are 6x more likely to use AI, predictive analytics, and other tech solutions to make data-driven decisions over their lower-performing counterparts. Research indicates that top performers see 18 percent higher revenue and 30 percent greater profitability compared to those that don’t use these tools.

In some ways, current AI technology is reminiscent of the droids in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. Much like the simple robots themselves, basic AI can complete programmatic tasks like keyword or image recognition, but fall short when facing certain, more complex operations. The droids have no problem volleying lasers in gigantic battles, but once an enemy gets up close, these droids struggle to hit the broadside of a barn.

Currently, recruiting AI can scan a resume to identify patterns and compare against pre-programmed “high-performing employee” profiles. The model then predicts if the candidate will be successful based on the amount of matching criteria. Today’s AI models are still leagues away from watching and evaluating candidates through video interviews or more traditional face-to-face interactions.

Dr. Handler believes that these shortcomings could be solved if engineers were able to develop deep learning AI with an advanced understanding of human psychology. He argues that machines currently follow guidelines much more efficiently than humans, but cannot make value judgements about their decisions. By somehow “teaching” machines elements of human psychology (i.e. empathy) and assigning meaning to their behaviors, automated processes like candidate selection would look, and feel, more human.

“For hire-bots to be able to do their job as well, or better, than humans, they are going to have to understand individual differences the same way that humans do,” says Dr. Handler. “In other words, to be truly game-changing, hiring assessment AIs are going to have to think like psychologists.”

In this sense, “thinking like a psychologist” means the bots must base their analysis on psychometrics, clinical measurements of knowledge, abilities, attitudes, and personality traits that determine an individual’s true self. Hypothetically, by combining this measurement criteria with programmed professional judgment, an AI model could spot individual differences between candidate profiles without ever looking at resumes and decide which candidate would be the best match for an open position.

Counter to these utopian ideas are ethical arguments criticizing recruitment AI tech. One argument warns how genetic data could factor into hiring decisions, introducing a previously unfathomable bias. Another fear from critics is the idea of AI “cyber-snooping” on social media to create potential candidate profiles for a position. Despite these concerns, Dr. Handler appears confident in the future of recruitment AI.

“There is a lot to be gained by using AI to help psychologists to better understand individual differences,” he argues. “So, when creating the hire bots of tomorrow, don’t forget to include good old-fashioned psychology into the mix.”

Hiring is all about predicting the future—is your applicant tracking system doing the same? Here’s a look at five features that aren’t just trends, but must haves for the new year.

Better Buys previously identified the top trends for the ATS solutions market as social media integration, greater emphasis on interviewing and assessment tools (i.e. video interviewing), and predictive analytics. In the two years since that report, recruiters and hiring managers have encountered challenges with reactive hiring, thinning talent pipelines, and a greater need for automated processes—all while fighting to secure great talent.

Looking ahead at 2019, these new demands are driving the future direction of applicant tracking systems across the industry. As companies continue to build out their ATS platforms to be more feature-rich and provide better solutions, here are some of the trends we can look forward to in the coming year.

1. Candidate Relationship Management

With job openings at a record high and unemployment at record low numbers, the competition for great talent is even more fierce. Companies are struggling to hire quality applicants, and many qualified potential candidates are not actively seeking work. Finding the right person for a role will require more robust sourcing tools, and Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) solutions will provide recruiters with stronger talent pools ahead of demand. CRM solutions will ultimately change the recruiting function from reactive to proactive, enhancing talent pipelines before companies post their open jobs.

2. AI

“Gut feeling” prediction of whether a candidate is a good fit for a role isn’t going to cut it in 2019. For example, candidates with impressive diplomas or certifications do not necessarily make great employees, and assessment tools struggle to test for traits like work ethic, a positive attitude, dependability, and working well under pressure.

Recruiters need to know which candidate is most likely to accept a job offer and stay with the team long enough to make an impact. Native AI solutions like SmartAssistant will offer recruiters measurable insights into a candidate’s skills, cultural fit, the likelihood of accepting an offer, and probable retention with greater efficiency, and less bias. AI will also help recruiters make better decisions with candidates who are moving between fields with comparable skills and promote more internal mobility within their organization.

3. Automation

Recruiters are constantly being pressured to fill more roles with the best talent at a faster, more cost-efficient rate, and this means that automation will continue to be a top priority among the best Applicant Tracking Systems. Automation will help optimize repetitive tasks like interview scheduling and applicant pre-screening, but ATS automation in 2019 will include targeted email campaigns and recruitment marketing platforms, allowing recruiters to deliver specific messaging to nurtured talent communities.

According to Rebecca Carr, VP of Product at SmartRecruiters, automating these processes will make “it faster and easier for businesses to build and convert their talent pipeline within one system.” Ultimately, automation and native AI solutions will work together to “challenge the old way of “tracking” candidates through a workflow.”

4. Collaboration and Communication

The future of recruiting is all about “the team” effort, where recruiters, interviewers, and hiring managers work in tandem to source, attract, and hire the best talent for their organization. But there’s often a disconnect. If not everyone involved in the hiring process is using the ATS, then time is wasted relaying information and collecting feedback. An ATS should be intuitive and allow for greater communication between all team members, which directly affects an organization’s time to hire and overall candidate experience.

Features like different access levels within an ATS to ensure each person sees the right amount of information and more comprehensive dashboards that give candidates an overview of where they are in the hiring process will be highly valuable in the coming year.

5. Integration

Enterprises are no longer the sole entities in need of end-to-end recruiting solutions. Startups are just as eager to hire great talent for their teams, and are often much faster adopters of new technology. For these organizations, an ATS that offers open APIs and a large marketplace of third-party vendor integrations is highly attractive.

Martin Snyder, President of Main Sequence Technology Inc., argues that, “key drivers of market share changes for 2019 are not likely to be technically revolutionary, but rather more operational efficiency.” Meaning, an ATS that offers features like streamlined integration with email, calendar, and Slack—systems that teams are already using—along with “easier solutions to teach and learn, easier ways to get data in and out, and lower pricing” will become the top choices for enterprises and startups in 2019.

Technophobic no longer, recruiters are embracing the potential of AI to positively impact their workflow.

Fairly or not, the recruiting industry is often branded as tech-averse. However, recent survey findings concerning the future of technology in HR are helping shed this negative stereotype, ushering in an era where TA becomes the poster child for early adoption.

According to Korn Ferry’s latest survey, 63 percent of TA professionals report AI having changed the way their organizations recruit. Not only that, but 87 percent say they’re excited about increasing their AI interaction in the future.

While these integrations are exciting sometimes it’s difficult to get past buzzwords to decipher the real concepts behind them.To gain a better understanding of the possibilities of tech when it comes to recruiting, we did the unpacking for you. Here are four main types of AI and automation technologies and how they’re being implemented in recruiting.

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the ability of a machine or computer program to simulate human capacities such as learning, problem-solving, planning, and perception.

AI for recruiting is the application of artificial intelligence in recruitment designed to automate or streamline some part of the workflow, especially repetitive, high-volume tasks.

Let’s get specific.

In recruiting, there are three subdomains of AI techniques being applied:

• Machine learning is a type of algorithm that has the ability to teach itself by analyzing data and automatically improving its solutions through experience. Machine learning is being used to automate sourcing and resume screening as well as analyze candidate fit during digitized interviews.

An example of an innovative organization using AI for their screening is Indigo, a leading retailer that receives more than 2200 applications every week. Using AI to automate manual resume screening, Indigo has been able to reduce their cost per hire by 71 percent, triple their qualified candidates, and improve recruiter efficiency by 3.7x.

• Natural language processing is the ability of a computer program to understand spoken or written human language. One major way natural language processing is being used in recruitment is through chatbots that provide answers to FAQs and feedback to candidates in real time.
  
• Sentiment analysis is the ability of a computer program to determine the subjective opinion, emotional state, or intended emotional effect of spoken or written word. Sentiment analysis is being used to improve job descriptions by suggesting alternative adjectives, for example.

Recruitment chatbot

A chatbot is defined as ‘a computer program designed to stimulate conversation with human users.’

Randstad found that 82 percent of job seekers believe the ideal recruiting interaction is a mix between innovative technology and personal, human connection. According to Allegis, with 66 percent of candidates comfortable interacting with a chatbot, the market seems ready for mainstream adoption.

In recruiting, chatbots are being used to ask candidates qualifying questions, answer FAQs, and even schedule an interview with a human recruiter. A major advantage of using a chatbot in recruiting is its ability to answer thousands of candidates’ questions simultaneously in real time. Information collected by the chatbot is then fed into an ATS or sent directly to a human recruiter for follow up.

Robotic Process Automation

Hand in hand with AI is automation, or more specifically, robotic process automation (RPA).

The Institute of Robotic Process Automation defines robotic process automation as the application of technology that allows employees to use computer software or a machine to capture and interpret existing applications for processing transactions, analyzing data, triggering automatic responses, and communicating with other systems.

RPA is being applied in recruiting in two main ways:

• Candidate outreach such as automated emails or texts to maintain speedy and consistent contact. This outreach can be scheduled as a DRIP campaign for passive candidates, for example.
  
• Interview scheduling is being automated by software that offer time slots when a recruiter is free that candidates can then select without a back-and-forth email, text, or telephone exchange.

Blockchain technology

While blockchain is still in the beta stages, it’s gaining more and more attention this year.

A blockchain is a system of record keeping using an open, distributed digital ledger that records transactions between two parties. Each transaction in the ledger is verified and then recorded permanently across a peer-to-peer network of users. One advantage of blockchain technology is its speed of use — everyone has access to the most up-to-date information regardless of how many people are using it.

For recruiting, the main application of blockchain technology so far is candidate background checks; for example, on their educational or work history. For blockchain technology to work as a tamper-proof record of candidate history, it’s crucial that a credible and reliable source verifies the data in each block. For educational institutions, this is pretty straightforward, but it becomes more ambiguous when it comes to work history.

Even with all this technology making the recruiting process smarter, it remains to be seen how these elements will ultimately affect the business of managing human capital.

Ji-A Min is the Head Data Scientist at Ideal, AI recruiting software that automates time-consuming tasks such as sourcing, screening, and messaging. She has a Master’s in Industrial­-Organizational Psychology and her interests include data-based recruitment, HR tech, and diversity. Find out more about Ideal in the SmartRecruiters marketplace here.

Fed up with human inefficiencies, this former recruiter used her math skills to automate a very human process, and save a ton of time in doing so.

Aida Fazylova used her background in mathematics and data science to sketch out a new approach to automate as much of the recruiting workflow as possible using artificial intelligence, automation and chatbot technology. The result, XOR.ai, is a customizable AI chatbot and workflow automation to engage, screen and hire candidates 33 percent faster than the normal hiring process, providing extended analytics about the candidates, including predicted employee lifetime value. With XOR, the recruitment process is completely automated, from the moment the candidate engages, right up to making a job offer.

Now, headquartered in Austin, Texas, with major customers in 15 countries around the world, XOR is the emerging leader in Human Resource/ Talent Acquisition process automation, and we sat down with Founder and CEO Aida Fayzlova (picture below explaining her amazing product at Hiring Success 18 Europe), to hear why this is so important.

Why is your product a necessary tool for any SmartRecruiters customer?

Our product combines the latest in Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, automation, and chatbot capabilities, eliminating the most time-intensive parts of the recruitment process. It’s available on your website 24/7, and can communicate in over 100 languages. XOR moves candidates through the funnel even while you sleep. Our AI will learn from your recruiters, hiring managers and candidates who come to your site, answering questions and gathering information, all to offer predictive analytics regarding future candidates and employees.

Briefly, on the back of a cocktail napkin, how does your product work?

Your candidate experience journey is elevated. XOR is with your candidates every step of the way, communicating conversations and data back to your hiring team in the ATS.

What does your product do that can’t be replicated?

Currently, XOR supports 103 languages and has global hiring capabilities. Our product is also known for its sophisticated scheduling functions.

How does your product help make the hiring process as easy as possible?

XOR automates 60 percent of repetitive administrative tasks that your recruiters are handling every day, which allows more free time for your team to focus on more imperative, strategic tasks.  

At what stage of growth are you, and where is that relative to how big you want to be?

We’re at a healthy stage of growth with a great headquarters in Austin, and major customers in over 15 countries around the world.

How does your product compliment the SmartRecruiters TAS – philosophically and technologically?

XOR is considered a one-stop solution for candidate experience. Providing self-scheduled meetings with recruiters, it’s available 24/7 to answer questions for candidates and walks applicants step-by-step through the entire application process. XOR will keep your candidates continuously engaged and send status updates until the position has been filled. Our software works the front end of the ATS for your candidates, automating a great deal of work for your recruiters and is proven to recruit 33 percent faster.

What led you to partner with SmartRecruiters?

SmartRecruiters has the same sweet spot we do. Most SmartRecruiters clients are enterprise customers and high-volume recruiters, which is really interesting for us. The simplicity and the beauty of the ATS is elegant and modern. Designing products and platforms in that same vein is why we chose to partner with SmartRecruiters.

How long did it take to become integrated into the SR marketplace, and what were the obstacles or adjustments in that process?

Our integration into the marketplace only took about a week, with one person, which was a pretty quick turnaround. We avoided any obstacles through preparation and research. There are some obstacles in getting the API to speak to each other but once we integrated it’s been working great.

How long would it take for the average SR user to implement and take full advantage of your product?

Set up will take about 3-6 weeks, most of this time will be spent with XOR’s customer success team, working closely with TA pros, learning the knowledge piece of the chatbot, going over screening scenarios and linking calendars to chatbots to self-schedule candidates. Our team wants to ensure your chatbot is customized to your recruiters’ needs and goals to be as successful as possible in their recruiting efforts.

What would you say to a company unsure about joining the SR marketplace?

SmartRecruiters marketplace is one of the best on the market. It’s full of incredible partners which gives you a great reach to SmartRecruiters customer base and vice versa. Great events like Hiring Success are organized to focus on bringing as much business to their partners as possible, and during those events, you are able to start building relationships with businesses and close a lot of deals.

What do you see as the future of Talent Acquisition and where do you fit into it?

We see it as a rise in conversational interface. Right now, most web interactions are form based. Forms are great, but there are better, more customer-friendly interfaces. Your friends meet you and they want to have a conversation, not fill forms, right? The same thing happens online. Users want to engage, ask questions, and have a personalized experience, not be stuck with one-size-fits-all forms.

Your competitors are looking to make the same great hires you are, so how do you make sure you have the upper hand in snagging candidates? The answer, increasingly, is Artificial Intelligence.

“Recruiting has really been transformed these past years,” said Hessam Lavi, Director of Product at SmartRecruiters. “We’ve seen a shift from HR and recruiting coming from an admin function, or merely a cost center, to much more of a strategic function. It’s become mission-critical, but, at the same time, increasingly expensive.”

Speaking in a webinar detailing how SmartRecruiters’ SmartAssistant, the industry’s first native AI-powered recruiting tool, Mr. Lavi stressed five ways he sees AI technology providing the backbone for recruiting in the future.

Task Automation: AI will take over high-touch activities like scheduling interviews and screening resumes, allowing recruiters to focus on high-value, strategic activities.

Automated Sourcing: AI will source new candidates online and re-discover talent in organizations’ own talent pools, helping recruiters leverage their own networks more efficiently.

Smart Advertising: Job advertising is a highly manual, unscalable process. AI enables advertisers to automate job advertising, making it performance-based and targeted. Through technology, your jobs will be advertised on the right job boards to the right candidates – at the right price.

Improving Diversity: Diverse teams perform better, no doubt about it. AI helps identify potentially biased language that would dissuade women or people from minorities to apply. Automated screening and scoring evaluates candidates only based on their skills, eliminating implicit bias from the hiring process.

Candidate Relationship Management: Candidates behave much more like consumers now – they value convenience. By outsourcing 1:many conversations to AI (through chatbots, for example), recruiters can focus on 1:1 conversations and drive better talent engagement and hiring success.

For this all to work seamlessly, cobbling a batch of BoBs onto a legacy ATS just won’t do. Real performance needs native level integration, and SmartAssistant is setting the standard for everything that will follow.

Click here for the full lowdown on what SmartAssistant can do for you.

In a world where 47 percent of jobs are susceptible to automation, growing your skill set as job security is no longer enough. So how do you stay ahead of the machines?

“Your future job probably hasn’t been invented yet.” Who among us didn’t hear a version of this forecast as a bright-eyed schoolkid?

And while the prognostication ended up true for many, it wasn’t the full story. There are plenty of unchanged job titles, but the skills required would have been beyond the imagination of that childhood you. And this is where recruiting stands today, the job that once required people skills and a penchant for organization now asks it’s practitioners to be financial, data, inclusion, legal, and IT experts – all while the revolution of HR Technology creates expectations of hyper efficiency, leaving no space for practitioners to set aside time for development in their day-to-day.

It’s a recipe for burnout. Businesses need to start thinking like Apple and Google and reposition themselves as “learning organizations”. That means being a company in a state of constant transformation. They must provide employees the training they need to be the best person for their job two, five or ten years down the line.

What we know about adult learning, from research pioneered by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics in the 1980s and carried on to the present day by the Center for Creative Leadership,  is that it usually happens socially, informally, and on-the-go. Seventy percent of what we learn about our job is from, well, doing our job, 20 percent is from our networks, and 10 percent is through formal presentations.

It’s in that last 30 percent where things get interesting, when people come out of their silos to discover the best practice of tomorrow, engage and expand their networks, and gain automation-proof skills to keep them relevant. That’s why, even in the digital age, it’s imperative to attend conferences, learn, and share ideas with the experts who put the newest learning into context.

That’s why SmartRecruiters has seized opportunities to dissect and discuss our industry with practitioners on the ground, and this summer, we take our Hiring Success Conference series global.

On September 19-20, we land in the heart of Europe for two days of seminars, product demos, and networking with 250 top talent acquisition executives, thought leaders, founders, investors, and the hottest recruiting startups.

Watch a live chatbot showdown in “Battle of the Bots,” where the audience asks these virtual helpers on-the-spot questions to test their functionality. Learn to inspire a remote workforce and leverage flexible employment options to increase diversity and productivity. Join the movement for gender parity by learning to recognize and mobilize talent without bias.

Join us this summer as we explore the latest in innovation, inclusion, and hiring success.

Check out our agenda here!

Declared obsolete once Zuckerberg’s attempt went kaput in January, at least in the recruiting space, chatbots are not only holding on, but thriving.

They called it M. It was Facebook’s virtual assistant. Offered through Messenger to a select group of Californians in August 2015. It was supposed to trigger actions based on keywords in chat windows. Users could make dinner reservations, or book a vacation, and if the query became too complicated, an on-call human would quietly take over. The idea was to help the AI learn, and eventually release the feature to all Facebook users, but money-sucking M never made it past beta testing. It was put to sleep in January this year, only ever having reached 10,000 users. But does M’s failure to launch speak to the extinction chatbots as a whole, as no less an authority as WIRED proclaimed recently?

If we take anything from the HR technology conference Unleash’s Startup Competition, held March 21 in London, it’s that chatbots are alive and kicking. At least in the recruiting world. Despite the array of flashy AIs, ARs, and VRs that made up the contestant pool of 30 startups, vying for the grand prize of 30,000 GBP last week, it was two good old-fashioned chatbot platforms, Jobpal and RoboRecruiter, who scored the highest with the Unleash judges.

WIRED’s eulogy for chatbots is predicated on the idea that voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa are more effective and less costly. M always needed expensive human labor because people could and were encouraged to ask it anything, whereas Alexa’s purview is much narrower, with most user requests being simple commands like “Alexa, turn off the lights.”

The problem of scope is not so relevant to recruiting chatbots, however, since tasks are easily defined as interactive faq’s, re-engagement of former candidates, and scheduling interviews. Even if only those three tasks were automated, the time saved is significant, up to 40 percent, as estimated by CEO of ideal.com Somen Mondal.

“Imagine,” writes Mondal, “if all [those admin tasks] was automated out. That’s two out of every fiver hours back to the human recruiter.”

To get more insight into why Talent Acquisition hearts chatbots, we caught up with London Unleash Startup Competition judge, Carl-Christoph Fellinger – TA expert and on-the-ground recruiter with over a decade of practical experience – to pick his brain about why, despite being given last rites, two of the six finalists were chatbots. (And three of the remaining four had chatbot capabilities.)

“I judge the startups on whether they address a real need,” explained Fellinger. “I want to know they understand the root cause of the problem they propose to fix, and if their solution is actually applicable.”

The need for automation in recruiting is clear, and an Allegis survey found in 2016 that 66 percent of job candidates are comfortable using a chatbot for the first steps of their application process.

“Communication with candidates causes a significant amount of work for companies,” Fellinger observes, “but it’s also important to businesses that applicants have a good experience, so chatbots are a good solution.”

Anecdotally, it seems that people applying for jobs are more comfortable with chatbots when asking initial questions, especially about salary. Anna Ott, head of Unleash Startup ecosystem and the director of London Unleash’s startup competition, found that in her year-long experiment with a chatbot called hubbot (built by Jobpal), the most common question was some version of ‘Where do I get the most money?’

“ [With Chatbots] the power of information extraction is entirely in the hands of our candidates,” says Ott, “whereas in a traditional recruitment process, I as a company would have been in charge of what information I provide to a candidate.”

But if chatbots are so great, save recruiters time, and are loved by candidates, what are they doing in startup competition? It would seem the technology is already perfected. But not quite: 70 percent of chatbots fail, Facebook found in February 2017. Why? Usually for one of three reasons: their purpose isn’t clearly defined, the goals are too ambitious, or it’s launched prematurely.

We are still a ways away from the ‘Google’ of chatbots, but recruiting wants to be the industry to find it.

Fellinger points out the obvious: “Chatbots satisfy the need for dialogue with candidates and save the company money.”

And the latter, more than any buzzword, is the most exciting thing for most businesses.