Catherine Munnelly | SmartRecruiters Blog https://www.smartrecruiters.com/blog You Are Who You Hire Tue, 02 Feb 2021 00:01:18 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://www.smartrecruiters.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/cropped-SR-Favicon-Giant-32x32.png Catherine Munnelly | SmartRecruiters Blog https://www.smartrecruiters.com/blog 32 32 5 Reasons Why Candidates Prefer Messaging Over Calling https://www.smartrecruiters.com/blog/why-candidates-prefer-messaging/ Tue, 02 Feb 2021 00:00:38 +0000 https://www.smartrecruiters.com/blog/?p=40765

Great communication between candidates and recruiters has become not only an essential part of a great candidate experience, but a 21st century necessity. With the evolution of mobile technology and messaging apps, today’s workforce has grown to expect instant and easy information exchange. That’s why so many companies have implemented chatbots on their career site […]

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Great communication between candidates and recruiters has become not only an essential part of a great candidate experience, but a 21st century necessity. With the evolution of mobile technology and messaging apps, today’s workforce has grown to expect instant and easy information exchange. That’s why so many companies have implemented chatbots on their career site or even within other messaging apps like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger.

Messaging apps have over 4 billion active users a month, and texts have an open rate of 90% percent and are often read in the first 3 minutes.  If you’re not already convinced to incorporate messaging as a part of your recruiting strategy then allow me to show you why it’s become so popular with the people. 

Control 

We’ve all had that feeling of annoyance as someone tries to call us first rather than email or text (which may lead to a call, but only  if it is necessary). This gut feeling has been changing the way we communicate steadily as technology has advanced.

So, what is the cause for this steady abhorrence to telephone conversations in preference to text or instant messaging? The main consensus over numerous studies is that people find phone calls obtrusive and less personal, in that as the caller you are valuing your time over the recipient’s. 

Texting gives candidates more  control over their response and schedule . These touch points of  consideration and respect is especially important in the recruitment process which is often stressful and opaque to the candidates. 

Value 

Messaging candidates, rather than calling, show candidates you value their time. Candidates may have varied and busy lives which makes messaging the preferred option during the recruiting process. Remember, the courtesy you show applicants during the initial stages will improve their overall candidate experience. 

At some point, a phone call may be necessary as part of the interview process or to arrange more finite details; however, taking time to message all initial communications and setting up a time when the candidate feels they are ready for a call will really provide them with a positive experience. Therefore, when initially contacting candidates, doing so via instant messaging or emails will make them feel more valued and increase positivity felt for your company.

Personal 

Studies show that  75% of Millennials prefer receiving messages over calls as they feel it’s more personal. As stated before – messaging increases feelings of value and control, this will, in turn, increase the feeling that this choice is personalized towards the candidate to take into account their schedules, preferences and allow them choices with their application. 

This personal element is critical when recruiting, as many candidates feel that the recruiting experience is too impersonal —aimed at the masses rather than the individual. Moving from telephone calls to messaging could be a very simple way to better the candidate experience and make the entire process feel more tailored to the individual candidate. 

Messaging can improve your candidate experience and boost the number of qualified leads, the only problem? Messaging is more time consuming for recruiters. The solution? investing in messaging software, such as SmartPal, could provide the type of messaging millennial candidates want and result in better hires. 

Transparency 

Communication and candidate experience are practically synonymous: poor communication equals poor candidate experience.  Many candidate applications go unanswered or even acknowledge. It’s a sad fact that’s hard to address.

Recruiters definitely want to reply to every candidate who takes the time to apply, but the harsh reality is that it’s not always possible. This is where automation can help: a lack of time shouldn’t be an excuse for poor candidate experience… you just need the right tools.

Incorporating messaging allows recruiters to automate important steps into the application process, leaving time for important communications that boost the candidate experience.  Here are some of the key admin tasks that can be given to a chatbot:

  • Guiding candidates to their ideal open roles in a personalized job search. 
  • Provide a short and sweet application process. 
  • Allow candidates to schedule and reschedule their own interviews.
  • Send candidates interview-reminders. 
  • Let candidates know the status of their application. 
  • Start the onboarding process. 

Overall, providing a huge opportunity for companies to provide transparency to candidates.

Speed

Messaging is an instant way to connect and engage with your candidates in real-time. When you combine instant messaging with automation in a chatbot frame, you’ll find candidates will be able to engage with candidates 24×7.

So where do you start?

Research and reflection is a great way to begin, we suggest answering these questions as a start:

  • Who would use the chatbot? (Look at your candidate personas)
  • Which messaging apps are your candidates using? 

Then be sure to check out some chatbots in actions such as SmartPal to get a full idea of what this technology can do.

If you’re able to answer these questions you’re off to a great start in creating your business case to help convince budget-holders. Next, it’s a good idea to gather stories from companies who have seen hiring success using recruiting chatbots. If you’re a customer of SmartRecruiters you can ask your contact or check out this blog over on Hiring Success

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5 Reasons Why Automation is Driving Efficiency in Recruiting https://www.smartrecruiters.com/blog/automation-driving-efficiency-in-recruiting/ Fri, 04 Dec 2020 00:52:49 +0000 https://www.smartrecruiters.com/blog/?p=40639

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 […]

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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. 

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What Do Job Seekers Ask About During a Pandemic? https://www.smartrecruiters.com/blog/job-seekers-during-a-pandemic/ Thu, 03 Dec 2020 23:50:13 +0000 https://www.smartrecruiters.com/blog/?p=40634

When talent acquisitions leaders were strategizing for 2020 they could not have anticipated the rapid changes that would occur in the candidate market. On March 11th 2020, the World Health Organization officially proclaimed COVID-19 a worldwide pandemic and the industry saw a sudden shift in the job market. The demand for workers in healthcare, consumer […]

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When talent acquisitions leaders were strategizing for 2020 they could not have anticipated the rapid changes that would occur in the candidate market. On March 11th 2020, the World Health Organization officially proclaimed COVID-19 a worldwide pandemic and the industry saw a sudden shift in the job market.

The demand for workers in healthcare, consumer goods and logistics jumped across Europe and the USA. This was inflated by the knock-on effects of a boost in online shopping, buying in bulk and increasing cases of COVID-19. For the talent acquisition lead it meant everything planned, along with the go-to playbook, was thrown out the window. Communication with job seekers and candidates was now more important than ever. 

In preparation for the influx of corona queries, enterprises such as Airbus, McDonald’s, Deutsche Telekom and other clients utilised their recruitment chatbot to automate communication with job seekers and candidates by creating coronavirus categories. 

Job Seeker Study Results

6 weeks after the announcement, jobpal’s data analysts gathered all 600 COVID-19 related questions that job seekers were asking in order to gain a better understanding of their behavior. These are the results:

job seekers COVID-19 queries
  • 47% of chatbot end users wanted to know about the company’s reaction to COVID-19. With queries such as “What are you doing to protect your employees from COVID-19?” and “How are you dealing with the Corona crisis?” 
  • 23% of chatbot end-users had hiring-related queries such as “What is going to happen with my application due to corona?” and “Can I apply despite Corona?”
  • 11% of chatbot end-users asked interview related questions such as “Will my interview be impacted by coronavirus?” and “Do all applicants get a new appointment for tests and video interviews?”. 
  • 10% of chatbot end-users asked a range of other questions that surrounded the business rather than around hiring such as “How do I get food from you despite COVID-19?” and “When do you close because of coronavirus?”. 
  • 7% of chatbot end-users wanted to know more information about the COVID-19 virus itself and had queries such as “I am worried about COVID-19 what should I do?” and “Give me information on corona”
  • 2% of chatbot end-users asked about what will happen after the COVID-19 crisis – “Will you hire after the coronavirus?”.

Learnings from the Job Seeker Study

What’s an interesting takeaway is the volume of queries in certain areas. For example, company reaction is almost half of the total queries registered. This shows that job seekers across the board are most likely to ask questions about the company’s response to the pandemic. It’s clear that to see the need to communicate the business’ stance on COVID-19 is a must. 

Hiring related queries take up 23% of the dataset – an interesting result which can tell us a lot about the candidate market. It could be that the volume of the queries relates to the concerns at the forefront of the job seekers mind. Stability and security could see less movement in job roles as talks of economic downturn continue. 

“Can I do a video interview instead of a normal interview?” – video interview questions populate a large portion of the 11% interview related questions. It’s no secret that interviews made the move to virtual platforms over March, and it could be seen as the new normal for candidates and recruiters. Another hypothesis around this category is that the majority of those asking questions are candidates who are already in the pipeline.  

The “Other” category consists of queries that relate to business operations. This could suggest that even if a job seeker is inquiring about a position they can also ask about the business from a consumer perspective. In a similar light, 7% of queries regarding the Coronavirus can also be perceived from a consumer standpoint. Post-COVID 19 makes up the smallest portion of the queries, which can tell us that during that period very few job seekers could see past the pandemic. 

Conversational AI technology equips talent acquisition teams with the ability to communicate effectively in their employer brands’ tonality 24/7. Consequently, automating this part of the hiring process provides the TA team’s time-back to focus on more urgent tasks, retrieve data insights from their candidates and increase engagement. Automation’s ability to drive efficiency in recruitment and time-saving capabilities is one of the reasons why the demand for AI in recruitment has shot up to 36% in 2020, compared to 7% in 2019.  

Enterprises such as Airbus and Deutsche Telekom have proved successful with automation in their hiring process with a positive impact on efficiency, candidate engagement and experience.

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How Does a Contextual Candidate Experience Impact Hiring? https://www.smartrecruiters.com/blog/contextual-candidate-experience/ Thu, 03 Dec 2020 23:36:20 +0000 https://www.smartrecruiters.com/blog/?p=40628

“Give the candidates the information that they want, in the right format at the right time. Make them curious so they want to know more, so they always have a good feeling and know why you’re the right employer — or not.” It’s as simple as that says Florian Schrodt, Employer Branding Leader, at Verkehrsbetriebe […]

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“Give the candidates the information that they want, in the right format at the right time. Make them curious so they want to know more, so they always have a good feeling and know why you’re the right employer — or not.”

It’s as simple as that says Florian Schrodt, Employer Branding Leader, at Verkehrsbetriebe Zürich (VBZ). With over 1 million passengers a day, VBZ keeps the citizens of Zurich on the move with their tram and bus services.

However, the VBZ recruitment team found that bus and tram “pilots” as they call them, are difficult to recruit. With 1500 applications usually resulting in just 70 new hires. Not to forget that they also need to hire engineers and digital talent to keep the company evolving.

“We are not just a transportation company. We are engineers, architects, developers and so much more. So we try to show a multifaceted big picture of our world of work – in combination with our living world. The key is the context, why we are concentrating on giving information that is full of facts and emotions as well. Storytelling is the key. In our job postings, but also on our website in general, that is a storytelling hub and centerpiece of our activities.”

When Florian Schrodt was given the goal of improving hiring, he set his focus on applying a Contextual Candidates Experience to the VBZ candidate journey. He set out a plan and evaluated what needed to be done to generate better hiring results. Barriers in his way consisted of a strict application process, due to the cognitive and behavioural aspects of tram and bus pilot required for those positions. In addition to a strict time frame to attract and hire new recruits.  

“Our application process is still a bottleneck where we try to improve our conversion. Because of our complex job landscape we still have a lot of media breaks. “

Looking at the entire candidate journey Florian made a list of which candidate touchpoints needed optimization. Looking at the definition of a contextual candidate experience, he knew more transparency was required on the role expectations and an instant communication experience. VBZ’s careers website was completely redesigned and streamlined, his team began publishing videos that showed the day-to-day life of VBZ employees, they even held career fairs on the VBZ trams.

Now that candidates were getting a better understanding of what was expected from the job, they still couldn’t always get an instant answer. At this point Florian set out looking for communication solutions, the idea of using a chatbot came up. 

To be honest, I had not been a big chatbot fan before because I hadn’t seen one that worked before or I was satisfied with. When the idea of implementing a chatbot at VBZ kept coming up, that’s when I turned to jobpal, who I saw doing exciting things with Deutsche Telekom. 

Taking a critical look at how a chatbot fell into Florian’s contextual candidate experience philosophy, he began to see how the technology could work. Implementing a chatbot meant that candidates could get instant access to educational information whenever they wanted. 

A chatbot also provided an additional communication channel to engage with customers and tap into a new potential employee base. All while offloading the task of answering repetitive questions from candidates and giving more time back to recruiters. 

As conversational AI and machine learning is still a new technology, jobpal held a workshop with Florian, the recruitment and marketing teams at VBZ HQ. For two days, they looked at the entire candidate journey and put together a roadmap. The goal was to ensure the chatbot would not just improve the candidate experience, but also impact hiring results. Once the roadmap was laid out, jobpal started implementing the chatbot onto the VBZ careers website

How Does A Contextual Candidate Experience Impact Hiring?

Now that their candidate journey had undergone a massive transformation, what results were they seeing? Interestingly, the team saw fewer applications but more quality hires. This shows the importance of quality over quantity when it comes to recruiting for VBZ. By providing role transparency and an instant communication channel with a chatbot, candidates can decide whether or not an open position is for them within minutes instead of further along the pipeline. 

Additionally, Florian was able to tap into a whole new set of talent insights thanks to the chatbot on their careers website. Thanks to the FAQ automation feature, this is when the chatbot asks and answers questions from candidates, he could get an authentic insight into what candidates cared about, what their desires were and who they were.

It’s amazing how good you get to know the target groups because of their input and the possibilities to improve the answers in real-time. Especially through the Corona crisis it was a great plus. That’s contextual candidate experience at its best.

Overall, contextual candidate experience can have a huge impact on who you hire, how you hire and the quality of hires. Another point that Florian’s story validates is how a contextual candidate experience strategy that includes a chatbot can improve your talent communication strategy. 

Florian is continuing to bring new ideas into VBZ’s candidate journey, which includes expanding the responsibilities of the chatbot that will save even more time for the recruiters and implement new features that will help candidates apply faster.

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7 Questions to Challenge Your Candidate Journey https://www.smartrecruiters.com/blog/candidate-journey-questions/ Thu, 03 Dec 2020 23:21:08 +0000 https://www.smartrecruiters.com/blog/?p=40620

When was the last time you put yourself in the shoes of a candidate looking for a job on your careers site?  Losing sight of the candidate’s perspective can often be the case for recruitment teams who are understandably busy. But when you start to take a look at your candidate journey through the eyes […]

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When was the last time you put yourself in the shoes of a candidate looking for a job on your careers site? 

Losing sight of the candidate’s perspective can often be the case for recruitment teams who are understandably busy. But when you start to take a look at your candidate journey through the eyes of a job seeker, you’ll be amazed at the number of opportunities there are to improve your overall candidate experience. 

This is why it’s so important to get an external view on your candidate journey review. In the meantime, you can take a look at these 7 questions to challenge your candidate journey review. 

1. How easy is it for talent to discover open roles at your company

When candidates are searching for a job the experience on a careers website should feel personal, intuitive and easy. The more steps between the candidate entering your careers website and getting to the open role they want to apply for the less likely they are to fully commit to applying. 

The content of a job description can be a deal-breaker for a potential candidate so it’s important that the job title and the job description match, that the role information is transparent and the expectations are correct.

2. Where are you missing out on attracting talent?

7 Questions To Challenge Your Candidate Journey

List the different channels you use in your talent attraction strategy. You probably have a careers website and company profiles on popular job boards such as Indeed and LinkedIn. These are traditional channels, and there’s no doubt that they still generate applications. But what if you could increase your applications exponentially? 

Social messaging platforms offer a massive opportunity for recruiters to engage with talent. Facebook Messenger engages with 1.3 billion monthly users and WhatsApp has over 1 billion daily users. 

Sales and marketing lead generation have been utilising social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook for years. Which makes sense considering social media is where customers spend a lot of their free time, brands are understanding the importance of relating to their customers – so why not recruiters and candidates?

3. How does your company appear on online job sites?

7 Questions To Challenge Your Candidate Journey

According to Glassdoor’s 2020 Report, 51% of job seekers prefer finding job opportunities on online job sites. Whether it’s LinkedIn, Indeed, Xing or Glassdoor you work with; it’s important that your company’s reputation and tone of voice is consistent across all platforms. Why?

Changing jobs is a huge emotional decision for candidates. They are at a point where switching employers can mean a change in lifestyle, salary and career. Throughout their job search they need to get the impression they can trust a potential employer.

Employers can build trust by providing a consistent message across each platform, and working to improve their rating on employer review sites. After all, 84% of job seekers say a company’s reputation matters.

4. How are you engaging Passive vs. Active talent?

It’s important to know the different scenarios in which candidates find themselves on your careers website. Depending on which channel they arrived from can tell you what their intentions are or where they are in the recruitment funnel. 

A helpful way to analyse and aggregate behaviours is to categorise candidates into two groups, passive and active. Active candidates are those actively looking for a new role and passive candidates could land on your careers website by accident. Either way, both groups offer quality candidates. 

Take a look at your careers site traffic analytics and note which channels you’re getting traffic from. Active candidates are more likely to come from direct and organic channels, if they’re typing your company name and a careers related keyword into a search engine. 

They can also come from referral channels such as Glassdoor and LinkedIn if they’ve been looking at your job positions on those platforms, and now they want to get a better understanding of your company. 

Looking at your traffic analytics can give you a great insight into how you can grow the traffic channels that work best for your company. 

5. What tactics are you using to engage with passive talent?

Passive talent has many faces, it can be someone who’s accidentally ended up on your careers blog, or joined a webinar hosted by your company. Luckily, there are plenty of ways to attract and engage with passive talent which we can break down into two categories – paid and organic engagement. 

Paid engagement can include employer branding campaigns, paid job postings or promoted content targeted at your candidate personas. If you’re not getting the candidates you want walking through the door it’s worth trying out a few targeted campaigns on LinkedIn to engage with the candidates you want. 

Organic engagement is very valuable, it doesn’t involve budget but it can mean results take longer to see. That’s why it’s important to create some great content around the employees you already have. People’s stories offer candidates clarity and help build trust, this is great if passive talent doesn’t know your company brand. 

Another great way to engage with passive talent is to build a great community around your consumer brand. For example, if you are a sports company and have a growing social media fan base, you can create a community of brand fans and use this as an opportunity to let brand fans know you have positions open. 

6. How well are you communicating with your candidates?

Whether it’s a status update on their application or they have a question about the job position, candidates want instant communication and maybe more importantly they want transparency.

It’s time to see your careers site from your candidate’s point of view. Choose a scenario in which a candidate is coming to communicate with your brand and ask: 

  • How are you delivering that talent communication experience?
  • How many methods of communication are you offering? 
  • Is the UX too confusing? 
  • Where do emails to your careers email address go? How often are they answered? 
  • How are you prioritising communication channels?

One of the most common challenges recruiters face is trying to reply to everyone. One of the ways recruiters are overcoming this challenge is using a chatbot to handle repetitive questions and provide instant responses to candidates. 

When Airbus implemented their recruitment chatbot, it was so successful that they removed their careers email address from the website just 5 weeks after going live with the chatbot. 

7. Where are the easy fixes you can apply to make your candidate experience better? 

The great news is that there are some easy fixes you can make to improve your candidate experience. Once you’ve walked through the steps of the different candidate journeys you should be able to identify these easy fixes.

We’ve also listed some commonly found easy fixes that you could do today include: 

  1. Check your job descriptions, evaluate if they are clear and informative
  2. Do an overview of the emails you’re sending candidates. Make sure they are consistent in tone and offer clarity to the candidate. 
  3. Check if your careers site is mobile friendly

Time how long it takes for your careers site pages to load as slow loading times can lead candidates to bounce. You can use this tool from Google to measure how well your site loads.

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How Did a Recruitment Chatbot Boost VBZ’s Hiring Process? https://www.smartrecruiters.com/blog/recruitment-chatbot-and-the-hiring-process/ Thu, 03 Dec 2020 18:53:22 +0000 https://www.smartrecruiters.com/blog/?p=40613

Recruitment processes are not always as simple as we’d like them to be. External factors such as requirements by law for specific benchmarks to be met or an internal resistance to change can frustrate recruiters who value building a successful candidate experience. Thankfully, there are ways to work around this. Such is the case for […]

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Recruitment processes are not always as simple as we’d like them to be. External factors such as requirements by law for specific benchmarks to be met or an internal resistance to change can frustrate recruiters who value building a successful candidate experience. Thankfully, there are ways to work around this. Such is the case for Florian Schrodt, Employer Branding leader at Verkehrsbetriebe Zurich (VBZ).

When joining the VBZ team in 2018, Florian’s goal was to remove the corporate perspective from their candidate experience and make it 100% candidate-focused. In order to keep 1 million commuters a day moving across Zurich; there is a business need to hire bus and tram pilots. But this was no easy task.

“It’s a really nice job because you are driving along the wonderful city all day long. But it can be tough because of the shifts. Especially because we are looking for job changers. Also, people do not have a typical education as a tram pilot on the market.  So we have to educate the tram pilots ourselves. And the test is not easy, because it’s a cognitive test. So this means we need to have around 1500 applications in order to hire 70 tram pilots a year.”  

Florian Schrodt

The 5% conversion rate from applicant to hire aligns with the strict application process for the tram pilot position which involves four stages: 

  1. Application
  2. F.E.D test (cognitive test)
  3. Recruitment interview
  4. Medical and psychological assessment
How Can A Chatbot Improve A Strict Recruitment Process?

However, as Florian could not change the recruitment process, he set his goal on increasing the volume of quality applicants. These are applicants that understand the expectations of the role before applying, and to deter any applicants who would likely drop out of the recruitment process. 

“We wanted the people a better picture of their opportunity within the jobs. We tried to improve the information on an emotional level and we tried to improve the touchpoints.”

The ideology of implementing a candidate contextual experience, meant that everything outside of the recruitment process had to benefit prospective candidates. One of the most notable steps in achieving this for Florian was redesigning the VBZ.jobs careers website. Which gained momentum through successful recruitment campaigns. 

How Does A Contextual Candidate Experience Impact Hiring?

However even though the volume of website visitors coming to the website was increasing, the level of engagement did not increase enough. This is when the idea of using a chatbot to engage and satisfy candidates with instant communication came to the forefront. 

“What we experienced at VBZ is that for job changers, like tram pilots, they have many questions, and many similar questions, asked again and again and again.” 

Responding to everyone’s questions, and doing a great job of it, contributes significantly to a great candidate experience. But it’s a huge task that occupies a large portion of the recruiters time. As a solution, implementing a chatbot with a FAQ Automation feature on the VBZ.jobs website gave Florian’s team 4 ways to improve their strict recruitment process.

1. VBZ speaks with talent 24/7 How Can A Chatbot Improve A Strict Recruitment Process?

Before implementing a recruitment chatbot there were only two ways a candidate could ask a question to a recruiter; through email or phone. Both channels offered a low response rate or in some cases some candidates’ inquiries were not responded to, as this was time-consuming for the busy VBZ recruitment team.

Now a candidate coming to the careers website can engage with VBZ instantly through TramBot. Over 74% of all questions are answered by the chatbot, while the rest are passed on to the recruitment team. Candidates can also engage with the chatbot 24/7 and get instant responses which helps Florian achieve his candidate-centric mission. 

2. Recruiters could focus on building relationships with candidates further along the pipeline

As TramBot handles 74% of incoming questions, recruiters are able to utilise their time doing more valuable tasks. Instead of spending hours replying to repetitive questions, they can focus on building better relationships with candidates further along the pipeline. 

3. The recruitment team could gain insights into what candidates wanted to know and improve their overall communication strategy

“It’s amazing how good you get to know the target groups because of their input and the possibilities to improve the answers in real time. Especially through the Corona crisis it was a great plus.”

Young graduates who are in their early-twenties used to be the focus target group for recruiting, before TramBot. In the first few months of the chatbot going live the VBZ recruitment team saw that amongst the most popular questions coming from candidates (salary and shift questions), questions around age were reoccurring.

It became clear that potential candidates were actually job changers, people who were looking for an interim job whilst they study or retrain. As a result, Florian and his team adjusted their marketing campaigns to capture this new target group. Their recruitment marketing team created stories directly from their staff and also advertised the chatbot on their trams, so commuters could engage on the go. 

In the future Florian and his team are continuing to improve their candidate touchpoints, including the chatbot. 

“The bot is a single point of contact for ALL initial questions relating to the profession of trampilot. We have established a contextual information management team that answers questions that the bot cannot answer as quickly and individually as possible. In addition, we are strategically expanding the bot so that we can offer contextually appropriate entries into the bot throughout the entire process.”

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