When you’re responsible for leading a busy team, taking time out to go through resumes and work through the interview process to find a new employee is one more demand in your already packed schedule. 

But what if there was an easier way to sort resumes, or find candidates, that can shorten the time to hire and make the whole process easier? 

Technology can be your friend — consider the use of chatbots! Chatbots are a kind of artificial intelligence and automation that can be programmed to help look for the qualifications, experience, and background you need for the open position you’re looking to fill, presenting you only with candidates that meet those requirements. 

Here’s how to use chatbots to help find your next new hire. 

Finding Hires for Your Organization (and How Chatbots Can Help)

First, what’s a chatbot?

Let’s start at the beginning: Recruiting chatbots are pieces of programming that can be added to your website’s job page to handle any number of tasks pertaining to open positions and candidates. These little text boxes can answer questions about a position, welcome job seekers to the page and invite them to take a look at open jobs, conduct some preliminary screening by asking questions of the possible candidate, and by gathering information on their experience and skills. Some can even help provide skills assessments after a resume or application has been submitted! By incorporating Natural Language Processing and machine learning tools, chatbots “learn” more language with each interaction with a person, providing better, more natural-sounding responses over time. 

Chatbots can speed up the whole recruiting-to-hiring process.  

You only have so many hours in a day or week to dedicate to looking for job candidates. Incorporating a chatbot onto your website can work as a kind of assistant, reviewing applications and weeding out those candidates who don’t quite measure up, all before you have to put in any time at all. If the average hiring manager spends 13 hours each week going through the early stages of candidate reviews for an open position, the use of a chatbot frees up that time to allow you to work on other important tasks. Depending on how they’re programmed, chatbots can also take on other tasks involved in the hiring process, including scheduling phone or in-person interviews, securing rooms for in-person meetings, and tracking each candidate’s progress through the system. They can even communicate with candidates via text message, providing fast replies and quicker communication, something candidates often say takes longer than they’d like. 

Find Higher Quality Candidates

When you’re feeling pressured to find a solid candidate quickly for an open position, both to bring in a new person to alleviate the stress of your shorthanded team and to maintain productivity rates, it’s possible the resume review process might not always be as thorough as you’d like. By incorporating a chatbot, you can ensure the only candidates brought to your attention are qualified, and with the kind of education, background, and experience you want for the open position. Each candidate you invite in for an interview will be capable of doing the job; it’ll be a matter of listening for differentiating factors, and personality matches to determine who you’ll be adding to your team. 

Address Candidate Complaints Without Lifting a Finger

Many companies earn poor reviews on job search websites for how long it takes to respond to questions or to go through the hiring process, or for a lack of response at all. That’s something that can really hurt your reputation as an employer and could dissuade strong candidates from applying to your company. But chatbots help fix that! Candidates can get real-time information from the chatbot on your website, or if you incorporate text message capabilities, questions submitted can be responded to instantly. If the chatbot you use can reply to emails, even with placeholder information until you can directly respond, that prevents a candidate from feeling left in the dark about their questions, concerns, or interest, and it will help them feel more in the loop as the interview process goes along. 

Eliminate Unconscious Bias

Humans are great. People are wonderful. We’re all people. It’s not a crime to be human. But sometimes, we let our likes and dislikes get the better of us. We might not even realize it — unconscious bias can creep in on any number of factors, from prioritizing and treating favorably people who went to the same school, or are from the same region, as us; it can also sometimes hold people back and pass people over because, on paper, there may be misconceptions about the person that makes us think they wouldn’t be a good fit. By relying on chatbots to sort through applications, you’re eliminating at least some of that unconscious bias, which can lead to a greater variety of candidates with a wider array of backgrounds and personal experiences that can help make your team even stronger. 

Want to Find Top Candidates for Your Team? ABLE Can Help!

Time is a precious thing. Your team will appreciate being back to full staff faster; you’ll have more of your time back; your candidates will speak highly of your speedy hiring process — all it takes is a little help from a chatbot that you can program to do whatever you need! 

If you’d like some assistance in setting up a chatbot, or if you’re a little unsure how it all works, call ABLE Associates. Our recruiters can help walk you through the process and, in the meantime, they can help you find candidates quickly that can start right away! Call ABLE Associates today, and let’s get started.