A fresh year always encourages TA to elevate their hiring strategy and find new improvements and efficiencies. TA teams experienced no shortage of curveballs over the past year: transitioning to remote hiring, reduced staffing and budgets, increased candidate volumes and/or hiring freezes, and more. This new landscape begs the question—how can we do more with less without compromising on employer brand? It’s time to make the case for smart automation, particularly through chatbots.
What do we mean when we say smart automation? It’s not just about faster/cheaper. Smart innovation boosts efficiency and improves the hiring process for all stakeholders: recruiters, hiring managers, and candidates—and chatbots have a crucial role to play.
Chatbots aren’t just about automating conversations, they could provide meaningful touchpoints for candidates and deep insights for TA.
Here are the three success stories that will convince you to add chatbots to your 2021 strategic plan.
1. Shave 50% off time to apply
How did a global logistic company shave off 50% of their average time to apply and boost their application completion rate to 95%? The company implemented a WhatsApp chatbot that could be accessed via QR code. This chatbot could answer questions, surface relevant opportunities, and administer basic screening questions. The company even won a Stevie Award!
2. Turn Customers into Candidates
VBZ, Zurich’s public transport service, used their chatbot to educate and engage talent into the business-critical role of a tram pilot. They learned from their chatbot, which was accessible via QR codes placed on the train, that shift schedules are very important to this candidate type. This learning helped the company give candidates more relevant stories online and in the interview process and turn customers, ie tram passengers, into candidates. In the first year of the chatbot being live, the VBZ recruitment team saved 246 hours of repetitive work and automated 74% of incoming questions from candidates.
3. Save hundreds of hours
Airbus, the world’s largest airline manufacturer decided to give their chatbot a name: Bessie (selected by company poll). The team helped train Bessie so she could go live on their global career site in just four weeks. It was like onboarding a new colleague, only now the colleague was an AI instead of a human. All this human interaction helped Bessie start strong, immediately freeing up bandwidth for her human colleagues. In fact, Bessie was able to automate over 55,000 candidate questions in her first year saving thousands of hours for Airbus recruiting teams across the globe.
When we reflect on these stories, the remarkable feature is how different these companies are from one another; they represent divergent industries, locations, and organizational sizes. Yet, they were all able to use chatbots as a vehicle to reach Hiring Success. The true throughline here is smart efficiency. These companies were not only able to automate a task—they were able to turn what was formerly admin work into candidate touchpoints and data learnings for recruiters. In the end, they had an experience that was better for candidates and the company.
Learn more about automating your recruiting process with chatbots, including SmartPal, here.
