It’s no secret that the hiring process isn't any close to being efficient. The best evidence of that is the fact that it takes companies on average 36 days to fill a job opening. In this post, we’ll discuss the ways conversational AI in HR can help managers make better hiring decisions.
Conventional hiring processes are often lengthy and take lots of HR time. As a result, hiring managers are faced with spending time on lengthy tasks rather than focusing on the individuals that are the best fit for the role.
The research backs up the fact that the hiring process can be improved with AI automation. It's said that 52% of HR executives find it most challenging to screen the candidates from a large pool of applicants. 56% of the HR leaders have also confirmed that they expect the hiring volume to increase as time goes. However, they expect the HR teams to have the same number of employees or even decrease. How can this be achieved? Only with the application of AI in human resources.
Let’s take a look at 4 different ways your HR department can benefit from conversational AI.
AI in HR: use cases
Candidate screening
The most common use cases for conversational AI in HR is job applicant assessment or candidate screening.
How does it work? First, the hiring managers need to create a set of questions to ask when phone screening a candidate. These questions should be based on the type of the position (e.g., senior management position or customer support specialist) and the minimum qualifications required to consider the person to be the right fit. The conversational AI app can be created to ask candidates about their previous work experience, skills, motivations, hobbies, and so on. Fair warning - the majority of hiring with the help of AI will, at first, be done for lower-value, higher-volume positions.
The best part is you can create a conversational AI app yourself without any prior coding experience. Here’s how I created a candidate screening app in less than 2 hours. If you have developers on staff, that makes it that much easier.
Embedded content: https://youtu.be/nIUkUiGDPsYReducing hiring costs with conversational AI
According to the Society for Human Resource Management's (SHRM) new Human Capital Benchmarking Report, the average cost-per-hire is $4,129. By enabling the HR department to use conversational AI to automate some of the hiring processes, companies can reduce their hiring costs.
Ken Lazarus, the CEO of Scout Exchange, says that his company "has found that employers using machine learning algorithms in a marketplace recruiting setting have consistently lowered their time to fill by over 30 percent, increased their pool of qualified candidates and fill rates by up to 40 percent, and reduced cost per hire by 30 percent”.
The lower cost comes from both the decrease in time from initial posting to close, as well as from the decrease in costs associated with interviewing.
Conversational AI helps eliminate the hiring bias
During the active hiring process, the HR department might get thousands of applications. It's virtually impossible to pay close attention to each of the candidates and carefully assess their skills, motivations, and experience. Unfortunately, especially in the case of lower value, volume hiring, hiring managers might fall back on their inherent biases in making their decisions.
A conversational AI app can conduct candidate pre-screening phone interviews, give proper attention and consideration to each applicant. After having all the needed information about the candidate, the HR manager can choose the best-qualified people to be interviewed in person. Importantly, it will simply follow the instructions that had been issued to it, not consider the applicant’s race, gender or otherwise.
Besides, the hiring managers are human and are bound to have bad days and upset moods. While maintaining their professionalism in a work setting, their emotional condition can be affecting the likelihood of the right (or wrong) person being hired. Conversational AI offers a smoothed, more structured, and automated approach that eliminates such bias and helps make better hiring decisions.
Candidate sourcing made easier with conversational AI
Despite advances in technology, most companies are still using a manual process to find candidates. This process is time-consuming and can lead to a loss of qualified candidates.
Conversational AI can help HR professionals simplify and automate their active candidate sourcing process. If a conversational AI app has access to candidates' contact information, it can call candidates to assess their interest in any of the open positions. This alleviates the burden of having to look for candidates manually.
The bottom line
Conversational AI can help human resources professionals in many ways.
It helps in the recruitment process by providing a platform for HR professionals to communicate with job applicants. The AI automates repetitive tasks in human resources. The HR department can also use it as an additional channel for HR professionals to find new talent.
Also, you can invest just 2 hours of your time to create an app that would save an immense amount of money and time for your company while getting the top candidates for you. Just join Dasha Developer Community to get all the help you need throughout the way.