3 Tips For Building a Recruitment Chatbot That Works

Chatbots use artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to interpret the needs of a user and guide them to the desired result with minimal effort.  Their ability to automate simple conversations has enabled numerous businesses to provide a better experience to their customers in a variety of areas by introducing chatbots for customer support, ordering services, personal assistance, and chatbots for recruiting.  

However, building a genuinely capable recruitment chatbot is still a challenge. Despite advancements in NLP and AI, developers are limited in what they can create. This blog will cover three tips for building a recruitment chatbot that works, allowing you to hire top tier talent with ease. 

A recruitment chatbot handles the basic communication tasks that are generally the responsibility of your recruiters, including:

• greeting candidates that come to your website
• collecting contact information 
• pre-qualifying candidates by asking questions about experience, interests, etc.
• scheduling time to chat with a recruiter 

For your recruitment chatbot to work effectively, you should have a solid understanding of your recruitment process and your target audience. A chatbot for recruiting at a consulting firm is going to be an entirely different chatbot than for a restaurant as the questions candidates will ask will be entirely different. Knowing this information will help your chatbot vendor tailor your recruitment chatbot to your specific needs.

The most challenging part of designing an effective chatbot for recruiting is making the conversation flow naturally. One way to address this is to create an initial scope of questions that your chatbot will be capable of answering efficiently. These include:

• Choice questions (i.e. is the car blue or red?)
• The five W’s (who, what, where, when, and why)
• Yes or no questions

Avoid open-ended questions and offer prompts throughout the conversation to solicit the answer you expect (i.e. How many years of experience do you have? 1-5, 5-10, or 10+). 

To get the results you desire from an interaction with a recruitment chatbot and candidate, your chatbot’s messages must be natural, intuitive, and align with the voice of your brand and target group. When it comes to recruitment chatbot copywriting, focus on the following:

• Avoid complicated grammar and sentences.
• Don’t use gender-specific pronouns. You never know who’s on the other side of the conversation.
• Prepare alternative replies to make the conversation more human-like.
• Add help messages and suggestions for when the user feels lost.

There is a lot more that goes into building a capable chatbot for recruiting than the tips listed above. However, these tips are a good starting point in understanding what is required to create a chatbot for recruiting that delivers results. Suppose you think a recruitment chatbot is right for your recruitment process. In that case, we advise you carefully select a vendor that has experience with HR and recruitment like Live Recruiter, for best results.