HR chatbots take on recruitment, benefits tasks

For Zurich-based The Adecco Group, the largest temporary staffing firm in the world, HR chatbots came into focus as a way to automate administrative tasks for recruiters, who spend a lot of time filtering through candidates and matching qualifications to specific jobs.

Angie College, senior vice president of operations for the general staffing group in Adecco’s North America branch, saw chatbots as a way to enable recruiters to spend more time building relationships with job candidates, which the company felt was crucial, as well as speed up the filtering process.

“It’s a very tight market,” College said. “There are more jobs than applicants. So, getting to those applicants quicker and identifying where they best fit is critical right now for everyone.”

After someone applies for a job, a chatbot — in Adecco’s case, Mya from Mya Systems Inc. — immediately engages with the candidate. Mya conducts a prescreening, asking client-specific “knockout questions,” according to College. If a candidate doesn’t complete the process, Mya can notify a recruiter to follow up. If the candidate appears to be a good fit for the position, Mya will schedule an in-person interview and add the appointment directly onto the recruiter’s calendar.

“To the recruiter, it’s very seamless,” College said. “The chatbot conversation is stored so that the recruiter can quickly go back, look at the conversation and prepare for the interview.”

Integrating an HR chatbot, also known as a conversational AI platform, such as Mya, into front-end systems to achieve the kind of seamlessness College was after meant partnering closely with Adecco’s IT department.

“We wanted to make the recruiters as efficient as possible, allowing them to focus on where we think they benefit our business most,” she said. “We worked heavily with our IT department, as we had to build out APIs and figure out how to streamline those conversations into the desk.”

Recruitment is the most mature area for HR chatbots, according to Helen Poitevin, an analyst at Gartner. The technology, which Gartner predicted will be deployed “It’s a common experience across recruiting functions where [employees] often struggle with an influx of applications that are not relevant for the roles they’re trying to fill,” Poitevin said.

HR chatbots like Mya act as a first line of interaction, collecting candidate information, prescreening applicants and scheduling interviews. “This is very attractive to many recruiting functions because it doesn’t open up any risk around discriminatory practices or fear that you’re using algorithms to decide how you recruit,” Poitevin said. “They’re also using some of these more advanced techniques to bring efficiency to your recruiting operations.”