Articles 
As candidate expectations rise and the war for top talent intensifies, so too do the demands on HR professionals. Whether you’re a recruiter, HR compliance officer or talent management specialist, your role likely encompasses a broader range of tasks and responsibilities than ever before. To address this challenge, a growing number of organizations are leveraging the potential of AI in recruitment and talent management, including chatbots and virtual assistants.
While most of the recent hype surrounding chatbots has focused on their applications in customer service and sales, HR chatbots are a powerful tool for helping organizations remain competitive in today’s hot talent market and reducing the administrative load on recruiters.
In this article, we’ll explore some of the many use cases and benefits of leveraging an HR chatbot, as well as some of the features you should look for when choosing one for your organization.
Benefits and Use Cases of HR Chatbots
Would you like to reduce the time spent on repetitive administrative tasks, drive job applications and improve the recruitment and talent management journey for candidates and other stakeholders? Then, say hello to HR chatbots.
Deliver a Consumer-Grade Experience
Visiting even the best career sites can be frustrating. In large organizations, there can be thousands of open positions to sift through—a time-consuming task that candidates have little patience for in today’s attention economy. After all, applicants don’t want to browse for jobs; they want to quickly apply for a job that’s relevant to them.
You’ve got them for 20 seconds through an application process, and if that isn’t consumer-grade, then they’ll go and work for your competitors who just made it easier to apply.”
Keith Muirhead
General Manager of Talent Acquisition at Fonterra
By simply entering a position title into an HR chatbot, jobseekers are shown matching opportunities pulled from thousands of positions. What once could have taken hours of trawling (and perhaps resulted in an abandoned job search!) can now be achieved instantaneously.
What’s more, with modern semantic search technology, chatbots can go beyond simple keyword matching to really understand user intent and show smart job recommendations.
Beyond improving the candidate experience, these fast and highly relevant search results increase applications and prevent organizations from losing potential applicants at the first step in the candidate journey.
Streamline Job Searches and Drive Conversion
Before a candidate applies for a job, they often have a myriad of questions, such as What are the benefits? What does the hiring process look like? What is the work-from-home policy? Despite influencing their final decision to apply or not to a role, it’s challenging for talent acquisition teams to answer everyone promptly, especially when dealing with thousands of applicants.
Fortunately, HR chatbots can answer frequently asked questions immediately, saving recruitment teams time and streamlining a candidate’s job search.
A recent Talent Board Candidate Experience Report found that candidates who could ask a chatbot questions consistently rated their candidate experience higher than those who did not. Moreover, interaction with a conversational AI at the start of the application process can increase completion rates to as high as 90 percent.
Scale With Ease
When faced with a surge in hiring demand, recruiters may find it challenging to manage the intensified workload. After all, they can only answer a limited number of queries and schedule a limited number of interviews on the average workday.
In contrast, AI can handle 10,000 applicants as easily as 1,000 — crucial to allowing organizations to scale and maintain momentum in high-volume hiring. Moreover, HR chatbots can serve as virtual assistants capable of tasks such as interview scheduling and employee onboarding at scale.
Enable Candidate Engagement 24/7
Communication via email can often take weeks of back and forth, and promptly responding to candidates becomes even more challenging when navigating multiple time zones. Even when recruiters are based in the same time zone as candidates, conversations can be interrupted for hours once the business day ends.
Conversely, chatbots are always ready to assist candidates, enabling instantaneous communication at any time of day. As a result, conversational AI chatbots can interact with thousands of candidates within hours, offering a significant competitive advantage for companies seeking to shorten hiring cycles and extend offers faster than competitors.
Moreover, by facilitating uninterrupted engagement, organizations can provide a better candidate experience, and recruiters can spend less time answering routine questions and instead focus on more strategic activities.
Unlock Powerful Use Cases for Other Stakeholders
Next-gen platform-native chatbots can leverage your full data model in ways that integrated ones can’t, unlocking robust use cases for other stakeholders such as hiring managers and employees.
For example, by leveraging data from within the platform, HR chatbots can serve as comprehensive virtual assistants and complete a wide range of tasks, including resolving hiring manager queries, extending offer letters and handling new-hire onboarding.
In this way, chatbots can help automate the end-to-end hiring process, saving hiring managers, HR specialists and other employees several hours each week.
In fact, according to a Deloitte report, HR intelligent assistants allow staff to halve the time spent on administrative tasks with 75 percent less time spent on resolving cases related to workplace processes. What’s more, delegating time-consuming and error-prone tasks to virtual assistant chatbots can increase productivity by an astounding 99 percent.
Features To Look out for in an HR Chatbot
Conversational AI Powered by Semantic Search Technology
While effective at helping users complete specific, predefined tasks, traditional workflow-based chatbots can only answer preprogrammed questions and provide limited responses.
For example, suppose you ask a traditional chatbot to search for job opportunities related to “marketing”. In that case, it will only display results that contain the keyword “marketing” despite the fact that “copywriter” and “content strategist” are relevant results.
Not only does a limited range of responses reduce the chatbot’s utility, but it can easily frustrate the user when it doesn’t understand a simple but unexpected request.
In contrast, choosing an HR chatbot built on a conversational model and powered by semantic search technology can improve the candidate experience and prevent potential applicants from abandoning their career search.
A powerful semantic search application is streamlining a candidate’s job search by understanding user intent and providing job suggestions that match.
Consider the smart search feature offered by Avature’s HR chatbot. Using an advanced AI matching model that leverages semantic technology, the chatbot retrieves relevant results even if there is no keyword match between the search and the results. For example, given the keyword “marketing”, the chatbot will offer positions such as “brand manager” and “social media manager” because it understands that they are relevant search results.
Beyond offering more relevant search results, Avature’s conversational AI chatbot can create a more engaging and personalized candidate experience because it can understand intent and respond in a more human way. In this way, semantic search technology ensures candidates receive meaningful interactions, fostering a deeper connection with your brand.
A Platform-Native Solution
The HR chatbot market is currently dominated by third-party “bolt-on” chatbots, which require complex integration with existing CRM and ATS solutions. Acting as an additional layer within the tech stack, these chatbots can’t leverage all the data collected in recruiting systems.
In contrast, platform-native chatbots like Avature’s can be easily enabled with the flick of a switch, sidestepping the need for challenging integrations and facilitating more powerful use cases across the talent lifecycle as they can leverage the wealth of data already gathered.
Conversational AI technology is developing at a breathtaking pace, and Avature is staying at the forefront of this evolution. To provide the best experience for the user, the Chatbot has to be deeply integrated into the rest of the platform, which is why we have built it ourselves, like the rest of Avature’s AI ecosystem.”
Rabih Zbib
Machine Learning Director at Avature.
Multi-Language Capabilities
Taking a multilingual approach is crucial to maximizing recruitment efficiency in a global workforce and meeting candidate expectations in different markets. Therefore, choosing an HR chatbot with multilingual capabilities is critical.
By answering frequently asked questions and providing smart job recommendations in multiple languages, recruiting chatbots create a personalized and inclusive job search experience. Not only can this drive conversion and improve the candidate experience, but it can also support your organization’s DEI initiatives.
Configurable Branding Capabilities
As one of the first touch points in the candidate journey, leveraging an HR chatbot to showcase your brand’s identity is a stellar opportunity to make an excellent first impression.
Customization capabilities, like those offered by Avature’s chatbot, allow you to select a unique color theme tailored to your brand and incorporate your company logo. By leveraging chatbot customization, your organization can stand out from the crowd instead of displaying the same generic chatbot everybody else has. In this way, you can remain at the front of candidates’ minds with a branded and immersive experience that boosts engagement.
Discover Avature’s Next-Generation Chatbot
As you’ve seen, HR chatbots are versatile tools that can automate and make the recruitment and talent management journey more intuitive, seamless and rewarding for all parties involved. However, not all chatbots are built the same.
If you’re looking for a platform-native solution that transcends the limitations of traditional chatbots, request a demo today and get ready to take your recruitment processes to the next level.
