The world is evolving, with messaging at the center of this transformation. Technologies like SMS, WhatsApp, and Chatbots have paved the way to more engaging, enriching employee experiences. This shift is not a coincidence, with people worldwide spending more time messaging then nearly any other task online.
Business messaging has gone global, and recruitment teams hear the message loud and clear: to continue attracting, engaging, and hiring outstanding prospects, HR teams and recruiters must update their hiring and recruitment procedures in light of the rapid shift towards having conversations that matter.
Enter Conversational AI.
With Conversational AI, organizations can automate straightforward, repeatable tasks while maintaining a seamless branded experience. Conversations are the bridge to building relationships with a candidate and AI can transform how hiring teams and recruiters interact with, understand, and evaluate — enabling and empowering recruitment teams to focus on human interactions with the most qualified candidates.
What is conversational AI?
Conversational AI [artificial intelligence] are systems designed to interact with humans naturally. Conversational AI uses machine learning and natural language processing to learn and improve responses continuously, making certain interactions feel like magic. The best part, applications for Conversational AI are far-reaching, from chatbots to voice assistants.
Conversational AI is a user-friendly substitute for the typical chatbot. Conversational AI interacts with others just like a person, since it can discern the intent of voice or text. It can understand complicated ideas or sentences and react accordingly to imitate real-world human interactions.
The value of conversational AI has increased in recent years thanks to advances in natural language processing (NLP) – a technology that aids interpreting everyday speech. It can record spoken conversations and then sort the transcriptions into quantifiable data points. This data can provide rich insights like a conversation’s theme or even speaker sentiment while capturing every word in a final transcript.
Any recruiter or hiring manager trying to conduct effective interviews would benefit from these features. Hiring is no longer based on assumptions or gut instincts, especially when conducting interviews electronically, thanks to the ability to record talks and turn them into quantifiable points. Instead of using the interviewers’ notes or their own recall, the candidates are evaluated using their actual response.
Conversational AI vs chatbots
A growing number of firms are using conversational AI-powered chatbots for communication and screening during hiring, scheduling, and onboarding. However, advances in natural language processing and conversational AI have made room for more sophisticated strategies to use the data to communicate with people on a more personal level, particularly during the interview process.
With the use of conversational AI and natural language processing, intelligent interview platforms can reliably record interview questions and answers and analyze them for sentiment, tone, and important insights. From there, hiring teams and recruiters can immediately comprehend the key conversational themes that are important for evaluating candidates and position fit. Hiring managers may then establish a more meaningful connection with potential hires since they have a better understanding of who they are.
Despite the fact that conversational AI is still in its infancy, businesses are beginning to recognise its potential. Just a handful of the ways it can speed up hiring and staff engagement are as follows:
Automatic applicant screening
When recruiting manually, recruiters may take weeks to react to applications, and as time goes on, candidates become disengaged and start seeking for work elsewhere. Conversational AI excels in developing relationships with every applicant amidst hundreds of applications for each position. Conversational AI can make it simpler for recruiters to evaluate each applicant’s resume. Conversational AI can filter many of the applicants who don’t fit the requirements, saving recruiters from having to comb through hundreds of applications to identify the suitable prospects. This frees up talent acquisition teams to concentrate on fostering genuine connections with applicants who might be a fit for the role.
Conversational AI may make data-driven predictions about how well each applicant’s experiences and skills match the company’s goals based on information obtained from their resumes and chat discussions. HR experts may enable more human interactions between the organization and each applicant by integrating conversational AI directly into the recruitment workflow.
Improve the entire employee experience
Conversational AI has uses outside of hiring. Think about how it might be applied, for instance, to improve employee satisfaction.
Consider the onboarding procedure: After a new hire, HR personnel must gather information for payroll, benefits, and other administrative needs. By having conversational AI gather the data and respond to new hires’ questions about onboarding, this process can be sped up significantly. In this manner, conversational AI can do the bulk of the HR team’s administrative tasks. The AI manages everything instead of a human resources manager physically sending out documents, following up, responding to inquiries, and looking for crucial paperwork. The time saved can be used by HR teams to concentrate on higher value, higher priority tasks like engaging new workers, defining goals, and assimilating them into the company culture.
Conversational AI can offer an even more individualized employment experience from the standpoint of the employee. Conversational AI can assist employees at every stage of their journey, from onboarding to leave, by answering their queries and giving them the information, they require at any given time.
Inputs by OmPrakash Muppirala, VP of Engineering and Head of Fountain India.
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