Advanced technologies would simplify staff recruitment in the next five years. It was stated by 81% of respondents in a study conducted by Kelly Services in 2015. The forecast has turned out to be correct. However, some companies prefer the old-fashioned way in 2020. They call their applicants and offer paper questionnaires. Chat2Desk has conducted its own study to understand how automation is going to help HR Departments in the coming years.
What Problems Does an HR Department Face?
What is an ordinary business day like for an HR Department? Day planning, discussing applicants with internal customers, active calling, scheduling interviews for applicants and supervisors, and collecting analytics. And that’s not even including interviews, trainings, surveys, on-boarding, or orientation of new employees. Quite a busy schedule, isn’t it?
Any HR specialist has to find the right applicant and to reduce staff turnover while saving the budget. That is why a recruitment chatbot is necessary. A wrong script decreases conversion, but increases the time and expenses required to find the right applicant. At mass recruitment in companies with 500 and more people, the manager spends every day interviewing and answering the questions of new employees.
We propose to replace usual calling to applicants with messaging. Answer bot, chatbots, scripts, and CRM systems help automate not only the recruitment process, but also the on-boarding and orientation stages. This is how the HR Department saves time for more important tasks, for example, personal interviews or relationship settlement within the company. How to do it? We will describe it below, step by step.
How to Automate HR Department Processes?
First of all, let us determine HR activities which may be automated. We have identified seven main areas:
1. Collecting Job Applications
Applicants usually search for vacancies and company background on recruitment platforms such as LinkedIn, Indeed.com, and Monster.com. Then an internal messenger opens for communication.
This stage can be automated as follows:
- Post a vacancy on the platform selected, add a number, and propose to chat.
- By starting a dialogue, a user will enter a chat with an answer bot, which will answer the first questions or transfer the communication to an HR specialist.
- The customer details will be uploaded from the chat to the CRM system automatically. In this case, the applicant is a transaction which will go through recruitment scenario stages.
2. Selecting Staff
Unfortunately, the current level of automation does not allow chatbots to independently select applicants qualified for interviews. Nevertheless, a manager can automate some tasks even at this stage.
The HR specialist connects the applicant via the messenger to obtain more details on their experience and expectations, and to clarify their duties. Templates and automatic answers will accelerate the survey, and an answer bot will send a test. If the manager is satisfied with the applicant, a template offering an interview will be sent. Otherwise, a refusal template will be sent, and the transaction will be closed.
3. Appointment
The manager has selected applicants. Now it is time for personal interviews. What was it like before? It was required to coordinate the time with the heads of all departments, call to each applicant, fix the time, and update the schedule. If an applicant asked to reschedule the interview, everything was to be coordinated from the very beginning.
Get rid of this treadmill. Create an interview invitation template specifying the applicant’s name with the date and time of the interview. If the interview has to be rescheduled, it is easy to notify on the matter as well — send an updated invitation to the messenger.
4. Interview
At the interview, the manager can record notes and opinion on the applicant into the contact card in the CRM system. Following the meeting, the company can select the applicant as its new employee. Otherwise, the applicant receives a refusal and the transaction closes.
5. Invitation
A chatbot will automatically send an offer to the messenger of the applicant who has reached the final stage. This function will be indispensable in case of mass recruitment. The chatbot will take some duties of the manager. The manager will be satisfied with a system which independently sends an invitation or refusal to each applicant.
6. Onboarding and Orientation
The objective of an HR specialist is to decrease staff turnover and increase ELTV. All of this is achievable through successful onboarding.
In the beginning, a new employee shall usually pass security check, get instructed, have a medical examination, and visit the Accounting Department. This process takes from several days to a week. Since colleagues have already forgotten how they went through that quest themselves, questions like “What room should I go to?” and “What documents do I need?” are addressed to an HR specialist.
Chatbots and answer bot will help make it easier. A scenario in chatbot builder is a message sequence received by a user. It is believed that chatbots are used in sales and marketing. But it is not exactly true. As we have already stated in one of our articles, chatbots have many purposes, therefore they can be used anywhere — at recruitment, on-boarding, or orientation. But most importantly, it is no longer needed to be on the phone all the time because a chat is used to communicate with an applicant.
Let us describe this process step by step
- The manager sets up and starts up a chatbot for new employees.
- Instead of a clearance checklist, an employee receives a message sequence specifying a place, a geolocation, and necessary documents.
- Having passed another step (for example, the Occupational Health and Safety Service), the employee presses a button with a tick and receives the next message specifying a new place, for example, the Economic Security Department.
- The scenario is deemed completed when the employee visits all departments required.
Chatbots may be used at training as well — add a multiple choice question to each step, and specify a link to a manual for new employees, video trainings, information on corporate discounts, details on benefits, etc. Frequently asked questions of new employees can be addressed to a simple answer bot, which reacts to keywords in a question. An employee can always ask a question in a chat to get an answer from a chatbot or an HR specialist. Chat communication is faster than telephone calls and does not take an HR specialist half a day.
7. Collecting Feedback
Sometimes a company and its employee go their separate ways and there comes a time to say goodbye. It is important for the HR supervisor to receive honest feedback on working for the company in order to consider comments and adjust the workflow. Employees are not always ready to be straightforward. That is when an answer bot or a chatbot enters the picture. Automatic devices will conduct a brief survey and send the results to the HR Department. According to our study, online questionnaires are far more honest because the personal factor is excluded.
What Other Tasks Can Be Automated?
| Analytics | Set up dashboards with extended reports and collect statistics on the total number of vacancies, the number of invitations and refusals, staff turnover, and the number of open and closed positions. Now all of this can be collected and exported within the Chat2Desk interface.
|
| eNPC Determination | Use surveys to know how employees feel about the company. Create a questionnaire in Google Forms. A chatbot will distribute it to employees and remind them to fill it in. The HR manager will not have to walk around with a stack of papers and employees will not blush because the survey is anonymous.
|
| Newsletters | Inform the company on a new employee and know who is going to be at the New Year’s corporate party. Templates, i.e. messages sent on a short command, will be helpful in such cases.
|
The process can be arranged via the Chat2Desk interface. Messengers (WhatsApp, Viber, or Telegram) required to communicate with an applicant are connected within the service. Set up additional reports, answer bots, chatbots, scripts, and automatic answers to accelerate your work with applicants. The automation process is monitored by the HR manager. They can connect to the dialogue at any time to answer applicant’s questions.
Conclusion
By automating their work, HR specialists save time for more important tasks such as analytics collection, team buildings, and more accurate recruitment. Now HR specialists will find the right applicant in time, train them fast, and obtain a prompt feedback on working for the company. The HR manager will get rid of unnecessary calls and a thick stack of paper questionnaires. The company will save funds while searching for the right employee.
Do you want to introduce automation into your HR Department? Contact us via a widget in the screen corner and we will be glad to help you.
