The Top 12 Best Recruiting and HR Chatbots - 2023

An HR Chatbot is one major category within AI recruiting software that allows job seekers and employees to communicate via a conversational UI via SMS, website, and other messaging applications like What’s App.  The platform allows for meaningful exchanges without the need for HR leaders to take time out of their day.

If you’re going to use chatbots for recruiting, you probably have one or two things in mind already that it can do to add value to your recruitment process.  Here’s a list of the key ways this segment of recruiting software can help:

• Interview Scheduling: HR chatbots are wonderful at scheduling screens and interviews.  They can easily update calendars, look across multiple people’s openings, and of course can do this while taking the burden of the cumbersome back and forth off the plate of an HR coordinator.
• Automated Screening: Chatbots are great at screening candidates with rudimentary questions (are you available to work starting in 4 weeks, does this comp align with your expectations, etc).  They can also leverage natural language processing to have a deeper conversation with your job seekers about their experience, expectations, and how well they align with the open roles.  This is a core use case for all of the best recruiting chatbots.
• Candidate Sourcing: Most of the sourcing capabilities we’ve seen revolve around re-engaging your talent pool members and ATS database.  The bot will look at open reqs, match them to people in the database, and then reach back to see if they want to engage.  It will also screen them, and schedule the ones who make it through the screen.  Not bad!
• Career Site Conversions: This is a page out of marketing’s playbook.  The bot’s conversational interface can help people who land on your career site get key questions answered, and then guide them either to the relevant job postings in your ATS, or send them direct to a recruiter to engage (imagine a software engineer with the right experience hits your page - you want them to talk to a human ASAP).
• Text Based Recruiting: Chatbots can communicate over many different mediums, and of course SMS is one of those.  Probably are favorite use case here is text to apply where you can drive candidates to apply via texting a shortcode, and then screen candidates all via text.  This is especially useful for places where you’re engaging candidates where texting is easiest (billboards, PR, presentations), or for candidates that don’t necessarily have a resume and are more likely to text than apply via ATS.
• Employee Referrals: The best recruiting chatbots now enable employees to make referrals through their interface - and will actually ping your employees with reminders about open roles, and how much the bounty is for each.  There is most likely a day in the not too distant future when these bots will leverage a bit of machine learning to reach out to employees and ask if they’d make an intro to a person in their network for an open role that seems to be a good fit.
• Candidate Experience: Candidates have questions, job application bots have answers.  Throughout the interview process a chatbot can easily answer applicant questions on status of application, or many of the pertinent info you may find in an employee handbook (benefits, PTO policy, etc).
• Employee Onboarding: Most hr chatbots will also have a module that allows you to onboard new employees.  Many of these workflows are pre-built, but allow the easily accessible “virtual assistant” interface that you get with the chatbot.  Also, the bot will learn over time answers to various questions that come up during onboarding - providing for a better employee experience and less strain on your HR team.
• Artificial intelligence: This is sort of a large bucket of benefits.  And, perhaps the biggest benefit is that you can join the club of next generation talent acquisition leaders using AI in their recruiting.  Most of these recruiting chatbots use some form of AI to more effectively communicate with candidates via natural language processing, or do things like vet candidates via machine learning.  The bottom line is that AI is an evolving force in human resources that most HR leaders should want to take advantage of.
  

There are a few major pitfalls we’ve seen with HR Chatbots.  

• Human interaction is key to making sure your candidate experience doesn’t degrade.  AI and chatbots should augment what your team is doing, not replace it.  And never loose site of the person who matters most, the applicant.
• Don’t get overwhelmed with the many ways a chatbot can help.  You came to this page most likely because you have one or two use cases in mind.  Start there, but try to pick a vendor with a broad offering you can leverage further over time.
• Many companies are interested but haven’t pulled the trigger (see “where to start” below - it’s super easy to get started).  Start exploring how AI can start taking tasks off the to-do list of your hr department today.
• Next is that some chatbot offerings can be setup easily, but take a long time to do it “right.”  Instead of “AI” they are regurgitating the hundreds of responses you had to input into a spreadsheet when you get setup - be warned that these offerings are not that functional and can take a ton of your time to get started.
• Don’t get caught up in the hype around AI.  It’s here, it’s helping, but it will not solve all of your problems by any means.  At least, not for another few decades.
• Engage your hiring managers to help you understand what’s important to them.  Definitely get sales and marketing’s take on how they’re thinking about using chatbots to engage customers.  There are a lot of parallels and ways you can learn from chatbot examples across your business.

The Return On Investment (ROI) driven from HR Chatbots is fairly straightforward.  These bots allow you to get more quality applicants into your funnel that otherwise would’ve bounced from your page without applying through the ATS.  

So, you can see the effectiveness through the number of new hires you’ve made that came through this channel as well as the amount of time saved by utilizing a chatbot where recruiters would’ve had to be involved previously.

Other potential drivers of value are saving recruiter time, and decreasing time to fill.  But, these aren’t contemplated in the calculator (don’t worry, these are icing on the cake).

Click here to download our ROI calculator.

If you’re looking at adding an HR chatbot to your recruiting efforts, you’re probably looking at specific criteria to judge which vendor you should actually move forward with.  We highly recommend staying organized as you vet various providers by using a simple spreadsheet (here’s a template to use) that keeps track of which vendors meet which criteria, along with other key considerations such as pricing and rep likeability.  Below is a spreadsheet you can modify to your needs.  It has some sample questions, but the most important aspect is the structure that we’ve setup.

What is an HR chatbot?

An HR chatbot is a virtual assistant used to simulate human conversation with candidates and employees to automate certain tasks such as interview scheduling, employee referrals, candidate screening and more. 

How does an HR chatbot work?

HR chatbots use AI to interpret and process conversational information and send appropriate replies back to the sender.  

What is a recruiting chatbot used for?

A recruiting/HR chatbot is used for many purposes, including:

• Interview scheduling
• Candidate sourcing
• Automated screening
• Employee referrals
• Career site conversations
• Text based recruiting
• Candidate experience
• Employee onboarding
  

Why use an HR chatbot?

You can use an HR chatbot to automate processes that normally require employee attention to make HR operations more efficient. This means saving recruiters time and decreasing time to fill. Besides time gains, companies also see a return on investment from getting more quality applicants in their funnel.

What major companies are using HR and recruiting chatbots?

Some major companies using HR and recruiting chatbots include:

• IKEA
• Netflix
• Heineken
• Hot Topic
• McDonald’s
• Arby’s
• Cheesecake Factory

Yes, we are data nerds here at SelectSoftware Reviews.  Here are the metrics we think you should be tracking for HR Chatbots, and why:

• Conversion rate: What percent of career site visitors are converting into your ATS and talent communities - “We were getting 5% of traffic into the ATS prior to implementing the chatbot, and are now getting 7% which means 250 more applicants/week, 3 of which we hire on average.”
• Quality of applicants: How many applicants are interview/hire worthy - “We were hiring 1% of applicants that applied through our career site, now it’s 3%.”  Many times HR bots can convince better talent to apply by answering questions and ushering them to the right place on a career site.
• Chat engagement: What percent of visitors interact with your chat - “15% of career site visitors chat with our bot, which is around 200/month.”  You should look at this for different talent demographics, and different use cases.  Perhaps your sourcing to high volume candidates is great, but not so much for engineers.  Maybe your chatbot is great at entry level employee onboarding, but messes up when it comes to more senior hires.
• Candidate NPS: Do candidates enjoy engaging with your chatbot - “Our candidate NPS for applicants has increased from 10% to 15%.”  Job seeker and employee experience are two of the most often overlooked (hence why most ATS’s on the market are terrible), but most important aspects of any WorkTech tool.
• Time saved: HR and recruiting chatbots will save your team time, period.  How you measure this is an other story.  One way is to look at all of the tasks the hr bot was able to accomplish in a given period, and how long your team would’ve taken to do the same.  Another is to see the relative effectiveness of your team post-implementation: are recruiters hiring more people, are HR leaders able to get more done.  HR chatbots will take tasks off the plate for your HR department.

Beyond metrics, it’s important to make sure you are keeping your recruiting process human, despite your new found efficiency.  While unconscious bias should be eliminated through standardized automated screens, this can actually be exacerbated in edge cases.  Make sure you have sanity checks in place via metrics you track as opposed to letting artificial intelligence start to dominate your recruiting process.