How Intelligent Chatbots Can Help You Win the Talent War
Back in 1997, as part of a groundbreaking study, McKinsey & Company coined the term “talent war.” The study identified how the worlds of employment and recruitment were transforming, in ways that were making things tricky for businesses. In this new paradigm, the study concluded, talented people are more scarce, more mobile, more demanding, and a bigger asset than ever. Though people had previously needed companies, companies now needed people. The balance had shifted.
A couple of decades later, the talent war is fiercer than ever. The spread of the internet has made the friction to apply for jobs minimal, meaning recruiters are swamped with exponentially more people. At the same time, many of these people are less interested or keen than they once were. They are passive job-seekers. This double effect is causing trouble. A recent ManpowerGroup Talent Shortage Survey found that of the 40,000 employers surveyed, almost half are struggling to fill roles. In the US, the number of employers experiencing talent shortages has grown from 32% in 2015 to 46% in 2019. Things are even worse in Japan and parts of Eastern Europe.
With the talent war intensifying, how can you stay ahead? Here’s one proven solution: chatbots.
Chatbots like Wendy can help you win the talent war by automating many of the tasks that constitute recruiting, thus making you faster and more comprehensive. At the beginning of the process, chatbots can help you sift through the enormous but hard-to-parse field of candidates by bringing AI to bear on sourcing: that very first stage of actually finding candidates that you want to reach out to.
Without AI, sourcing can be an arduous and time-consuming task. You scour LinkedIn, scroll through endless profiles looking for the right people. It takes hours. But chatbots like Wendy can automate this top-of-funnel activity. Wendy is built to conduct personalised outreach campaigns, aimed at a targeted list that is derived from her substantial database. Wendy absorbs detailed job descriptions, and scours the digital realm for potential candidates, both active and passive. In seconds, using instant and powerful data recall, she can assess hundreds of candidates’ suitability for a given role.
These conversations enable Wendy to conduct the screening part of the recruitment process. Through complex and personalised conservational algorithms, Wendy can conduct in-depth, role-specific conversations at scale. She can ask all of the right questions and all of the right follow-ups, and answer any queries a candidate might have. She always has full domain knowledge of the industry, and access to all relevant facts and figures.
Finally, Wendy can hand off tailored recommendations to the hiring manager. Having located a potentially suitable candidate and conducted a thorough screening conversation, she can make the call whether or not to forward them on.
Through all of this, the numbers that a chatbot like Wendy can hit are phenomenal. One new Wade and Wendy user had 63 open roles that needed filling, and zero applicants. In two weeks, Wendy completed 767 lengthy and personalised chats with candidates she identified as potentially a good fit (that’s 54 chats per day). The recruiter accepted 66% of the qualified and interested candidates Wendy recommended. 45 of the 63 job openings were filled.
The talent war is real. There are lots of job-seekers out there, but it’s hard work sifting through them all, hard work determining who is serious, and time-consuming work to have the necessary conversations. A chatbot like Wendy can automate many of these tasks, giving you a much greater chance of finding the right talent waiting out there to be hired.
