Robotic automation gradually covers more and more areas of human activity. In the old days we only heard about robotic loaders and robotic engineers working on production lines and machines, now they have got to business processes, in particular HR processes. HR bots post vacancies on job sites, collect a candidate database, and can conduct telephone interviews. But is it so effective?
Let's highlight the clear pros and cons.
Pros:
1. HR bots help to “offload” the recruiter when monitoring candidates, filtering resumes, and calling, provided that there is a mass recruitment of employees, in particular, which means that more attention can be paid to internal HR. For me personally, this is an objective plus, but subject to well-defined filtering criteria.
2. Increasing the coverage of candidates is a controversial point, since managing to contact all candidates is the main task of each HR.
3. Another of the pluses is often the speed of dialing - I can’t agree, since the chatbot in any case does not call all potential candidates at the same time, which means that, in theory, in those 10 minutes that he will interview one candidate, competitors can catch hold of another one, more promising, which is also possible with a “live” HR.
4. They say that people are franker and less embarrassed with the HR bot - as for me, the formality of the conversation, since not all bots are “ready” for the free flow of dialogue, does not contribute to the emancipation of the interlocutor and his frankness. The intonation of a recruiter alone can sometimes save a situation when a person is not ready to admit something or is simply confused. Although when setting up HR bots the choice of intonation and gender are available, they have not been yet “learned” to change them naturally.
And now I’ll smoothly move from this point to the cons of HR bots for recruiting that are obvious to me.
1. The conversation imitates a living one, but they are absolutely not alike - a bot needs much more time to think and process an answer than a candidate. We already mentioned intonation. And any conversation should have its own pace, which is also important.
2. Low conversion - yes, there is a huge contradiction in this, I insist that conversations with the bot repel candidates, and this is justified - if there was no time to conduct a short telephone interview with them, then in the work process in the event of difficulties, they also may not be heard and understood, plus, the bots are not taken seriously, but, on the contrary, are considered to be intrusive.
3. And the most basic minus, which overlaps, for me personally, all the pluses is the fact that the candidate is selected not only on the basis of professional qualities, but also on the psycho-emotional state, because the team is also a special internal microclimate, which is necessary to be saved and maintained. From personal experience, I can say that there were enough cases when a fairly professional applicant did not fit exactly the mentioned criteria, during communication, we perfectly understood that he simply wouldn’t be able to join the team and work fruitfully together, without even minor conflicts, which means, alas, failure.
Speaking about the IT sphere, taking into account the originality of the inner world of developers, I would not recommend going into absolute robotic automation of HR processes except the stage of resume filtration. Live communication, even in the form of a short telephone interview, already allows you to get some impression of the candidate and, perhaps, not even waste his or your time.
