10+ Best Recruiting and HR Chatbots - 2024

Benefits of HR chatbots include saving time and costs, smarter candidate sourcing, and improved conversion rates on career sites. Below we’ll delve more into each one along with the common use cases:

• Interview Scheduling: HR chatbots are wonderful at scheduling screens and interviews. They can easily update calendars and look across multiple people’s openings 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. For example, IKEA used it to increase conversion rates by 10% in one of their operating regions.
• Candidate Sourcing: Most of the sourcing capabilities we’ve seen revolve around re-engaging your talent pool members and ATS database. A recruiting chatbot from some of the companies we’ve listed could look at open requisitions, match them to people in the database, and then reach out to see if they want to engage. It will also screen candidates and schedule the ones who make it through the screen. Not bad!
• Career Site Conversions: This is a page out of a typical marketing playbook. The bot’s conversational interface can help people who land on your career site get critical questions answered and then guide them to the relevant job postings in your ATS or send them directly to a recruiter to engage and start the application process. All the while, the chatbot can get contact information, give candidates the link to your privacy policy, and, if it all flows seamlessly through a well-designed portal, elevate your employer brand.
• Text-Based Recruiting: Chatbots can communicate via many different mediums; of course, SMS is one of those.  Probably our favorite use case here is text-to-apply, where you can drive candidates to apply by 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 who don’t necessarily have a resume and are more likely to text than apply via a job board.
• Employee Referrals: The best recruiting chatbots now enable employees to make referrals through their interface - and will 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, and job application bots have answers. Throughout the interview process, a chatbot can quickly answer applicant questions about the status of an application or many of the pertinent details you may find in an employee handbook (benefits, PTO policy, etc). These days, a recruitment bot can even follow up on a process that has grown cold and encourage candidates to at least go through the pre-screening process, for instance.
• ‍Employee Onboarding: Most HR chatbots also have a module for onboarding new employees. Many of these workflows are pre-built, but they allow the easily accessible “virtual assistant” interface that you get with the chatbot. The bot will also learn answers to common questions that come up during onboarding, providing a better employee experience and less strain on your HR team.
  

Common pitfalls associated with using HR chatbots include losing site of the human interaction, lack of experimentation, and unmanaged expectations.

• Human interaction is key to making sure your candidate experience doesn’t degrade. Whether for recruiting or HR, AI and chatbots should augment what your team is doing, not replace it. Both the human recruiter and the automated processes unleashed by them should never lose sight of the person who matters most: the applicant.
• Don’t get overwhelmed with the many ways a chatbot can help. You likely came to this page 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 in the benefits of AI but hesitate to take the plunge. You won’t know if it’s right for you until you get some hands-on time with the tool, so start exploring! It’s as easy as getting an OpenAI account and getting it to polish job ad copy, some of your candidate emails, or signing up for a demo or trial with one of the companies we’ve listed.
• Some chatbot offerings can be set up quickly but take a long time to do “right.” Instead of “AI,” they are regurgitating the hundreds of responses you had to input into a spreadsheet when you get set up. 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, and it’s helping, but it will not solve all of your problems or completely replace recruiters and HR professionals. 
• Engage your hiring managers to help you understand what’s important to them. Get sales and marketing’s take on how they think about using chatbots to engage customers. There are a lot of parallels and ways you can learn from chatbot examples across your business.

Regarding recruiting, the Return On Investment (ROI) driven by chatbots is fairly straightforward: These bots allow you to get more quality applicants into your funnel who would have bounced from your page without applying. You can measure the efficacy directly by assessing the number, speed, and quality of hires made and the number of TA team hours saved.

On the other hand, the ROI of HR chatbots is 100% about time savings with hiring and recruiting. We recently talked to HR thought leader Bennet Sung, who suggested that the internal effect of these tools is massive. Based on his years of experience, he shared that the most common use case for HR chatbots is self-service automation for FAQs from employees.

If you’re an HR pro, you know that a significant part of your day is spent connecting employees with available information that is hard to find in company handbooks and policy documents. Taking the HR human out of the equation makes it more efficient for everyone, and it is a clear boost to ROI.

To run your own numbers, feel free to download our ROI calculator for HR and Recruiting chatbots.

If you’re considering adding an HR chatbot to your recruiting efforts, you’re probably evaluating vendors based on specific criteria. It is critical to stay organized as you vet various providers, and we recommend using a simple spreadsheet like this one that tracks which vendors meet which criteria, along with other key considerations such as pricing and rep likeability.

What is an HR chatbot?

An HR chatbot is a virtual assistant that simulates a human conversation with candidates and employees. Chatbots automate tasks like interview scheduling, employee referrals, candidate screening, and more. But that is far from everything! You can get creative with the tasks that these AI tools can handle.

How does an HR chatbot work?

HR chatbots use AI to interpret and process conversational information and send appropriate replies 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 generally require employee attention, making HR operations more efficient. This saves recruiters time and decreases 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; for example— “We were getting 5% of traffic into the ATS before 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%.” HR bots can often 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 regarding more senior hires.
• Candidate Net Promoter Score: 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 ATSs on the market are terrible) but are among the most important aspects of any WorkTech tool.
• Time saved: HR and recruiting chatbots will save your team time, full stop. How you measure this is another story. One way is to track all of the tasks the HR bot was able to accomplish in a given period and compare that with how long your team would’ve taken to do the same. Another is to assess the relative effectiveness of your team post-implementation; are recruiters hiring more people, and are HR leaders able to get more done?

Beyond metrics, it’s important to ensure that your recruiting process remains human despite your newfound efficiency. While unconscious hiring bias should be eliminated through standardized, automated screens, this can 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.

Getting an HR Chatbot is a no-brainer for talent acquisition teams. They’re so popular because they work in driving leads down the funnel. In the world of talent attraction, it’s the same concept - get more leads down the funnel by engaging passive candidates.

Beyond conversion, a recruiting chatbot can help with many use cases. We have glossed over non-recruiting workflows like onboarding, answering employee questions, new hire check-ins, employee engagement, and internal mobility. The best HR chatbots are extremely powerful and only getting better.

If you’ve made it this far, you’re serious about adding an HR Chatbot to your recruiting tech stack. Whether it’s to cut down on scheduling and screening time, drive more applicants into the ATS, or one of the many other use cases, the next step will be to get a demo with one of our pre-vetted vendors to take a deep dive into their product. You can use this spreadsheet to stay organized as you do demos.