Chat bots are a hotter topic right now than pumpkin spice lattes at a Starbucks convention.

Why? Because in 2015, this happened:

As shown above, more people use messaging apps in their daily lives than social networks. This means that there are a lot more conversations going on about how this fits into the whole automation picture and whether we are in the midst of (yet another) tech revolution.

However, let's forget the big picture questions for now and focus on how this affects and improves what you and I are doing right now in recruitment.

"You have to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology" - Steve Jobs





Rethinking the way a user interacts with the web

First, let's take a step back from the way we use the internet and think about what we are actually doing (when we aren't sharing cat gifs).

We're searching for information.

As digital natives, navigating a web page is second nature to us. You think of what you are looking for, you click on the link and there you are.

The web page creator tries to make everything as easy to find as possible. In the age of minimalist design, choosing what goes where can be the subject of much debate.

How does that look for recruitment?

Say someone is interested to know what the culture is like of a company, or where the office locations are - both are easy enough to find just by clicking on a tab.

But what about questions that are a bit more in depth, like:

"What technologies do you use?"

"Are you able to sponsor my visa?"

"How many employees are in your Toronto office?"

Let's take that last one for example.

Your process may be to browse the About us or Life at X page. It might say how many employees are in the company, but that's not exactly what you wanted to know.

Next, you may likely jump on Linkedin, search for the company employees, narrow your search down to the Toronto based profiles only and gauge a rough estimate from there.

That's a lot of leg work for potentially inaccurate information!

So let's approach it from a different angle and look at how quickly we can answer the same question in a different (and much cooler) way:





A definitive answer in less than a second - not too shabby!





What are we hoping to get out of this?

Now that we can see the benefits from the user side, what does it do for us on our end?

There's a long list of benefits, but let's look at what I would say are two of the biggest:

Engagement

By delivering information in a conversation-like environment, we're interacting with potential employees from the get-go. Instead of clicking a couple of links and only spending a few seconds on each page, we're able to have a conversation with them, find out what questions are really on their mind, and as we collect more data - give them the answers they really want from the beginning. It's a recruiter's dream!

Insights

This is by far the greatest benefit to having a chat bot on your careers page.

Data is a large part of almost every decision there is in business, so imagine if you could see reports on everyone who you talked to...

What did they want to know?

What locations and teams were they most interested in?

How did the question trends change over time?

Was their experience positive in their tone?

"Data! Glorious data!" - everyone who likes to see the numbers

Has this been done before?

Chat bots? Yep, they've been around since 1966!

Chat bots for a careers page? Not really.

It's all very new territory, and that's why we're so excited about going live with it.

There have been a few attempts, though these were more focused on redirecting you through their website rather than building a conversational experience with the user.

The closest example of one of these "go here" bots would be Sergeant Star - designed to point you in the right direction for what you want to know about joining the US Army.

But hey, for a startup company from NZ coming second to a US government organisation with a $600B budget isn't so bad, right?!





Where are we now?

We can see every question that gets asked and how it was answered. This means we can go through and "train" Pepper to let her know that she either answered the question correctly - or if not, how she should have answered it.

At the time of this article, Pepper can answer questions on just over 350 topics (pretty impressive for a pug).

We Alpha tested how people would interact with Pepper by inviting everyone at Vend to jump in and ask some questions. This helped us hone in the accuracy of the responses to just over 80% of Vend and general careers related questions.





What's next?

By opening up Pepper to the public for Beta testing on our careers page, the massive influx of questions being asked will mean that she will rapidly grow smarter with each response. If she didn't answer your question properly this time round, check back in a couple of days!

Aside from enhancing her response accuracy, I am also working on the following features for a slicker experience:

Rich message delivery (pictures, buttons etc.)

Saving user details within the session (i.e. saving the name of the user and dropping it later in the conversation)

Asking more questions about the user for a more natural dialogue.





Chat to Pepper on our careers page here!

Follow up article with one month of data here!



