Feature
Hiring a new employee can cost a company anywhere from $4000 to $20,000 before salary and benefits, according to Indeed. So it should come as no surprise that HR managers are turning to solutions which promise to ease their workload.
Enter the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot — a technology with the power to transform hiring strategies and redefine how companies recruit and hire top talent. Below are how two companies used AI chatbots to solve some of their pressing hiring needs.
The Role of AI Chatbots in Today's Hiring Landscape
AI chatbots — also referred to as virtual assistants (VAs) — are applications of artificial intelligence that can automate talent acquisition (TA) operations tasks. The result is an improved candidate experience and greater recruiter efficiency.
Hiten Sheth, director of research and advisory, HR tech and transformation at Gartner, believes VAs have the ability to enhance candidate engagement during the attraction and application process through a conversational user interface that is known as the chatbot. This, he said, helps drive end-to-end efficiency for multiple user roles.
The adoption of VAs in talent acquisition is increasing, as organizations seek to optimize processes and improve key TA metrics, Sheth said. In a survey conducted by Gartner, when recruiting leaders were asked where in the recruitment process AI is currently used, AI chatbots was among the top three cited use cases.
Another survey, this time by ResumeBuilder.com, questioned over 1,000 employees involved in their organizations’ hiring about their use of AI chatbots in the process:
- 43% said they already have or plan to adopt AI interviews by 2024.
- 15% said they expect companies will use AI to make decisions on candidates without human input.
- 62% believe it’s very or somewhat likely that AI will someday replace human hiring managers entirely.
These numbers signal a significant, near-term shift in the hiring process. To help HR leaders understand how they, too, can make use of the AI chatbot technology, let’s take a look at two real-world examples.
Related Article: NYC's New AI Bias Law Is in Effect. Here's What it Entails
Hewlett Packard Converts Job Seekers Into Applicants
Attracting qualified applicants to job openings can feel like a herculean task for many organizations. Add to that the struggle of keeping those same applicants engaged once they’re on your job post or career website.
“Often, we find casual job seekers will leave a careers site after a few seconds if they can’t find the answers they’re looking for,” said Lavonne Monroe, vice president of global talent acquisition and onboarding at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).
In response, the company implemented an AI-powered chatbot to attract, engage and convert job seekers into new hires.
“Our chatbot sits on every page of the HPE careers website and greets new visitors with a friendly prompt, offering to help them find a job,” Monroe said.
To start, the bot asks the person for a resume or information on their background and interests. Then, the chatbot either narrows down jobs that would be a good fit based on the person’s answer or, using an extensive library of answers managed by an in-house team, answers questions about the hiring process, compensation and benefits, or the company itself.
“This functionality,” said Monroe, “makes it easier for applicants to understand more about what they can expect when interviewing and working at HPE.” Ultimately, she said, chatbots make the information-gathering process easier and quicker for candidates, “making it more likely for them to take the next step to apply.”
In the first three months of 2023, the company has more than doubled the industry standard in the number of visitors to its careers website, reaching 950,000 site visits in total. And with its Phenom chatbot technology, the company has converted 26% of casual job seekers into actual hires.
Eventually, Monroe said, as AI evolves across industries, job seekers will come to expect even more sophistication from careers site chatbots.
“With further developed machine learning functionality, these chatbots can have more robust, personalized conversations and change their answers according to previous input from the job seeker,” she said. “This evolution will lead to more job seekers feeling confident and prepared to apply for a job on the careers site.”
Related Article: How Chatbots Can Enhance Candidate and Employee Experience
General Motors Speeds Up Its Candidate Management Process
General Motors doesn’t have a candidate flow problem. “I would say we have a candidate management problem,” said Eileen Kovalsky, global head of candidate experience at General Motors, in an interview with AI company Paradox.
According to Kovalsky, GM receives between one and two million applications per year. But it was taking an average of five days to schedule interviews — on a good day. “It was just leaving our candidates wondering: Are we ever actually going to get this thing on the calendar?”
To try to resolve the issue, GM leaders asked:
- How do we reduce the lead time to an interview?
- How do we ensure we’re bringing a better experience to our recruiters so they can do things that add more value?
- How do we take something 100% manual and make it 100% automated while creating a better experience for everyone?
In the interview, Kovalsky outlines two major selling points for GM’s investment in an AI chatbot. The first was efficiency. The second: to capture top-shelf, highly competitive candidates.
“The types of roles that we recruited for yesterday are very different from what we need tomorrow,” she said. “And those candidates are a hot commodity on this market. They have a very short shelf life…and if we can’t get them locked and loaded as quickly as possible, we lose them.”
The solution that GM came up with? “Let’s take anything that can be automated and automate it,” Kovalsky said.
The result was Ev-e, a conversational hiring assistant that can automate interview scheduling and answer candidate questions around the clock. And the benefits GM unlocked from Ev-e started to roll in within just months of implementing the AI chatbot.
Webinar
Sep
25
CMS Briefing: A Live Look at What’s Next in AI-Driven Platforms
Learn how leading organizations are using AI‑driven tools to publish faster, personalize smarter and stay secure.
Register
Webinar
On demand
Ready or Not: How Data-First Organizations Are Unlocking Agentforce Potential
Learn how to cut through the noise, activate Agentforce and build a Salesforce AI strategy that actually delivers.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
AI in Customer Service: Faster Resolutions, Happier Customers
Don’t let rising demand burn out your team. See how to build a smarter, more resilient support org.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
From Hype to High-Impact CX Strategies That Actually Scale
Turn buzzworthy AI and outsourcing trends into measurable CX wins with fresh 2025 data.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
Insights to Action Rethinking the Contact Center for Real Business Impact
Join our exclusive webinar to hear CX executives share their innovative strategies for transforming service delivery.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
Accelerating Healthcare Ops with AI
Sign up to see how your peers are putting AI to work — and making it stick.
Watch Now
According to Kovalsky, after just one year of using Ev-e, GM saw:
- $2M+ saved in hard costs by reducing recruiting contractor headcount.
- 500,000+ interviews scheduled by Ev-e.
- A 99% decrease in time to schedule interviews, down to 27 minutes on average.
- 180,000 days of manual work by recruiters, managers and candidates saved.
“Has it been an easy road?” asked Kovalsky. “Definitely not. Every day, we’re still fighting over obstacles. But every day it gets better, and we have…more ways to share out: This is why this adds value, or this is how else you can use this or this is how you would articulate the value of this tool to your hiring manager to help them understand the way that we’re now working within talent acquisition.”
Related Article: VC Firms Fund a Chatbot Revolution in HR
AI Chatbots Can ‘Revolutionize’ Recruitment & Hiring
Sheth is not surprised AI chatbots are able to solve these types of issues for companies. The technology can streamline processes, allowing recruiters to improve efficiency and focus on more valuable tasks, he said.
And their personalized and instant responses to candidate queries drive a significantly better candidate experience and enhance conversion rates. “VAs are particularly useful for high-volume recruiting, handling activities like applicant inquiry, interview scheduling, feedback collection and offer/onboarding execution.”
Ultimately, Sheth said, the widespread adoption of AI chatbots has the potential to turn recruiting on its head. Companies that offer AI chatbots for recruitment are expanding their capabilities to better support recruiters and candidates in activities like candidate reengagement, assessment, screening and strategic campaigning.
And more recently, the introduction of generative AI has brought new possibilities to the drawing board, like the potential to significantly enhance the bots’ ability to drive more realistic, contextually-appropriate and human-like communication.
“AI chatbots based on LLM foundation models likely will improve their ability to screen candidates by leveraging natural language processing, sentiment analysis, and machine learning techniques,” Sheth said.
Until then, while AI chatbots have the potential to revolutionize the recruitment and hiring process, companies must nevertheless approach their implementation thoughtfully, Sheth said, ensuring ethical considerations and human oversight are in place.
