Recruitment Marketing Public

The AI Chatbot Assistant is a vital part of your Talent Acquisition team - helping candidates find answers to their questions, find the ideal role within your organisation, or perhaps simply helping them to connect with you by joining your talent network.

This article provides some hints and tips for you to consider when configuring your AI Chatbot Assistant to help optimize the candidate experience.

General Guidelines

When configuring the AI Chatbot Assistant, you should consider the following general guidelines:

• Where possible, try to configure messages to help guide candidates towards successful interactions. The conversational nature of the chatbot means that candidates can enter any question or input, and whilst the chatbot technology does an excellent job of interpreting that input, given the limitless way in which candidates could ask questions, the chatbot will never be able to interpret the question with 100% accuracy. Providing hints, such as the name of commonly searched jobs or examples of frequently asked questions, will assist in providing the candidate with a positive interaction experience.
• Look to effectively utilize prompts to provide candidates with guidance on successful interactions and common activities.
• Try to avoid situations where a candidate hits a dead end in terms of their interaction. For example, if their job search returns no results, ensure that the "No matching jobs" message provides them with examples of alternate search phrases, or make it clear that they are also able to visit the job search page on your career site to look for roles.
• Ensure the tone and style of the messages align with your organizational style and employer brand, and look to make the prompts conversational. 

Chatbot Naming and Avatar

It is important in terms of candidate transparency to ensure that the candidate knows they are interacting with an automated AI-powered chatbot, rather than communicating directly with a human.

An easy way to try to achieve this is to effectively convey this in terms of the name and avatar you assign to the AI-powered chatbot. Try to avoid using human names, which may cause some ambiguity for the candidate.

Welcome Message

When configuring the welcome message for the AI Chatbot Assistant, you should consider the following:

• Make it transparent that the chatbot is an automated solution and that the candidate is not interacting with a real person. This can be achieved in a number of ways, including the naming of the chatbot or incorporating appropriate verbiage within the welcome message.
• Provide the candidate with insights into the capabilities of the chatbot. For example, you could mention that the chatbot is able to help the candidate search for open job roles, including providing hints on the structure of common searches. Additionally, you could indicate that the chatbot is able to answer common questions.
• Utilize prompts to help guide candidates towards successful interactions. For example, include a commonly searched job, or highlight a particular FAQ that you think might be of value to candidates.

Free Text Job Search

The conversational nature of the AI Chatbot Assistant provides an engaging way for candidates to search for open job opportunities, and the AI technology does a great job of interpreting search related inputs from the candidate, including extracting the relevant aspects of what can often be complex sentences.

When configuring the chatbot, we should be mindful that candidates will ask questions in many different ways, and the chatbot technology will not always be able to correctly interpret their intent with 100% accuracy. With that in mind, we should look to guide the candidate as much as we can to structure their search query in a format that will increase the chatbot's ability to successfully interpret their input.

You should consider the following when configuring the Free Text Job Search capability:

• For the initial prompt, include examples of successful searches, in particular, consider showing examples of commonly searched jobs.

• For the "Success" message, consider including the supported merge fields, which allow you to include the candidate's job query and/or desired search location in the message.

• For the "No matching jobs" message, also include examples of successful searches. Also, consider including prompts for successful jobs.

AI-Powered Responses

The AI Chatbot Assistant does an excellent job of providing quick responses and can respond to candidates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Given the importance of ensuring that the candidate only receives accurate responses to their questions, the chatbot will only ever respond to questions using the information you have made available to it via the FAQ Library.

As a result, there will be occasions where the chatbot simply does not have the relevant knowledge available to it to confidently answer a question, and when this happens, the chatbot will return the success message from the Fallback intent.

To prevent the candidate from hitting a dead end in terms of their interaction, you should consider configuring this message to incorporate suggestions of other questions that the chatbot will successfully be able to answer, as well as utilizing prompts to achieve the same outcome.