"This is a market that will be very hard to be a second mover, but it's also a market you cannot afford to miss out on. You need to start to understand how to design a conversation."- Bas Van De Hatred

Remember 2010? The iPhone had been around for about three years and you heard mobile was taking over the world. Your candidates would be wanting to apply by mobile and you said: no way. Applying for a new job is something you do when you have the time. You want a big screen for that. Guess what? It's 2018, about 50% of your website traffic comes from mobile devices and your website still sucks on mobile. Dutch research I've been doing with Digitaal-Werven for 12 years into corporate recruitment websites shows 75% of all Dutch careers websites do not have their vacancies optimized for mobile and it's impossible to apply at 65% of them. And the Dutch seem to be leaders when it comes to corporate careers websites in the world.

It's 2018 and you are hearing things about chatbots and voice-assistants. And your thinking: no way people will use chatbots or voice commands to apply for jobs, right? Just like in 2010 you didn't believe they'd move to mobile. Let this be a wake-up call. Start learning about the conversational interface. Because that's what this is. Chatbots and Voice are different sides of the same coin, they are conversational interfaces. Not only will your candidates demand them, but they might be able to help you in ways you can't imagine.

There are different types of chatbots around now. Depending on your type of applicants and your maturity of the recruitment function this might be for you, or not.

The simple bot

The first chatbot simply answers questions. That is a great first step to learn. It can answer all the FAQ's in a way much more intuitive than a website can. You can learn from it what sort of questions your applicants are actually interested in. Spoiler alert: many are about remuneration.

The great thing about these bots is that they might also function as an alert service. For example, in Facebook messenger, you can ask someone if you are allowed to get back to him or her if a job is available if the search turns up empty. But you might also have a candidate-centric approach. Like we did with a university where our bot asks students interested in a Ph.D. when they would graduate. We know on average a Ph.D. starts looking for this position 3 to 6 months before graduation, so we get back to them in that time period. A candidate-centric alert instead of a company-centric alert. This might also be applicable to trainees.

The recruitment assistant bot

A bot might also help with either the first interview, asking several knock out or selection questions. A German company hiring interns simply had the bot ask the three questions they asked every interview and decided to base the invitations on that. This way the first face-to-face interview could go deeper into the candidate and less time was wasted on unmotivated candidates. A British chatbot for a elderly care institution did the entire first screening based on the knock out questions they used. Than it scheduled a call with a recruiter.

So some chatbots also have the ability to plan interviews, either face-to-face or by phone. There are even bots that are able to conduct these interviews by phone. Use voice to text and redirect the text back in the ATS. But that's for example ideal in Russia, where much is done by phone, but less in for example the UK, where you expect a human to call.

The assessment bot

Then there is the chatbot that's able to build a personality profile based on linguistics. Basically,

there's been a lot of research done in building personality profiles based on the type of words we use and how we use them. This is called LIWC. There is one bot out there that uses this technology in order to build a personality profile from the way you communicate. So not only do you have your first intake questions, you also get a scientifically valid personality profile with it.

Voice assistants

And all of this... will move to voice. Because voice assistants and chatbots are different sides of the same coin. Several development tools even have the option to export the conversation either to Amazon's Alexa of Facebook Messenger. And voice is taking over the way we communicate. And this will change things. Because with voice you have a clear winner takes all. It's not possible to buy ads. A question is asked and Alexa will answer, based on the app (called skills) that ranks best or that's triggered by the user. So brand awareness will be more important than ever.

Learn about conversational interfaces

Now is the time to learn about conversational interfaces. This is a market that will be very hard to be a second mover, but it's also a market you cannot afford to miss out on. You need to start to understand how to design a conversation. Recently one of the major Dutch airlines at a voice conference was asked why they were investing in voice assistants even though they are hardly used in the Netherlands. His answer: we need to figure out how this works and what competencies we need to be the best at this. And we need to do that before everybody is using it.

Because I'm so passionate about this subject I'm very proud we have speakers on simple bots, assessment bots and voice assistants at the European recruitment event TA-Live: https://ta-live.com/ An entire track about the conversational interface.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in the article above are those of the authors' and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of this publishing house