One of the ongoing themes of the podcast in 2019 has been my quest to cut through the hype and find out to what extent employers are automating aspects of their recruiting process. I’ve spoken to several practitioners and look at the automation debate for a few different angles. So I thought it was high time that I talked to a recruiting technology vendor about the art of the possible in recruiting automation and the benefits they are seeing their clients get from it.
My guest this week is Aida Fazylova, founder and CEO of XOR, an automated communication platform for recruiting. Aida started her career as a recruiter and has some great insights to share into both the current and future capabilities of recruiting automation.
In the interview, we discuss:
- The amount of time wasted on repetitive tasks in recruiting
- The evolving sophistication of chatbots
- Natural language recognition and intent analysis
- Do candidates like interacting with chatbots?
- What areas of the recruiting can be automated now and how much could be automated in the future
- Humans versus machines
Aida also talks about the results and benefits employers are getting from recruiting automation as well her predictions for the marketing int he next 12 months.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from zor. ZOR is a global recruiting platform that drives smarter and more efficient hiring. Direct employers and staffing agencies use Zor’s AI powered software to automate recruiting’s most repetitive tasks like candidate pre screening, interview scheduling, ongoing engagement, and cold outreach at scale. By freeing recruiters to focus on what matters, Zor increases productivity while delivering a personalized, attentive candidate experience that’s responsive 24. 7 and delivers a 99.3% candidate satisfaction rate. Hundreds of companies across the globe, including IKEA, Exxon Mobile, MOL Group, X5 Retail and Manpower Group, rely on ZOR to hire better people faster. To find out more, go to www.ZOR.AI. that’s www.ZOR.AI AI and xor is spelled x O R.
Matt Alder [00:01:22]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 231 of the Recruiting Future podcast. One of the ongoing themes of the podcast in 2019 has been my quest to cut through the hype and find out to what extent employers are actually automating aspects of their recruiting process. I’ve spoken to a number of practitioners and looked at the automation debate from a few different angles. So I thought it was high time to speak to a recruiting technology vendor about the art of the possible in recruiting automation and the benefits they’re seeing their clients get from it. My guest this week is Aida Fazylova,, founder and CEO of XOR, an automated communication platform for recruiting. Aida started her career as a recruiter and has some great insights to share into both the current and future capabilities of recruiting automation. Hi Aida and welcome to the podcast.
Aida Fazylova [00:02:22]:
Hi Matt, thank you for having me.
Matt Alder [00:02:24]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell us what you do for sure.
Aida Fazylova [00:02:30]:
My name is Aida Fazylova. I’m CEO and co founder at Zohor. At Zohor, we built the new communication platform that lets our customers recruiting and HR team to hire and retain talent much more efficiently than ever before.
Matt Alder [00:02:45]:
So I mean, tell us a bit more about your background and your story and how you got to do what you do now.
Aida Fazylova [00:02:51]:
Sure. So my educational background of mathematician and software engineer, what happens was I dived into the talent acquisition right after the university and I’ve been working as a practitioner for as a talent acquisition practitioner for almost a decade. So being a practitioner, I’ve noticed that I spend three quarters of my time every day on routine repetitive tasks. So like going back and forth over the email, trying to schedule the candidates for role or calling them to ask the same very questions, to answer the same very questions and then screening those stacks and stacks of resume every day. So you know, when three years ago the new chatbot technology just came into Media Spotlight, I immediately thought that, you know, this must be something that I need to do.
Matt Alder [00:03:34]:
Fantastic. Now I know that you do a lot of stuff around AI and a lot of stuff around automation and I’m kind of looking forward to sort of talking through the detail of it. All year on the podcast I’ve been on a quest to, to look into recruitment or recruiting automation and see what’s happening and what’s going on out there. And I’ve spoken to lots of practitioners and lots of other people. So it’s great to finally get to talk to a vendor and find out some of the, you know, some of the things you’re doing and the, and the projects you’re working on. So, so, so first question, chatbots. It seems like chatbots have been with us forever but, but really they’ve only been around in recruiting for a couple of years. Talk me through how they’ve developed in comple time period.
Aida Fazylova [00:04:15]:
Oh for sure. For starters, let me just give you like very quick overview of Zor. Right, so what do we give to the customers is on one side the ability to communicate with their employees and the candidates over the text messaging which gets them the 46% of the response rate within 15 minutes and another on site we are using AI powered chatbots in order to automate the most routine or pieces of processes in recruiting. Think of interview scheduling, candidate screening, talent pool reactivation and re engagement. Answering the fake news questions and the employee referrals for the talent acquisition. So the chatbots had been with us in the last two years, you write, they’ve been evolving a great deal because we started from very, you know, with like three years ago when there was a huge media hype about the chatbots. Everybody were talking about how they’re going to take over the world, replace the apps. This was when I thought to myself, you know, the recruiting and HR is going to be one of the best areas of application of chatbots. So we started a couple of years ago from very basic functionalities like screening of the applicants, very streamlined and kind of tree looking, decision tree based chatbots that can respond to any of the questions that the candidates might ask and pretty much screen them for a role and Then from that moment on, I feel like requesting chatbots have gotten so much more complex because chatbot is only one of the interfaces, right? And after all what you’re doing is a workflow automation with the communication automation piece. So first of all they got much more advanced in terms of the natural language functionality and natural language recognition and the intent analysis. Because let’s say the candidates can ask the same various questions in 20 different ways. They can ask what is the benefit package in the company, what are the employees perks, do you have insurance? And in order to handle, you know, recognize the intent and then pick the closest by meaning response from the knowledge base, you know, this is something that chat was heavy bolt in in the last three years. I feel like second of all, more and more of the processes in recruiting are starting to be automated by artificial intelligence and chatbots. So it’s not only about the initial candidate engagement anymore, it’s also about the reactivation of your talent pool, refreshing your candidates profiles, figuring out who of them are open for new job opportunities at the moment. But it’s also things like scheduling. And I’m not only talking about the very basic scheduling scenarios, one on one interview with the recruiter over the phone, but also very complex scheduling scenarios like let’s say, sequence interviews, panel interviews for multiple interviewers, updating everybody’s calendar. Because this is one of the things that we need to do as a, you know, chatbot providers the least. The last thing people love to do is scheduling, I feel like. So yeah, and it’s not only internal acquisition anymore, the chatbot actually moved past the, you know, for the past post hires as well. So think of employees, onboardings, new hire check ins, internal mobility centers, pretty much employee satisfaction, post service and up till the moment of the exit interviews and the boomerang of employment. But also I feel like the mediums of the chatbots have changed. So they might be used multiple mediums like over the email, over the text, in many of the app messenger apps like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, Viber, and then on top of the website as a widget or in the mobile browsers as well.
Matt Alder [00:08:05]:
So I mean that’s really interesting. So really, you know, we’re sort of moving beyond chatbots and we’re, we’re into sort of automated intelligent conversation interfaces I suppose would be the best way to describe it from the experience that you have with the clients that you’re, that you’re working with. One of the, one of the questions that comes up time and time again is whether candidates or Potential hires or even employees. If you’re talking about using these within organizations, do people actually like interfacing with chatbots? What’s your kind of experience there?
Aida Fazylova [00:08:40]:
This is a great question because we were actually surveyed last year. We have surveyed 10,000 applicants that were randomly picked and asked them, how did you like the conversation with the chatbot at the end of the conversation? So the stats was pretty amazing, and I’m very proud of that. So 93.3% of all the applicants said it was excellent experience, 6% said it was good, and less than 1% didn’t like it. And I get where you’re coming from, because this is one of the main concerns that the prospects and the customers have. Like, what about if they don’t like to talk to the chatbots instead of a human? But at the same time, if you think about it, they don’t necessarily mind doing this if they get the job done within the first three minutes. Let’s say whenever they apply for a job opportunity, instead of filling out the ATS web application form, which takes them for 45 minutes to do sending it out, and 75% of all the applicants will never hear back, they would rather have a chatbot sitting on top of that and then just, you know, screen them on the asking very basic questions, answering any of their questions, capturing their information, and then pretty much schedule them for a meeting within three and a five minutes instead of, you know, by always. If the recruiter gets back to you, it might take up to two weeks.
Matt Alder [00:09:59]:
Yeah, I think that makes perfect sense. You sort of mentioned a number of areas of the recruitment process where you’re using this technology to effectively automate parts of the workflow? Could you sort of just recap which areas of the recruitment process can effectively be automated right now, and how much else do you think it’ll be possible to automate in the future?
Aida Fazylova [00:10:24]:
Absolutely. So, so let me start with that. The chatbots are not there to replace recruiters. They are not. They’re there to help the recruiters to automate the most routine, repetitive tasks by allowing them to bring this high quality human touch back to recruiting so that recruiters can actually do what matters the most. Build a relationship with the candidates, talk to them, evaluate the cultural fits, sell the job, and close the deal. Because after all, this is the main piece. And let the chatbot take care of all the routine, repetitive communications. Again, starting with, let’s say, working with the inbound candidates. Whenever the candidates are ready to apply from a job board or from the company career site, the chatbot pops up and starts engaging them into conversation, screens them for role schedules them for meeting, passes, all the information to the calendar in the ats. And if we’re talking about the outbound recruiting, whenever you reach out to the candidates yourself, you can actually utilize the chatbot technology so that you will deliver the announcement of the job opportunity in a personalized manner to every single candidate you would love to talk to. You know, and you would. The old ways of doing this is either calling them or emailing them, but this is like decline in engagement rates and then just, you know, conversion rate from those sources. So the chatbot reaches out to the candidates over the text and, let’s say, starts engaging them, sees whether or not this candidate is open for new job opportunities at the moment, and if so, connects this candidate to the recruiter with all the information about the candidate that you need to know before you actually pick up the phone and call them. So the third one, very important one, is scheduling and everything that is connected to the interview coordination. So not only scheduling and updating everybody’s calendars, but also making sure the candidates show up and don’t forget about this, because it sends them the reminders, can answer any of the questions about this interview. Let’s say, do you have the parking? Will I need to bring my ID to get to the building? How do I connect to the WebEx? And pretty much also taking care of the rescheduling scenarios and updating everybody’s calendars. Again, I’d say the fourth one is employee referrals. So one of the kind of sources of highest quality candidates, of course, your own employee referrals. So the chatbot can actually help you to automate this space as well, when they reach out to every single one of the new employees saying, hey, we’re hiring people for this particular role. If you successfully recommend somebody that we hire, let’s say there is a bonus, for example, and then if the person recommends their friends with a certain contact information, the chatbot can either pass it on to the recruiters and have them connect, but rather reach out to those candidates and see whether or not they’re open for new job opportunities at the moment, answer any of their questions that they might have beforehand, like, for example, do you have flexible scheduling schedule, working schedule possible, or will you provide me with the visa support on any other things that the candidates might be interested in, and then connect them to the recruiter once they’re ready to talk to them. So, and also, you know, everything up till the moment of the job Offer pretty much keeping the candidate engaged, updating them whenever the status changes in, let’s say, ATS scheduling for them for the next steps of the interview process and answer any of their questions they might have. But I still think that, you know, human touch is something that is not going anywhere from recruiting.
Matt Alder [00:14:01]:
No, absolutely. And I think, you know, that was, that was going to be my question really. I think obviously the human touch is important. Obviously we’re talking about automating repeatable processes. Is there a point in the future where, you know, the technology does start to impinge on some of the things that humans take for granted that they, that they do now? Do you think that, that that might be a possibility?
Aida Fazylova [00:14:25]:
I don’t really think there is a technical possibility for this within the next seven years, I’d say at least.
Matt Alder [00:14:31]:
And I think that makes sense in terms of other conversations I’ve had about the, the technology and the science behind it and that it is perhaps a bit more limited than people think it is in their, in their kind of sci fi robots taking over the world imaginations. So getting down to the kind of the results and benefits of this, what, what are employers achieving through this kind of AI and automation? You know, what kind of benefits, what kind of results are they getting?
Aida Fazylova [00:15:01]:
Absolutely. So the three main metrics we impact is first of all, increasing, decreasing in time to fill. Because you know, by automating all the routine repetitive tasks and by having a chat, conversing with 100% of all the applicants, 24, 7, being there for them and organizing the things like scheduling for meeting faster than ever before done manually, the chatbot are able to significantly decrease the time to fill. And then just, you know, let’s say we’ve seen the examples anywhere from 15 to 33% depending on the process of the company. So the second one is increasing the candidate engagement level as well as the candidate satisfaction level. So I’ve already told you about the experiment we’ve done with one of our customers for the employee satisfaction, the candidate satisfaction level. Right now we do this at the end of every single conversation with the candidate, you know, with certain, periodically. So we let them give them an idea about how did the candidate like the process and how does the satisfaction status kind of changes on a weekly basis. And the third one is decreasing the cost per field because you know, first of all, you capture all the best candidates right there when they’re ready to apply for a job. Don’t have them dropping off from this huge, very complex application process first. And then you capture the Best of the candidates that you possibly can get them on the phone and then engage them into recruiting process of the company. So yeah, those are the three main things I would say. And also in terms of the engagement, just to give you an example, just by changing the medium and using, let’s say instead of email and the calls that you used to use in the past, just using the texting, even in the manual regime, you increase the engagement and the response rate of the candidates drastically. So As I mentioned, it’s 46% of all the applicants will respond within 15 minutes. While over the email, if we’re talking about the cold email outreach, only 2 to 4% of them will respond within two weeks.
Matt Alder [00:17:21]:
I mean, that’s really interesting. And presumably employers will have that kind of data in kind of real time at their fingertips and be able to sort of optimize the channels and the mediums they use.
Aida Fazylova [00:17:33]:
Yes, absolutely. The mediums they used. And then just, you know, speaking, conversing with the candidates and the employees on their terms at the time they’re comfortable at over the things that they’re used to, like texting, for example, because we text back and forth with our family and friends all the time, 60% of our time on mobile phones, why not utilizing this easy way for candidates to communicate.
Matt Alder [00:17:57]:
Fantastic stuff. So final question, we’re recording this towards the very end of 2019. What would your predictions for this market be in 2020? How are things going to develop over the next 12 months?
Aida Fazylova [00:18:10]:
Well, that’s a great. So I would say we still operate in very new and emerging market, right? We do have the competition, the companies that are doing the same things. But I think, you know, across all the companies in this space, the penetration of the markets right now under 2%. So what I’m seeing happening is that the, you know, it’s pretty much the innovators and the early adopters that are adopting the technology and kind of getting the way of, you know, early majority coming. So I do see that there is a very, a lot, a lot of interest within enterprise customers, within staffing agencies of utilizing this technology not to increase their capacity, you know, decrease their costs, save the time. So I think one of the main shifts is going to be that this technology is going to be more and more of the commodity and then just more and more common across the western world, for sure. In terms of the functionality, I would say that the chatbots are going to be moving post hires as well. So in terms of all the process that might be automated within recruiting, they’re already there. Only the quality of the natural language recognition might change, which is really great and then tailoring to every single company’s processes. And I think that the chatbots are going to be moving past the employment up till the moment of the exit interviews and the boomerang employment as well.
Matt Alder [00:19:40]:
Aida, thank you very much for talking to me.
Aida Fazylova [00:19:42]:
Thank you so much, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:19:44]:
My thanks to Aida. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow us on Instagram. You can find the show by searching for Recruiting Future. If you’re a Spotify or Pandora listener, you can listen to the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com on that site. You can subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
