Recently, ClearCompany proudly announced the release of Virtual Recruiter, a new AI-powered chatbot assistant designed to help our clients streamline recruiting and improve the candidate experience. Now, we’re sitting down to explore Virtual Recruiter’s capabilities with two foremost ClearCompany product experts: Charley Miller, Principal Product Manager of Talent Development, and Ellen Wilson, Senior Product Marketing Director.
Here's what Charley and Ellen had to say about the Virtual Recruiter and its incredible potential for HR and recruiters.
Read more about the release of ClearCompany’s Virtual Recruiter.
Q: Thanks for joining us, Charley and Ellen! Can you start by telling us about the new Virtual Recruiter chatbot and how it works?
Charley: Of course! Virtual Recruiter sits on our clients’ Career Sites, appearing when visitors click on a job post. It’s designed to convert people who are already showing interest in a specific job into candidates without them having to fill out a seven-page application or wait for a call from a recruiter. Virtual Recruiter helps reduce the time it takes to schedule interviews from weeks to minutes.
Companies have visitors coming to their career sites 24/7, and now they have the ability to turn these visitors into candidates. On those nights and weekends when recruiters aren’t available, Virtual Recruiter enables people to apply for jobs, answer knockout questions, and even self-schedule interviews.
When recruiters come in on Monday, they already have interviews lined up. For clients with high-volume jobs that require a lot of candidate flow or those with lots of evergreen requisitions, the Virtual Recruiter helps keep the candidate pipeline filled and ensures a steady stream of applicants.
Ellen: With the Virtual Recruiter chatbot, job seekers are engaged the minute they arrive. It helps facilitate job application completion and jump-start hiring processes. Industry statistics show that if a career site provides job seekers with chatbot support, 13% more job seekers will click on a requisition, and 40% more will complete an application.
Charley: It's fast, it’s to the point, and it's engaging. It's really a great experience.
Q: How is ClearCompany’s Virtual Recruiter different from other chatbots on the market?
Charley: Only a select few companies offer a chatbot that actually converts visitors into candidates. Other companies’ main business is the chatbot, and those are often very expensive and very hard to maintain.
Oftentimes, they have these templates where you actually have to write out the answers so that when the chatbot gets to that question, it can serve up the right answer. That takes a lot of time to set up and even more time to maintain.
With ClearCompany’s Virtual Recruiter, there's no setup and no maintenance. It just piggybacks on all the decisions the person made when they set up their job requisition. There's no extra piece to embed; there's nothing you have to do on the technical side — it just works.
Ellen: We removed unnecessary bells and whistles. ClearCompany’s Virtual Recruiter chatbot supports recruiters’ most important need: getting job seekers to fill out and submit a 100% complete application. It really is designed to support a career site’s most important use case, which is to help generate more applicants.
Charley: And there are ways to customize it for clients that need to match branding across many sites!
Q: What if the role doesn’t ask for a resume? What does that application process with the Virtual Recruiter look like?
Charley: If the job requisition wasn’t set up to require a resume, Virtual Recruiter won’t ask for one either. The chatbot totally piggybacks on how the req is set up. So, whether you created knockout questions or there are no knockout questions, you require a resume or resume is optional, self-scheduling is available, or it’s not available — Virtual Recruiter looks at all that information to know what to serve up to job seekers.
Ellen: Right, so the recruiter only has to write knockout questions once. The recruiter drafts these questions upfront, and then the Virtual Recruiter chatbot facilitates the same sequence of questions for every visitor who starts an application for that particular requisition.
Q: Great, so there’s not much of a learning curve for recruiters as far as setup goes. Can recruiters collect feedback or analytics about candidate interactions from Virtual Recruiter?
Charley: There are two phases of the analytics and ROI data points we'll offer. First, we’ll track every source so that whenever a candidate makes it into the funnel through the chatbot, recruiters will understand that they came through the Career Site and that the Virtual Recruiter, as a secondary source, helped convert the person into a candidate. So, there will be a lot of data on candidate volume.
The second phase will use more analytics to understand engagement and anything related to the percentage of people who make it through a conversation with the Virtual Recruiter and become candidates. It will also start to scrutinize that time-to-interview, which will dramatically shrink for most customers from weeks to minutes.
Q: How does ClearCompany ensure data privacy and security with Virtual Recruiter when handling all of this candidate data?
Charley: Virtual Recruiter is really smart in terms of handling data. So if you're in an office or a coffee shop on your computer using the chatbot and you walk away, we want to make sure the chatbot times out after inactivity so that any PII (personally identifiable information) data gets wiped.
If someone doesn't become a candidate — whether they don't complete the process, fail to pass knockout questions, or walk away — we don't hold onto any of that data. Only people who submit applications and pass the knockout questions (if required) will enter the ATS (Applicant Tracking System) related to the EEOC requirements.
Q: It’s great to know that the chatbot doesn’t save job seekers’ information if they don’t finish their application. What else can you tell us about Virtual Recruiter’s functionality?
Charley: Yes, there was a lot of scrutiny to make sure data is protected.
Another great feature of the Virtual Recruiter is that it has multi-tab support. Who’s guilty of opening lots of tabs at once? Pretty much everybody. We can imagine someone going on a Career Site and saying, “I want to apply to that job, that job, and that job,” and then they’ve got eight tabs open.
The chatbot is smart enough to understand you're the same person across all eight tabs. If you've uploaded your resume once, it won’t ask you for it again, and it will allow you to change things. Let's say you have a different resume for a different job, or maybe you want to use a different email address. We can handle it.
Virtual Recruiter will always allow you to change your information, but it also knows who you are and can maintain that conversation across separate tabs.
Q: I wanted to touch on a big concern for HR as AI becomes an everyday tool at work. How does Virtual Recruiter help balance the convenience of automation with the human element of HR?
Charley: Every recruiter and organization I've talked to that is constantly hiring says they need a big funnel of candidates. They’ve got to hire people and get them trained as fast as they can — they needed them two weeks ago! Everyone just absolutely needs more help on the frontline to engage candidates. That’s number one, and the Virtual Recruiter will do a great job helping with that.
But you also have to be careful who you're hiring, which is why we ask knockout questions and give interviews. That’s job number two for Virtual Recruiter. It can start taking on some of these screening measures and get those interviews scheduled, and then that’s where the humans step in.
Virtual Recruiter is bringing a lot of candidates in for you and eliminating those two weeks of back-and-forth emails. You can get to those human-to-human conversations much faster and figure out if these candidates are the right people for your organization.
Ellen: We think that having the Virtual Recruiter chatbot at the front end of the process improves the candidate experience. Candidates get a helping hand to complete the application and prompt responses. The Virtual Recruiter accelerates and simplifies the application process and gives people answers right away so they know where they stand early on.
Q: The Virtual Recruiter sounds like a huge help for busy recruiters and candidates who are eager to start working. To wrap up our conversation today, can you give us a glimpse into what’s next for AI at ClearCompany?
Charley: Yeah! We've got a sourcing tool coming out that uses AI to help source candidates. We’ve got AI Talent Match coming out to help with that — now that you have this huge funnel of candidates thanks to sourcing and Virtual Recruiter, you have to make heads or tails of where to start zeroing in on your top candidates. Then, we’ve also got email drip campaigns to help recruiters automate outreach and engage more people.
When you understand how all of these tools work together in unison, you have a real orchestration here that is using AI from helping you write the job description all the way through to when you hire someone.
We're not just speeding up the hiring process and giving more efficiency to recruiting. What you see in the ClearCompany roadmap are tools that will help HR make decisions faster and give back more capacity to the team.
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