Accelerating candidate engagement through the use of conversational AI.

The Recruitment Hackers Podcast

Hello, welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster. And today, inviting to the show for the first time, Mr Martyn Redstone, who is an Uber geek, and an analyst of the TA tech world and who has been working in the world of recruitment chatbots and conversational AI, for as long as the industry is, which is only about five or six years but has been consistent in his interest of finding ways to connect with candidates faster through the use of technology. And so today's discussion will be about that exactly; like how - what's the next step for talent acquisition in terms of treating candidates, like customers and getting a little bit closer to them?

And what can we learn from the world of consumer marketing? So that we can - because usually, recruitment is a little bit behind consumer marketing. Recruitment marketing is usually a few years behind consumer marketing. So what can we learn from the leading technologies in that space and the best practices in consumer marketing? Notably, because Martyn has recently spent some time working with Hootsuite, which is a company which specializes in omnichannel marketing and delivering messages to different channels like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc.

So there's a - yeah, there's probably some good parallels that can be drawn from there, or that's what we're hoping for. And finally, Martyn, for your introduction. Martyn is also the founder of Bot Jobs, which is a job board for people who little bit - who are in love with bots, and who prefer to talk to bots than to talk to humans. So they can go to that job board and they can find other - they can find opportunities for people like them. Is that a fair summary? Martyn?

I think so. I think so. Yeah. And, just for the benefit of everyone else, I did give Max permission to call me an Uber geek. So it's not a derogatory term. Very proud of that, actually. But yeah, no, thanks for the introduction. Yeah. So, Bot Jobs, just to clarify is a job board for conversational AI professionals. So everything from Conversation Designers through to Engineers, Software Developers, Marketers, Salespeople, anything to do with that conversational AI ecosystem. It's a bit of fun, but it's enjoyable. Great to see the trends and keep my toes dipped into the world of recruitment as well.

So when we look at the kind of conversational AI world, hiring, still going like the clappers. In the - on the tech vendor side of things, we're still seeing hiring in kind of the smaller and medium-sized tech businesses, the ones that have already gone through, they're kind of their seeds, their seed rounds, their series A's, you know, they're still got cash, they're still growing. And some of them are doing exceptionally well from a growth perspective. And they're still hiring like the clappers. What we're also seeing, quite interestingly is large corporates that are now realizing that conversational AI has to be part of their strategy, their business strategy, and so they're starting to hire internal conversational AI teams to run that customer experience, customer context strategy. So that's very, very interesting.

But to go back on your, on your point about job creators and job destroyers, I think that's a, I think that's something that I've been dealing with for the last five or six years that you've mentioned, I've been in this world where people say, oh, you know, chatbots, you know, and automation, it's just, it's just going to replace people, it's just going to take over people's jobs. And that's what you're out for, you're out to kind of replace recruiters with bots. Now, interestingly, over the last five or six years, I've never actually really seen that. I've never seen -

And we've seen examples where chatbots in the retail world or in the recruitment world have automated up to like 85% of all conversations that happen. And yet, we haven't seen 85% of recruiters or 85% of customer service people being laid off because of that. And a great example is a global sports retailer who were able to literally turn off their customer service telephones because their conversational AI solution was so strong, they were able to turn off all their phone lines and deal with every single inbound inquiry.

Over - actually, Facebook Messenger was where most of their conversations happened. But actually, what that meant was they realigned their customer service team into providing higher - providing service into higher value conversation. So conversations where they can upsell where somebody is then transferred to a person to say, you know, I - wondering if this is in stock, or something that the conversational AI couldn't cope with, where they had the ability to actually increase the revenue coming into the business through customer service.

So a lot of businesses now are seeing customer service as a revenue centre, rather than a cost centre, because they're able to actually concentrate now on higher-value conversations rather than the just - the mundane stuff that can be automated. I see that happening in talent acquisition as well, where we're going to find that we're when we start taking away some of the more mundane repetitive stuff from recruiters that they're able to become more high-value partners to the business and to the hiring managers and to their candidates as well. Which I think is going to happen. I don't see it as a race to replace people.

Yeah, yeah I mean, I would say that there is some truth to automation, killing some jobs. But of course, recruiters have the EQ and the experience who reinvent themselves and be relevant in a more automated world, because certain things will not be automated. So yeah, that's the projected outcome for us is that they'll still be there. Recruiters will still be there to sell the job. They'll still be there to get people excited. They may not be needed for the repetitive you know, data collection piece of it. You mentioned the - some layoffs at Alexa and Salesforce Einstein products, but that generally, bots are doing well.

The corporate world is buying more. I’m, wondering about, you know, the Hootsuite experience, if that's not too confidential, if you can share - what's been the adoption of Heyday, you said it was their conversational product and what - why did they decide to step you know, or slow down there?

Yeah, that's a good question. Obviously, if you appreciate some things, I can talk about something. Yeah. But yeah, ultimately, Heyday was focused on e-commerce and retailers. So it was a very niche product. But the uptake was always great, you know, every single retailer, especially during the pandemic, what what was, what was obvious was that every brick and mortar retailer that had shops couldn't have their shops anymore because of lockdowns and things like that. So every retailer became an E-commerce business.

And so they need to do more with less which we know that everyone tries to do in times of economic shock. So obviously a conversational AI tool that's focused on e-commerce and can do things like not only, not only answering FAQs, all those kinds of standard things, but also being able to sell things from within chat, so adding things to your basket doing checkouts, but also keeping people updated on their order status, as you know, I think if you speak to most retailers, is 70 to 80% of all of their customer service inquiries are going to be where's my order?

So being able to just do it, you can automate that is a very, very powerful - creates a very powerful business case. So absolutely, you know, the adoption was there. The c...