Definition, Best Practices, and How to Get Started with AI for your Staffing Firm

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In staffing and recruiting today, the candidate is in control.

With hundreds of firms vying for top talent, one misstep – a recruiter who sleeps on an email request, a midnight question that goes unanswered – can be the difference between losing the best candidates and landing them.
Today's candidates expect instant responses without sacrificing connection. They expect knowledge at their fingertips, 24/7, and they want to work with agencies that are on the cutting edge to meet their needs.

Life in the past was less digital, and less remote.

In the past, when the world was less digital, less remote, and a bit slower, staffing firms could hang back a bit before riding on the next wave of the digital seachange. Today, firms relying on manual processes are going to fall behind their competitors. In the increasingly digital world, only the firms with the strongest tech stacks will survive.

From the Phone, to Emails, to Messaging

As long as there have been salespeople and recruiters, there have been people trying to create tools and software to help them sell more, faster. Let’s run through a quick summary of the evolution of those tools and the channels they’ve used over time.

When people sold over the phone, the need for faster connections drove the invention of the autodialer.

Then, email changed the game, creating a new channel of communication to connect with prospects.

This led to the barrage of emails we now get from marking and sales email automation and the natural decline of read and response rates as all communication channels fall victim to overuse.

Fast forward to today, the candidate is now in control and they expect life on-demand and instant communication.

Real-time messaging channels combined with AI have become the new frontier to speed up the sales and recruiting process and create a one-to-one, on-demand connection with candidates and clients.

AI-powered chatbots engage in real-time, personalized conversations, move prospects through pipelines, and are available to engage candidates and clients 24/7.

And this is just the beginning. Sales and recruiting acceleration tools are going to continue to evolve exponentially. And if you're not investing in AI to accelerate sales and recruiting now, you'll fall exponentially behind.

“We’ve never seen technology move as fast as AI has to impact society and technology. This is by far the fastest-moving technology we’ve ever tracked in terms of its impact and we’re just getting started.”

– Paul Daugherty, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, Accenture, Author of bestselling book Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI.

The Definition of Recruiting Acceleration

Recruiting Acceleration combines the power of AI with real-time messaging channels to speed up connection, scale qualification, and increase your recruiters and sales reps productivity.

By leveraging the latest advancements in AI, combined with omnichannel messaging, dynamic routing, and integrations with the staffing tech stack, you can ecosystem of intelligent digital workers to act as an AI assistant for every recruiter.

The 5 Benefits of Recruiting Acceleration

#1. Create a more human recruiting experience.

For years, there's been a lot of promises about robots replacing recruiters. But, the truth is that AI makes recruiting better for recruiters and candidates alike.
When intelligent digital workers, take over the busy work, your recruiters are able to focus on what they do best: building relationships.

“If we do it right, we might be able to evolve a form of work that taps into our uniquely human capabilities and restores our humanity. The ultimate paradox is that this technology may become a powerful catalyst that we need to reclaim our humanity.”

– John Hagel, bestselling author of The Journey Beyond Fear: Leverage the Three Pillars of Positivity to Build Your Success, on AI

Every staffing leader has seen their best and brightest tank under the pressure of the 24/7 recruiting cycle. Burnout is real.

The demands of today's candidate-centric industry continue to accelerate. Expecting humans to keep up without digital help only sets the industry up for another Great Resignation.

By automating the manual and slow aspects of the recruiting cycle, recruiters and sales reps are free to do the things only humans can: build relationships, engage in nuanced conversation, and practice empathetic problem-solving.

#2. Learn more about your candidate and clients.

In the past, the recruiting process – slowed by generic outreach, fledgling automation, and a business-first approach – was often transactional.

When recruiters are managing hundreds of contacts a day, it's easy for a candidate or even a client to look more like a dollar sign than a person.

Truth be told, chatbots that run on limited scripts are pretty transactional, too. Without nuanced natural language processing and flexible machine learning, these dumb chatbots just parrot the same information back to interested candidates. If the candidate decides to vary from the script, as humans tend to do, these first-gen chatbots just can't handle it.

Smart, conversational AI chatbots can dig deeper. They can get the information recruiters need to make informed decisions, leading to better-quality leads.

With automatic lead qualification, insightful and engaging questions, and clear calls-to-action, conversational AI chatbots can keep unqualified candidates off your recruiters' desks and route top talent to the best team member to help them.

Information sharing goes both ways. By the time the candidates reach the recruiters, they have a deeper understanding of your firm. And your recruiters already have a host of conversational information to draw on.

#3. Convert more candidates and better leads over every channel.

Staffing is an omnichannel game. Talent isn't just reaching out to you on phone and email any longer. When they are on your website, or on the go they’re looking for a faster way to start a conversation with you.

If you can't give candidates what they want, when they want it, no matter how they reach out, you're going to be losing out on some of your best leads.

Recruiting Acceleration can provide instant, 24/7 assistance to everyone who comes to your firm, no matter what door they knock on.

With automatic lead qualification, insightful and engaging questions, and clear calls-to-action, conversational AI chatbots can keep unqualified candidates off your recruiters' desks and route top talent to the best team member to help them.

Information sharing goes both ways. By the time the candidates reach the recruiters, they have a deeper understanding of your firm. And your recruiters already have a host of conversational information to draw on.

AI powered chatbots on your website add a second net to capture visitors. While forms require busy prospects to wait for your recruiters to get back to them, bots can act as virtual recruiters on your website.

They can greet visitors personally and qualify them, moving them through the pipeline, and getting them booked on your recruiters' calendars. They can also disqualify leads, making sure your recruiters focus only on right-fit talent.
Live chat can also put website visitor directly in contact with your recruiters and sales reps, right from MS Teams or Slack.

Putting intelligent digital workers on the frontlines of your communication with leads will help you convert more candidates and clients – all without wasting your recruiters' or sales reps’ time or requiring you to increase your headcount.

#4. Shorten your recruiting cycle.

Everyone knows that “time kills all deals.” So let’s imagine a typical interaction a candidate might have with your firm.

Your recruiter sends an outbound email that has a link to a static form asking for more info about them.

While filling out the form at 11 pm after the kids have gone to bed, the candidate has a question. They navigate to your FAQ page. The answer to their question is buried below the fold, so they don't see it.

Stuck, they respond to your recruiter's email, and the email sits in your recruiter's inbox for 24 hours before they respond.

The candidate then takes three more days before they think about returning to the process.

(We all know this is a best-case scenario, and many, many candidates will navigate away after that first stumbling block and never come back).

Now, look at the process of recruiting acceleration.

Your recruiter sends the same email, but they add a link to a pre-screening bot to that outbound email.

Your candidate takes action, sharing their information with the bot.

When they have their 11 pm question, it's answered in conversation with the bot, who is trained on the full contents of your FAQs.

They complete an application and end up booking a meeting with your recruiter.

This illustrates that you can't drastically shorten your recruiting cycle just by speeding up your recruiter's time to respond.

#5. Grow your candidate pipeline.

All of these benefits don't mean much if they can't help you grow your business. By building better relationships, scaling conversations, and speeding up your recruiting cycle, you'll be able to grow your candidate pipeline – and your revenue.

Done right, recruiting acceleration can double website leads and improve conversion rates on high-quality clients and candidates.

“There went from being no client leads, and no candidate conversions to multiple client leads and multiple candidate conversions. And they're also good leads in the industries we work in.”

– John Hagel, bestselling author of The Journey Beyond Fear: Leverage the Three Pillars of Positivity to Build Your Success, on AI

Launch Your New Branded AI

Think of launching your new branded AI like you would onboarding new employees.

Create your AI’s ecosystem of intelligent digital workers

To set your AI up for success, you want to have a firm idea of what tasks it will complete. This will give you a blueprint for setting up the communication channels, skills and tasks that your intelligent digital workers will need.

Put your AI through learning and development. You'll train your AI on the information and tasks that they'll communicate to your candidates and clients. The more conversations your AI has the more it will continue to learn and increase it’s knowledge.

Introduce your recruiters to their new AI assistant

Communicating clear goals and expectations for your AI with recruiters will help ensure seamless adoption.
Set achievable goals to measure performance. Watch your leads, conversations, and contracts grow and your time-to-close shrink.

Notifications and Database

It's also crucial that your recruiters are notified in real-time when AI-nurtured leads are ready for human interaction.

With clear, instant in-system notifications, your recruiters will never miss out on nurturing a lead.

The best AI in the world is going to be useless to your team if it doesn’t talk to your database. On the backend, a recruiting acceleration platform seamlessly integrates your ATS/CRM with your new branded AI.

Conversation data from all channels are included in contact records in your database, making it effortless for your recruiters to access crucial info to build relationships.

And your AI can use this information to pick up any conversation where it dropped off, ensuring a seamless experience for candidates, whether they are talking to human or digital recruiters.

Solve the big problems

Three of the biggest challenges facing recruiting leaders in the next five years include:

• Building a renewable pipeline of top talent
• Adapting existing outreach strategies to empower growth
• Maintaining flexibility to respond to economic fluctuations and uncertainty

Recruiting acceleration with AI helps you meet all these problems head-on:

With AI evolving quickly, recruiting leaders who don't adopt this technology will be left in the dust. It's no longer a question of if, only when.

Getting started accelerating recruiting is about embracing the evolution of AI that's happening right now and moving at lightning speed. Once you're buckled up for that trip, you're ready to build the tech stack that will launch you into the new on-demand world.