One of the greatest challenges for any growing staffing company is finding the right talent for its clients. You may have thousands of contacts in your applicant tracking system, but culling through those candidates is a slow, time-consuming and expensive process. Some staffing firms respond to this challenge by hiring additional recruiters, but recruiters provide the most value when they are building relationships with candidates and closing deals.

Engaging artificial intelligence for candidate screenings is a logical solution — and even better is an AI system that can speak with potential candidates quickly and efficiently, such as ConverzAI’s Voice AI platform. By sustaining dynamic and engaging conversations with candidates, Voice AI delivers qualified leads for recruiters to take to the finish line.

Able to be set up in five days, Voice AI can provide a 90% reduction in job turnaround time — while freeing recruiters to focus on high-value relationship building.

Human-Like Conversations

Going well beyond the automated phone trees consumers often encounter, Voice AI can hold a natural and engaging conversation with candidates of all experience types and levels, ranging from entry level all the way to doctors and VPs of IT.

It starts by mining the job description for details to use in a dynamic conversation. The system is trained to respond to diverse scenarios quickly and in depth, using industry-specific vocabulary. Its speech recognition programming enables it to listen through background noise and understand a wide range of accents and speaking styles.

During the dialogue, the ConverzAI platform reacts and adapts in real time, allowing the candidate to interrupt or ask questions. With the system’s clear speech, candidates experience engaging and beneficial conversations, which typically range from 6 to 21 minutes.

“We developed a conversational intelligence framework that overlays and guides the basic steps of human conversation,” said Ashwarya Poddar, founder and CEO of ConverzAI. “By listening, comprehending, and speaking through technology, Voice AI can simulate human-like conversations, allowing for the infinite scaling of valuable voice connections.”

“I listened in on these calls, and what truly amazed me was when Voice AI was negotiating with the candidates,” said the director of recruiting at a staffing and MSP provider based in Frisco, Texas. “My targets are getting met, recruiters are happy [and] we’re getting more coverage.” 

Transforming the Recruiting Process

Fitting seamlessly into a staffing firm’s recruiting process, Voice AI automatically gathers relevant candidates from the staffing firm’s applicant tracking system. ConverzAI then engages with candidates through phone conversations, voicemail, email and text. The platform can touch on the candidate’s qualifications, recent work history, interest level and availability, for example. Recruiters receive real-time summaries of the interactions, enabling them to move candidates along and make faster placements.

AI commonly used today does not extend to voice channels, and ballooning set-up times can lengthen a staffing organization’s time to value to over 12 months. Offering a complete set up in only five days, ConverzAI does not require recruiting teams to write scripts or build process maps. Recruiters just need to act on the conversation-based insights and make placements. ConverzAI provides clear visibility to the revenue impact from Voice AI, and staffing organizations see value from their first engagements.

“Easily deployable, Voice AI enables organizations to scale their recruitment strategies, create a better candidate experience and raise their revenue,” Poddar said. “Recruiters can now lock in the best candidates with rapid turnaround time.”

Immediate Benefits

Deploying Voice AI to augment your recruiting team and scale candidate engagement can bring big rewards:

Quick ROI. A fixed-cost investment to boost staffing revenue, such as onboarding a new team or offshore group, must be paid for up front, and set-up times can cause that cost to balloon before the first recruiting call is even made.

An investment in a Voice AI system, on the other hand, can pay off quickly, not only in terms of speed to placement but because Voice AI’s pricing model is outcome based.

For example, one finance/accounting and engineering staffing firm in the Northeastern US saw benefits in just seven days. Using the firm’s ATS, ConverzAI automatically mined the candidate database and sourced over 2000 potential candidates. The platform had conversations with 455 of them, and in seven days, 10 candidates had been placed. Such a project with no help from Voice AI would typically take a team of recruiters up to four weeks.

More placements, more revenue. Faster placements bring in more money as the firm is able to fill more positions. The topline impact to the staffing firm in the aforementioned scenario was more than $215,000.

Here’s another example: A leading light industrial staffing firm saw rapid revenue growth after implementing Voice AI to scale its applicant screening process. In just a few days, the system contacted over 1,200 candidates, resulting in 123 offers and a topline impact of over $400,000.

More successful recruiters. Voice AI systems help recruiters place more candidates by speeding up the process — and by eliminating some of the repetitive work from the recruiters’ jobs. It carries on the time-consuming early discussions, freeing recruiters to develop deeper connections with the candidates screened by Voice AI.

A personal experience. The best candidate experience is fast, transparent, consistent and personalized — and Voice AI can help deliver all those qualities.

An applicant to a job managed by ConverzAI hears from the staffing firm immediately for screening, and they appreciate the directness, honesty and focus of the Voice AI recruiting experience. The immediate follow-up makes them more likely to complete follow-on assessments and, ultimately, deliver positive reviews.

“It’s the engagement experience that matters the most, and we have spent three years ensuring that experience is human-like and transparent to sustain meaningful, long conversations,” Poddar said.

Valuable insights. The Voice AI system is not just reading questions and recording the answers. It is also analyzing those answers — providing insights that can improve recruiting strategies on both an individual and a group level.

For example, one timely interaction with a candidate may be all that’s required to land a placement — and having accurate data about that candidate increases the chances of having that conversation at the right time. At a higher level, insights from thousands of conversations help a staffing company adjust its recruiting strategy.

Keeping databases current. Staffing firms spend a lot of money acquiring names and profiles of current and future job seekers. Voice AI makes those investments pay off by finding and contacting candidates from the database — both speeding the time to fill the position and keeping the database current. ConverzAI, for example, documents each candidate interaction, updating profiles to ensure a large-scale refresh of the candidate database.

For example, an innovative and large healthcare staffing firm reactivated a database of travel nurses with Voice AI in just nine days. Through Voice AI engagements, the staffing firm connected with 145 nurses and submitted 18 for open roles. Apart from the topline impact, the client’s database was enriched with updated candidate information for all the candidates that the platform connected with. While candidates that are interested in the role move ahead in the process, the platform captures insights from candidates who are not interested, those that want to be contacted in the future once their current contracts end, and more, driving additional placements from your existing candidate database.

A lengthy recruiting process can cost your staffing firm in terms of revenue as well as skilled candidates. Engaging a system that can evaluate and reach out to candidates in your applicant tracking system — having conversations with them about their skills and interest in roles you are trying to fill — can set your recruiters up for success in making quality placements quickly. The rewards your firm can reap go beyond financial, as Voice AI further enables your firm to build meaningful relationships with candidates and deliver results to your clients in previously unattainable time frames.

“Recruiters are a staffing organization’s most valuable asset, and they should be treated as such,” Poddar said. “Focus your recruiters on closing qualified candidates and building valuable relationships versus the drudgery of daily call-a-thons. Recruiters working with the ConverzAI platform make more incentives through increased placements.”

ConverzAI’s Voice AI platform can help your staffing firm reduce screening time and place candidates in a mere day. To learn more, visit www.converzai.com and contact our team at team@converzai.com.