RecruitHub’s Tech Spotlight blog series focuses on a selection of recruitment technology providers, each adding value to the recruitment process through a specialised offering.
This month we look at RoboRecruiter, a provider automated database activation solutions, using messaging and chatbots.
What is RoboRecruiter?
RoboRecruiter is an automated messaging and chatbot platform that helps recruitment businesses, RPOs, jobboards and internal staffing teams activate their candidate databases and automate repetitive conversations throughout the recruitment process.
Delivered both as a managed service, RoboRecruiter allows recruiters to conduct large volumes of high-quality conversations with applicants, collecting key data and driving improved database ROI.
Who’s behind the tech?
RoboRecruiter’s leadership team has an impressive pedigree in the recruitment sector. Co-founder James McHugh previously created one of the world’s largest SAP and Salesforce recruitment brands, K2 Partnering Solutions, which achieved revenues of $200m+ before being snapped up by private equity.
Alongside James is the experience of Beerud Sheth, pioneer behind gig economy platform Elance (now part of Upwork) and founder of smart messaging leader Gupshup, a prominent chatbot development platform.
Various other members of the RoboRecruiter board have been involved in successful recruitment and technology ventures in the past, and the latest headline addition to the team is seasoned executive Steve Lewis, who previously ran the LinkedIn’s global staffing sector practice.
What’s the benefit to agencies?
The initial problem RoboRecruiter set out to solve was a real-world challenge the founding team had faced many times throughout their staffing careers – how to use candidate databases more efficiently and effectively.
RoboRecruiter’s own research revealed that recruiters tend to only use 1-3% of their overall candidate databases, and with so much time and money being invested in building candidate networks, the company saw a clear need for a tool to allow recruiters to make better use of the valuable data they already possessed.
The core benefit of RoboRecruiter’s technology is to re-activate and re-engage databases using chatbot messaging – transforming CRM and ATS systems from passive data archives into active candidate profiles, engaged through conversation and filled with up-to-date information.
Driving the chatbot’s candidate engagements is something the RoboRecruiter team call ‘PALS’ – price and position, availability, location and skills. The key data that agencies require on applicants in their systems.
RoboRecruiter’s chatbot re-engages passive candidates within a database, creates a PALS profile through automated conversation exchange, then feeds that information back into the database.
While maintaining an actively-engaged candidate database has its own benefits, one impact of RoboRecruiter is to reduce candidate acquisition costs by utilising pre-existing candidate profiles, instead of recruiters spending time and money searching external platforms.
With the automation comes an opportunity for recruiters to have more active, marketable candidates on their books at a single time, compared to the heavy lifting involved in engaging each one manually.
RoboRecruiter’s technology also helps to radically accelerate the pace of candidate engagement. During database ‘reactivation’ campaigns, 20-40% is the standard for overall response rates. Of these replies, 40% occur within the first ten minutes of launching the campaign, 60% within the first hour, and over 90% of all responses are generated within 24 hours.
Agencies who are able to harness this capability strategically have included it as the foundation for winning both retained and exclusive business, based on their ability to deliver relevant candidates at a pace their competition can’t match.
Who’s using RoboRecruiter?
With just a handful of clients at launch in 2017, RoboRecruiter’s user base is expanding rapidly with 2019 expected to double the pace of growth seen in 2018.
Many of RoboRecruiter’s customers are beginning to engage the company as a managed service solution as opposed to a software provider, working with RoboRecruiter’s tools and team as an extension of their organisations to create a reinvigorated candidate funnel.
Headquartered in San Francisco and with European operations based in London, RoboRecruiter has a global user base covering the US, EMEA and APAC regions.
Flagship agency clients include Adecco, Sthree, Impellam Group and NES Global Talent, while the solution is also widely used by internal recruitment teams, such as Publicis.Sapient.
