Built-in chatbots, or virtual recruitment assistants, are also becoming increasingly common for pre-screening as part of a recruiting automation process. The chatbots gather basic information about candidates to determine their suitability for roles, freeing you up to spend more time connecting with potential employees. They can ask questions, understand answers, and interact with candidates thanks to innovations in machine learning.
Chatbots also improve the way companies engage with candidates by providing immediate answers to common questions applicants might have, leaving recruiters more time to answer more complex questions.
If you want to add a chatbot to your recruitment toolbox, you have several options to choose from. Keep reading to see the top-rated recruiter chatbots currently available and find the right one for your company.
The top 10 recruitment chatbots at a glance
- XOR – Best overall chatbot for screening, nurturing, and scheduling candidates
- Olivia by Paradox – Best option for high-volume hiring
- Taira by MyInterview – Best for in-depth interview analysis
- Radancy – Chatbot system offering career fair style engagement
- HireVue AI Recruiting Assistant – Extensive hiring platform with chatbot capabilities
- iCIMS Text Engagement Chatbot – ATS with an integrated chatbot and other automation features
- Eightfold – Best chatbot for building a ranked talent pipeline
- Clara Labs – Conversational AI that functions as a digital assistant
- Humanly – Best choice for mid-market companies or early career hiring
- Symphony Talent – Suite of tools ideal for enterprise hiring
Full reviews: The top 10 recruitment chatbots
XOR
XOR is a recruiting platform focused on hourly and blue-collar workers, though their chatbot and AI-driven platform certainly isn’t limited to those roles. XOR’s automation allows recruiters to choose when they want to initiate automated sequences for screening, scheduling and nurturing. If a candidate isn’t qualified, they get alternative job openings recommended to them and are notified when future jobs are posted. XOR also schedules interviews by integrating your calendar and automating messages to candidates that enable them to select available times.
Pricing: Based on the number of interviews:
- Starts at $699 for 500 interviews per month
- Highest tier is $2,499 for up to 3,000 interviews per month
Pros
- Conversational AI screens and scores candidates
- 35+ integrations
- End-to-end automation, from sourcing through interview scheduling
- Automated inbound and outbound communication
- Easy to setup and customize chatbot feature
- Responsive customer support team
Cons
- May need some scripting and adjustment to give proper responses
- Longer and more complex setup than other similar programs
Olivia by Paradox
https://www.paradox.ai/author/olivia
Olivia is an ideal chatbot for those with high-volume hiring needs. It can engage with your candidates through the web, mobile platforms, or social channels. Using AI and NLP (natural language processing), Olivia promises to be the front-end on all your candidate communications and to answer every question your candidates might have. She can intelligently provide next steps and route “green light” candidates right to recruiters, while handling all scheduling coordination.
Pricing: Starts from $1,000 per month
Pros
- Improves the candidate experience to drive higher engagement and retention
- Create conversational career sites with built-in AI chatbot
- Intuitive interface is simple to navigate even for those with limited ATS experience
- Mobile-first design
- Automates administrative tasks like sending reminders and scheduling interviews
- Easy integrations with popular ATS and job boards
Cons
- Limited customization options
- Can struggle to handle complex or nuanced queries
Taira by MyInterview
MyInterview is a video interviewing platform, popular for its features like customizable branding, ATS integrations, and AI-driven smart shortlisting. Their chatbot, Taira, is a powerful virtual talent acquisition specialist that can engage your candidates while accomplishing tasks like screening, shortlisting, and scheduling. Its value comes from both its ability to automate time-consuming tasks and its friendly, natural conversational style.
Pricing: Starts at $59 per month
Pros
- Sophisticated candidate screening
- Conversational and friendly responses ideal for driving candidate engagement
- Very user-friendly interface
- Fully SOC2 and ISO compliant
- Free version available
Cons
- Customer support is only available through text chat (no phone support)
- Doesn’t integrate with some popular HR software (such as BambooHR)
Radancy
Radancy is a virtual career fair platform that includes a chatbot as one of its tools for users. Its recruiting chatbot enables you to have live conversations with candidates 24/7, and it can send videos as well as text responses. Along with this automated communication, Radancy’s Talent Acquisition Cloud gives you data-driven insights to help you hire qualified talent faster and optimize the candidate journey.
Pricing: Available upon request
Pros
- Also allows you to host virtual career fairs
- Interface is easy to use and navigate
- Strong customer support including monthly calls with a dedicated account representative
- Multiple ways to engage with candidates, including text and voice as well as chatbots
- Helps you make better data-driven hiring decisions
Cons
- Limited customization options
- Relatively high cost and long required commitment compared to other chatbots
HireVue AI Recruiting Assistant
HireVue’s primary purpose is as a video interviewing tool, helping hiring teams identify the attributes most critical for success with an automated screening process. Their AI hiring assistant also lets you engage with candidates 24/7, matching them with jobs that fit their skills and experience through a conversational interaction. For users, this translates to a 4 times faster time-to-hire and a 20% improvement in interview show rates on average.
Pricing
- Essentials: Starts at $35,000
- Enterprise: Custom pricing available upon request
Pros
- Excellent choice for large agencies with extensive hiring needs
- Includes on-demand video interviewing and candidate screening features
- Very responsive customer support team
- User-friendly interface on both the candidate and recruiter side
- Conversational screening captures qualified talent that other methods may miss
Cons
- Integrations are limited
- Pricing may be too high for smaller businesses
iCIMS Text Engagement Chatbot
https://www.icims.com/products/talent-cloud-platform/text-engagement/
iCIMS offers a suite of products, including a full ATS as well as Talent Cloud applications including career sites, marketing automation, an employee onboarding interface, and candidate experience management. Their Text Engagement chatbot helps hiring teams automate their candidate engagement with conversational AI. You can also personalize your messages at scale with mail merge variables and templates, or automate your follow-up with drip messages to unresponsive candidates.
Pricing: Available upon request
Pros
- Built-in automatic interview scheduling
- Customized experiences and quick answers to questions for job site visitors
- Integrated conversational screening
- Also functions as an ATS with a wide range of candidate management features
- Good variety of customization and configuration options
Cons
- Pricing makes sense for the extent of features but is high if all you want is a chatbot
- Some users find the account management and customer service lacking
Eightfold
Eightfold’s AI finds the people most likely to succeed in a job based on their skills and potential, identifying great people often missed by legacy keyword-based screening. You can use it to screen candidates automatically and receive instant ranked pipelines of talent. Its chatbot can also answer candidates’ questions, schedule interviews, and send candidates alerts as they move through stages of the hiring process.
Pricing: Available upon request
Pros
- Screened candidates can be filtered to help pinpoint the best talent
- Anonymous screening feature reduces unconscious bias
- Integrates well with Outlook calendars for easy interview scheduling
- Streamlines candidate communications throughout the process
- Great tool for candidate rediscovery
Cons
- Sometimes lags in its communication with ATS programs
- Limited options for sorting candidates or adding notes onto their profiles
Clara Labs
Clara is designed to be an intelligent virtual assistant that functions like a human employee, utilizing a conversational intelligence trained on high-quality data. It also syncs with your ATS so you can track and access candidate information quickly, and can be used to automate other tedious and time-consuming tasks like candidate emails and interview scheduling.
Pricing
- Personal: $99 per user per month
- Professional: $199 per user per month
- Pipeline: $399 per user per month
Pros
- Functions as a virtual personal assistant
- Automatic follow-up with candidates
- Natural-sounding personable and professional responses
- Cloud-based with no software installation required
- Very easy to learn and use
Cons
- Limited customization options and other features
- Can be slow to respond at times
Humanly
Humanly is an HR chatbot designed for early career and volume hiring. It lets you automate several time-consuming tasks, including screening candidates, scheduling interviews, candidate follow-up, and conducting reference checks, all in the same user-friendly interface.
Pricing: Available upon request
Pros
- Great choice for mid-market companies or recruitment firms
- Integrates seamlessly with your ATS
- Fast and easy set-up
- Uses your data to continuously improve its candidate screening
- Responsive and dedicated customer service representatives
Cons
- Not as easy to embed into career pages as other chatbots
- Limited self-serve administration options
Symphony Talent
https://www.symphonytalent.com/
Symphony Talent started as a CRM and has expanded its features since acquiring SmashFly in 2019. This has grown it into a powerful talent acquisition tool, integrating programmatic job advertising, career sites, and conversational AI all in one platform. With it, you can automate both initial candidate interactions and follow-up messages to nurture candidate relationships, which you can trigger to send based on the candidate’s behavior, skills, and engagement with your company. The chatbot can also answer candidate questions and recommend relevant jobs to keep qualified talent in your pipeline.
Pricing: Available upon request
Pros
- Seamlessly integrates into both career sites at CRMs
- Wide range of features to attract, screen, and hire the right talent
- Captures candidate contact information while answering their questions
- Improves and streamlines the candidate experience
- Search functionality makes it easy to find and track applicants
- Automatic resume parsing reduces manual work during hiring
Cons
- Interface isn’t as user-friendly as other options
- System can be slow to load and prone to lags when syncing information
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