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To recruit efficiently, you need to have great conversations at scale.
Paradox CEO Adam Godson recently talked with Jaimee Kidd, events programming manager at Morning Brew, about how AI helps scale great recruiting efforts. We’ll give you a hint — it starts with teaching candidates to trust a chatbot.
You can watch the full conversation between Adam and Jamie here, or read a snippet of the conversation below.
The following excerpt has been lightly edited for clarity:
Jaimee Kidd: I think that great recruiting comes from a great conversation. What do you think makes for a standout conversation with a candidate?
Adam Godson: Standout conversations come from trust. The foundation of recruiting — the emotional process of recruiting — is trust.
We establish trust in different ways. For example, when you and I have a face-to-face conversation, we use eye contact and body language. But in a chat conversation, it's much more subtle: It becomes about user interface. About the words that you open with. So you need to get the little things right.
You also want to set expectations early. Some conversations are going to be transactional. “What's the status of my application?” Others are going to be relationship building. “Tell me what it's like to work there.”
Transactions need to be quick and correct, while there’s a lot of nuance that comes with building empathy over time. And if both the recruiting team and the candidate are on the same page about the purpose of the conversation, it makes for a standout experience.
JK: How did you hone in on these elements and apply that to AI within recruiting?
AG: Candidates want to understand what's happening. They have an idea of what recruiting is — and a disruption to that frame raises questions. I’ll give you an example. When recruiters started to use game-based assessments in the hiring process, candidates were confused. “Why am I playing this game? What does this have to do with anything?”
When you introduce new technology to a process, it needs to be followed by an explanation of why. That’s how you build trust.
So when we think about conversational AI, we try to be really clear about how it's used and what decisions it is or isn't making. Because we want to use new technology that scales really well within the existing frame of the recruiting process — one where you can schedule hundreds or thousands of interviews at the same time — but also in a way that people understand what's happening and trust it.
Candidates are going to go into these conversations thinking, “Is this conversation going to be smart or is this sort of a dumb chatbot?” We want to show them that it’s the former.
JK: To that end, where do you see AI elevating conversations for candidates and recruiters?
AG: AI gets rid of a lot of the constraints around time and information.
Say a candidate’s got an interview coming up, and maybe has a few questions. “What should I wear?” “Where should I park?” “What kind of questions are they going to ask me?” These questions were not typically answered before. Because oftentimes when people have questions, they don't ask them if it’s inconvenient or they’re afraid of seeming uninformed.
Now that goes away. We’ve scaled from a person in a call center that can maybe answer all those questions to a conversational AI doing it every time.
And for recruiters, AI’s really taking care of the boring stuff — we call it B.S. — that has existed in TA for a long time.
Things like scheduling interviews: No one is getting self-actualization from that process. People just want it to be fast and right. We’ll schedule about 20 million interviews in the Paradox platform this year. Those interviews are scheduled accurately and quickly — and recruiters don’t have to worry about it. They can spend time with the actual people.
That's actually the paradox actually our company is named after. It’s technology that makes the process more personal.
JK: How would you say a company can make sure they're balancing AI and people within the recruiting process?
AG: We see mistakes when people start with AI. Companies should really start with the experiences that they want their candidates and recruiters to have, and design towards that. Technology should come in to help scale the experience, not the other way around.
