How Screenom’s hiring buddy is coming to the aid of both recruiters and job aspirants

This article is sponsored by Screenom

The job market can be a tough place– both for a recruiter and a job aspirant.

The former faces constant challenges related to finding quality talent from a sea of applicants, short deadlines, and an inefficient hiring funnel. What’s more, candidates tend to drop out midway through the hiring process, if they either find a better opportunity or if the hiring process is time-consuming.

For job aspirants, the pain points include finding the role that aligns with their expectations, facing a cumbersome hiring process, or even getting noticed because a résumé doesn’t always do justice to your capabilities and skills. Not to mention, the lack of understanding of the work culture and decision driving factors.

As technology continues to bring in transformation across sectors, including the talent marketplace, some challenges continue to persist, nevertheless. “A typical recruitment process involves publishing jobs, sourcing a large volume of résumés, profiling candidates, tests followed by a few rounds of face-to-face interviews before a job offer can be rolled out. This often takes up to 6-8 weeks and the cost of hiring can run to over $4,000 per hire. Not to mention, the repetitive and mundane task of providing the same information to all the candidates,” explains Anshul Kumar, co-founder, Screenom.

Co-founded by Chandrakanth Shettigar and Anshul, Screenom kicked off its journey in Q1 2015 with the launch of an online technical skill assessment platform, and followed up with an intuitive candidate management and recommendation system early this year. The idea was to create a platform that automated the entire recruitment lifecycle, making it more time and cost-efficient and effective for both the recruiter and the job aspirant. Screenom’s target market is primarily software companies looking for candidates for technical and non-technical positions with an experience range of 0-10 yrs.

Screenom is taking the product to the next level by leveraging chatbot technology which will facilitate an interactive job application process. The move is aimed at aligning the product with the futuristic industry direction such as social hiring, recruitment marketing, and high usage of smartphones in the job search and application process. At the same time, the chatbot can bring significant advantages to recruiters as well.

“With the just-to-be introduced chatbot technology, organisations can not only build their talent brand, engage and evaluate candidates but also automate more than 65 percent of the hiring funnel activities,” explains Anshul.

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The chatbot technology on the Screenom platform will enable hiring organisations to build a talent pipeline. Sharing more details, Anshul says, “Screenom will allow recruiters to create their own company bot without writing even a single line of code. They can also configure and add frequently asked questions as well as evaluation parameters based on the job requirements.” Once these steps are completed and the job is published and shared over various social channels, that’s when the chatbot feature will come into play. The chatbot will act as the first point of contact for job applicants, guiding them through the hiring process, evaluating candidates by asking relevant questions and also updating them on the stages in the process. “This helps recruiters save time since they do not have to provide the same information and repeat the same steps with every potential candidate. Overall, the day-to-day activity of the recruiter is made much more efficient without losing out on any key information from the candidates.”

“Why shouldn’t we treat prospective employees as customers and provide them a great interview experience?” he asks.

Quoting a LinkedIn Talent Solutions report titled 2015 Talent Trends – Insights for the modern recruiter on what talent wants around the world, he says, “According to the report, only 45 percent of candidates feel that their job application and interview process was great and that's one area where a lot of companies have to improve if they want to attract high-quality candidates. The candidate experience can be significantly improved by adding personalisation using chatbot technology. Additionally, chatbots will also be able to push rich content to their audiences, keeping the talent pipeline active and engaged.”

By optimising hiring activities, Screenom not only makes the entire process more appealing and interactive for job aspirants, but also enables recruiters to evaluate a large volume of candidates in a matter of hours, and take decisions in a faster and easier manner. “We anticipate that the hiring decision will be made within 2-3 weeks on our platform, instead of the regular 6-8 weeks which is common in the industry today,” says Anshul.

When asked if hiring organisations were apprehensive about using chatbot technology, Anshul says it’s too early to determine that since chatbots have just started to penetrate the enterprise software market. “But based on our interaction with recruiters, they are quite upbeat about the potential of chatbots in recruitment and the level of automation they can bring. They completely understand how the chatbot aligns with the industry direction of recruitment marketing, extensive usage of social media platforms and usage of smartphones for job application processes.”

With the chatbot technology and its evident benefits, the process of job-hunting or finding the right candidate is going to be better, sans the pain.

Making recruitment cost and time efficient for both the aspirant and the recruiter

While there’s quite a bit of excitement at Screenom about the impact of the chatbot technology, their flagship platform continues to gain steady ground in the global SME market.

“It has saved us countless hours in screening candidates' technical abilities,” says Steve Kane, Head of Learning, 4mation Technologies, a Sydney-based company that has been using the Screenom platform for a year now.

In a span of just two years, the Screenom platform has garnered a global customer base, working with over 50 organisations for talent assessment. Anshul says, “We have worked with SMEs based out of India, US, Australia, Mexico, Singapore, Vietnam, Philippines, and the UK so far.” In addition, the platform was used by one of its India-based customers for campus recruitments across premier institutions including IIT Jodhpur, IIT Madras, IIT Mandi and IIT Guwahati.

A key feature of the Screenom platform that makes it intriguing for job aspirants is that it enables them to showcase their skills and capabilities. They can take up coding-related and other technical challenges that match their skill-sets and prove what they are capable of. Two other interesting features of the platform are the video feature and the monthly challenges. Telling us more about the video feature, Anshul shares,

“We believe CVs may not always be the best way for candidates to stand out in the crowd. The video feature gives the candidate an option to pitch for themselves and clearly communicate why they are the best fit for the role. Additionally, from a recruiter standpoint, it’s a quick way to assess candidate communication skills and get to know them before they come in for a face-to-face round.”

Talking about the monthly challenge which is open to any candidate looking for a technical role in SMEs, he says, “At the primary level, it helps us build a talent pipeline and provide pre-evaluated candidates to hiring organizations. At the secondary level, it also helps candidates to improve their scores and feature higher on recommendation rankings, thereby increasing their chances of getting hired for their desired role.” In addition, Screenom intimates job aspirants about job offers that suit their interests and capabilities and enables them to review interview offers from companies looking for candidates to hire.

On the other side of the spectrum, for the new age recruiter, Screenom saves time by personalising the entire hiring experience for candidates. The company uses data analytics to bring to the table the best candidates and provides the recruitment team with rich insights throughout the skill evaluation process. The startup’s flagship talent assessment platform hosts question banks which are drafted by experienced professionals from the industry. All this enables recruiters to speed up the recruitment process, while ensuring quality.

Apart from the just-to-be introduced chatbot or hiring buddy, Screenom’s talent marketplace includes a job board and a visual candidate management system, making the hiring tool truly holistic in nature. All this, with SaaS-based pricing, means that hiring organisations don’t have to pay an exorbitant price for a successful hire.

In essence, the Screenom platform offers distinct benefits to hiring organisations and job aspirants, making the entire recruitment lifecycle efficient for both the stakeholders and that is key to why the startup is gaining wider acceptance.

If you are an organisation looking to hire quality candidates in technical, product, sales and marketing roles for your company, or if you are a candidate looking for a change, do participate in the Screenom online job fair, which is being held from November 24 to December 9, 2016.