A Stanford professor once told me that “people buy on emotion and justify on logic.” But you’re here for a business case, so I’m going to start with the logic. I’ll get to the emotion later.
- Aptitude Research Partners found that a recruiter spends up to 20 hours (half their work week) on basic candidate screening and interview scheduling.
- If a recruiter could spend 0 hours screening for minimum qualifications and scheduling interviews for candidates/hiring managers…
- This recruiter would have 2x the capacity to do anything else.
The bottom line is: If you can eliminate manual screening and interview scheduling, you either get double the output of your current recruiting team … or you have the option to reduce headcount (or RPO or staffing firms or contractors) by up to half. Take GM, for example: in less than 6 months, the company saved $2M in hard costs by automating interview scheduling with Paradox. Mic drop.
In less than 6 months, GM saved $2 million in hard costs by automating interview scheduling with Paradox.
What a recruiting or talent acquisition leader would give to present those two paths — double the productivity or halve the resource cost — to their C-Suite ahead of economic uncertainty in 2023. And those options aren’t just a possibility, they’re proven when you automate interview scheduling through conversational software.
In an economic downturn, only “need-to-haves” matter.
Recruiting teams — and technology budgets — have it notoriously hard in times of market volatility.
In our current market, we’re seeing strong job reports (i.e., jobs need to be filled = hiring) contradict high inflation (i.e., high sensitivity to spend), which could mean even higher stress for businesses that need to fill roles while being potentially overly conservative on costs and labor resources.
The only technology that has a fighting chance with leadership buy-in is something that feels like an absolute need-to-have:
- Increases conversion — Helps your business meet hiring goals, faster
- Provides Day 1 value — Eliminates manual, repetitive, time-consuming tasks the minute you turn it on, without much added training/learning
- Improves efficiency of your current hiring team — Frees up time to do value-added work, and acts as an extension outside of business hours
- Integrates directly into your ATS — Requires minimal resourcing and change management
- Transforming the ATS — make it feel invisible and frictionless through conversational experience.
Essentially, software that can pay for itself and then some.
How conversational interview scheduling eliminates wasted hours and increases time to hire.
Conversational is the key word here. We’ve all seen interview scheduling software take the “schedule time with me via my Google calendar” approach in emails. Sure, sending a link in an email to a scheduling platform is one way to “automate” scheduling and reduce the manual back and forth calendar tetris in the recruitment process. But when it comes down to it, that approach puts the burden on the interviewer's time; it’s also not a welcoming first impression or consistent experience across the rest of the hiring process.
What if it looked like this instead:
With conversational software, an assistant like Olivia acts like the recruiter’s (and candidate’s) personal assistant, sending high-touch, mobile-first communication that generates immediate responses from candidates to increase speed to first interaction (whether phone screen or in-person interview).
Olivia knows every recruiter and hiring manager’s calendar availability by what they’ve denoted in their calendar; she then simply offers up top three times to candidates within a certain timeframe for easy selection. If none of those work, the candidate can choose additional availability times.
And believe me, as a hiring manager who is supported by Olivia internally, she has never double-booked me. Ever.
Conversational interview scheduling software is not just making scheduling simpler. It’s increasing speed and simplicity before and after each interview, too. Here are some key features:
- Auto-screening candidates for minimum qualifications via quick conversation, whether via career site chat, ahead of mobile apply, or even during virtual or in-person events ahead of meeting with a recruiter
- Allowing candidates to self-schedule a phone screen or interview in real time 24/7, as soon as minimum qualifications are met
- Rescheduling interviews for both hiring managers or candidates, all with a simple reply via text or email
- Sending reminders about upcoming interviews or other requirements, like formally applying for the position after a phone screen
When you buy conversational software, you’re hiring a coordinator for every single one of your recruiters. Which do you think is more cost effective … doubling your team or adding a conversational assistant that can scale your talent acquisition operation on Day 1?
The best business cases equate to logic and emotion.
A CFO might say a business case only equates to time saved or dollars saved. We say the best business cases equate to tangibles (logic) and intangibles (emotion).
The tangibles are based on simple math — logic. If you can cut the time your recruiters spend on scheduling, rescheduling, and reminders in half (or entirely) you get their hours back per day to do another job … or you get their hourly rate back.
If they can spend that time back on sourcing, you might not need to outsource sourcing or purchase a sourcing tool. If they can spend that time back upskilling in interviewing and building relationships with hiring managers, you might see higher conversion to accept and stronger internal alignment.
Take these tangible, real-world business use cases of conversational interview scheduling software to your CFO:
- We’ve seen conversational interview scheduling software increase candidate conversion rates by up to 50%. With conversion rates up, you need less volume at the top of the funnel, which allows you to cut back on job advertising spend. One client plans to cut a percentage of a $100M recruitment advertising budget through increase in speed and conversion with Olivia.
- With more than 1 million candidates per year, it was taking GM’s 55 contracted recruiting coordinators 5-7 days to schedule an interview, with up to three to four reschedules. Now, Ev-e, GM’s conversational assistant, has automatically scheduled 55,000+ interviews with zero recruiter intervention and improved time to schedule to just 29 minutes.
- Nestle’s recruiters were spending 8,000 hours scheduling interviews, detracting from value-add work with candidates and hiring managers. Olivia has scheduled 18,000+ interviews this year and helped improve Nestle’s candidate NPS score by 5 points.
- Stryker’s conversational assistant Sam is scheduling interviews 130% faster than the company’s recruiting team, decreasing time to hire by 4 full days.
- Pfizer was on a mission to enable its talent acquisition team to do more empowering work. With conversational interview scheduling software, Pfizer has decreased time to schedule by 80% with a 96% positive candidate experience rating, generating 142% ROI based on recruiter and hiring manager time saved.
The numbers above are a no-brainer. There isn’t a world where conversational interview scheduling software like Olivia doesn’t pay for itself.
But the intangibles, the emotions, are equally as impressive: the peace of mind, the feeling of support, the happiness of recruiters and candidates can’t be measured as easily, but boy it’s felt.
Retaining recruiters is as important as retaining anyone else. It’s a hard job, so creating a great recruiter experience is advantageous.
One recruiter with a high workload emailed GM leadership with the note: “I want to share the impact EV-e has had on my life… I moved more than 30 candidates to phone screen status in Workday at about 5:30 at night, and I walked away to feed my kids dinner, which I don’t often have time to do, and when I came back 45 minutes later I had 30 confirmed phone screens on my calendar for the rest of the week. I’m sold.”
The right interview scheduling software can impact a recruiter’s life. Not just their work. The long-term value of the support that recruiter feels is immeasurable.
She likely feels more invested. She likely feels more valuable. She may put even more into her work. She now has more time to give candidates. She’s thankful.
People justify on logic but buy on emotion. Do the math. Run the numbers. Just don’t leave out the intangibles.
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