Our development team has been quiet over the last couple of months… a little too quiet. They’ve been keeping their heads down, working on something big.
Hiring – as I’m sure you know – takes a lot of time. And as we settle into this uncertain time of Covid-19, a recession and Brexit, it’s not getting any easier for candidates.
We’ve been seeing hundreds of graduates sign up to our platform lately. This is great news for you as you get to pick from a big pool of talent – but our administration team have had their work cut out to pick out the top performers and help other candidates identify and fill in their CV gaps.
Not only that, but we care about matching the right candidates with the right jobs. It’s our duty to get this stuff right, and the more we know about a candidate the better we can match them to your company.
Evil genius and DigitalGrads CTO Mike Mulqueen has put his energy into creating a hiring robot to help us identify superstar juniors and eventually take over the graduate recruitment world as we know it.
What does this mean for you?
You shouldn’t be seeing our (as of yet unnamed) robot on your side of things, but you will see its effects.
Our robot is here for a few reasons, and the first is to get to know our candidates better. We really believe in a people-centred approach to hiring, but that can be tricky when every job advert has hundreds of applicants.
This is where our lovely robot, Dave, comes in. It asks our candidates questions early on in the process, to find out the detailed information that makes each candidate special.
This means that – depending on how well the candidates respond to our dear little robot – we can better match them to jobs and companies. We also get to see early on how candidates present themselves, especially whether they communicate with us clearly and politely.
The second reason why our robot is taking over things is because – well, things take time. Preparing hundreds of high-quality profiles takes a lot of time and brainpower.
If you peek behind the curtain with me, you’ll see constant messaging between our admin team and our candidates. Creating a quality, personalised profile takes a lot of communication – especially when it comes to writing bios. This will now all be assisted by the robot.
It will ask questions like:
- Are you working on any side projects?
- Have you won any awards?
- Were you the president or committee member of any university societies?
- Have you run a fundraising campaign or raised money for charity?
- Can you speak any foreign languages?
- Have you worked or studied abroad?
- What makes you unique?
Crucially, by finding out this rich information about each candidate, the robot also help us identify top tier candidates. This is often information that is left off a CV, but is especially important in highlighting motivation, ambition, talent and skill.
Armed with this fabulous rich picture of each candidate, our team can focus on getting the hiring right and helping clients to manage the recruitment process.
How does it work?
Once our candidates have completed some basic steps like signing up and verifying their email address, a little chat notification pops up.
And once they open it, they will see their first messages from ‘DigitalGrads Team’ AKA our robot.
The robot begins by walking them through some simple yes or no questions before moving onto more deatiled questions about their experience. Here, they can free type their answers.
The robot can also help our grads take profile pictures, record videos and verify their right to work status!
We like to think our robot is pretty smart. It’s deeply connected into the rest of the DigitalGrads platform. Before each question, it considers everything we already know about the candidate and tries to ask only relevant questions. When it’s not speaking, it’s keeping a watchful eye over all our candidates, ready to follow up as new questions arise.
Once they have finished chatting to our robot all they have to do is wait for our admin team to finalise their profile, tag key skills and write their bio.
When the robot shuts off and goes to sleep the candidate’s profile should look a little something like this:
If you want to check out more robot-approved profiles, log in to the hiring platform!