Many of the companies I’ve looked at to demo their recruiting technology during a “startups of the future” session at the ERE conference this April fall into several categories.
One of these is chatbots — experiences where a job candidate interacts in the form of a chat, and they feel like, or at least a little like, they’re talking to a human.
Doug Berg, of Jobs2Web and more recently MyAlerts, is getting into this game. HiringSolved has another intriguing tool, which it compares to Siri. Olivia, from Aaron Matos, is worth a look. As is Karen. Job Pal, out of Berlin, is a great example; a large European telecom is trying it out; so have I, and it’s impressive. There’s XOR. Stanley, from Talkpush. And, variations like Chatfuel.
The one we’ll demo in San Diego is Mya. You may be as surprised as I was that talking to the chatbot can actual feel more personal for a job candidate than some career-site experiences without a bot. The system can handle a back-and-forth conversation with someone asking many of the questions that’d come to mind for any job candidate, like about pay and the ability to get overtime hours.
Mya’s more than an idea. It’s being used by some large companies, and was created by a San Francisco company called FirstJob. The co-founder Eyal Grayevsky says the company “raised a $4M Seed and plans to raise our Series A in the next few months” and that “over 900 companies have joined our waiting list since launching in July last year.” He says the company has brought on dozens of clients, including some Fortune 500s.
Stay tuned. More companies to come for the demo session in San Diego.