Talkpush was born almost five years ago from a desire to change candidate/recruiter interactions by starting meaningful conversations, making the experience better for millions of candidates and thousands of recruiters. Within that time frame the Talent Acquisition space has changed drastically. It’s an exciting industry, as tech and marketing techniques evolve, new ways to level up the recruitment experience are constantly popping up. Outdated processes like manual pre-screening, scheduling, and ineffective sourcing burden companies with massive costs-per-hire, as well as millions of great candidates who are never given a fair chance to be hired.

I wanted to be part of this revolution, and give a shove to traditional recruiting towards automation. I wanted to rethink recruitment from a candidate-centric perspective, where candidates are treated like customers.

Disrupting an Aging Industry

The internet, tools like Google Drive, social media, and a generation who knows how to use all these tools inside out — have decentralized the job market. In a way, it’s become more accessible, applying to jobs is (or should be) easier than ever. Facebook messenger and WhatsApp have 1.7 billion monthly users worldwide. That’s a very captive and attentive audience if employers can find ways to connect with them there.

With job opportunities delivered at the fingertips of job seekers, all recruiters have to do is find the right strategy to make the best of it. I want the days of “upload your resume here,” to be gone for good. And we’re getting there. It’s time to send voice notes to candidates, to record video job descriptions, and to use a conversational chatbot that’s ready to answer questions from candidates 24/7.

One of our customers, BAC Credomatic, a leading bank in Central America, is a perfect example of how recruiting tech works. By using Talkpush, they were able to take their whole process online, moving away from traditional methods and sourcing channels, to social media, and a bot that could answer candidates at all times. They saw a 14x reduction in cost per hire, as well as a 40% increase in recruiter productivity.

With talent to be found on Facebook, WhatsApp, Google Jobs, or on specialized job boards, it’s never been easier to find the right talent. We have built a system that organizes it all and makes it fun for candidates and recruiters to start conversations. For us, this was an opportunity too good to pass up.

It opened up a host of remote job possibilities, completely globalizing the talent pool. Companies are hiring the best talent, regardless of where they are. This model has allowed my company to attract talent we would never have connected with otherwise.

Our official headquarters are in Hong Kong, and we have people working in offices or co-working spaces in Manila, Delhi, San Jose (Costa Rica), Mexico City, Paris, Berlin, Kuala Lumpur and California. Our remote philosophy has allowed us to hire the most qualified, regardless of where they are in the world. Who knows where our next hire will be? Cape Town? Mumbai? Barcelona? We believe being a distributed team makes us better equipped to build localized solutions.

Bots are not a replacement

Companies can show candidates who they are, by building bots with personalities to match their brand, their tone, and their core values. Worried about losing the personal touch? That’s precisely what we are designed to deliver: automating all the boring, repetitive, mundane work so that your recruiters can spend more quality time with each qualified candidate. Those high-touch human experiences are very valuable to hiring effectively and building your brand.

The point of Automation

Adding automation makes recruiting more effective. Recruiters focus on high value tasks and leave the tedious ones to the bots. This is also a big benefit for candidates who can receive instant responses 24/7 and be kept informed of their progress through the various hiring stages.

We designed an intuitive platform that was easy for recruiters to use and kept candidates engaged through every stage of the funnel. Applicants want to know where they stand. The uncertainty, where they find themselves clueless on whether they are close to being hired or have been passed on, is senseless and borderline cruel. Slow response rates also mean that good candidates get hired by someone else.

iQor Philippines, a managed services provider of customer engagement and technology-enabled BPO solutions — in over 7 locations — also saw the benefits of a centralized recruitment platform. They were able to capture all the leads that came their way, because they had a system that allowed them to effortlessly contact them, and keep them informed.

With new technology popping up around recruiting every day, the layers have started to add up — and it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle. High volume hiring companies find themselves asking “Do I need a new CRM to manage candidates?” “Can I just plug in a bot on my website?” “Should I pay the big $$$ to get on the AI bandwagon?”

The key is Integration

After five years of shaping and reshaping Talkpush, I believe the foundation of the answer to all of these questions lies in integration. Expect AI when it comes to recruiting, but we’ll get to that in a minute, (or you can read my thoughts on the matter right here). Market leaders in Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) are more than a decade old, and their poor candidate experience shows they have struggled to adapt to new behaviors, but that doesn’t mean you need to throw them out. Companies rely on them for many HR processes and have valuable data stored in there. Your job is now to connect the dots, and make those tools work together with new tech that is adapted to new candidate behaviors.

That’s why we designed an expanded API — or in simpler terms, an interface that your engineers can use to make your software communicate with ours. Consider it the glue that can hold your tech stack together. In the shift from on-premise to cloud/SaaS, almost two decades ago, companies became more nimble, but were still often stuck with one single vendor. The platform revolution from recent years means recruiting software can be adaptable, making it easy for you to organically grow your tech stack.

Now, Let’s Talk About AI

We do employ AI, just not in the way people tend to associate the term. We invest time and resources in building a library for our NLP (natural language processing), which helps us direct candidate inquiries better. We also use a voice to text transcription engine that can be labelled as an AI technology. And I’m sure our backend does hundreds of activities per second that rely on some form of intelligent load balancing. So, while I would have no problem making the argument that we are an “AI recruitment provider”, it just feels like an empty word, just like saying “cereal is natural”.

Leave it to the Googles and Amazons of the world to develop awe-inspiring machines that can guess what you’re thinking. What the TA tech space really needs and thrives on is Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which is basically automating repetitive tasks. RPA allows us to automate:

• Capturing leads from various sourcing channels
• Asking candidates questions to find out what their core competence is
• Sharing key information with candidates about employer value proposition
• Scheduling interviews
• Taking interview notes
• Calling and writing to candidates to get updates
• Sharing interview notes and commentary with hiring managers
• Running assessments
• Background checks
• Preparing new hires for Day 1 on the job and onboarding

How can all this be done without disrupting long-established systems? Step by step, with the help of a robust API. Getting systems to communicate with each other is the strong-hold of a successful automated recruitment strategy. And it’s what we work to achieve every single day.

Customizable Software: Localized Solutions

We are a software company that lets you connect with candidates via various interfaces (career sites, Facebook, chatbots, etc.) and provides automation to hiring workflows. This saves time for your recruiters, and saves money for your recruitment advertising.

 

Having expertise across the globe means we love to adapt our solution to each market, going as far as training our chatbots to speak in dozens of languages. We believe the best recruiting experiences are built with deep love and care for local and cultural preferences. Our conversational designers have developed Stanley, a conversational agent — aka chatbot — to respond in 18 languages. We also custom design branded bots, that embrace the unique style and brand of each employer; give it a personality and adapt it to the communication channels that are most effective in the local markets. Why? Because candidates live in the real world, not in your global headquarters.

With our new expanded API and focus on Robotic Process Automation (RPA) we’re poised to build unique partnerships with employers and other tech vendors, and to build new experiences for candidates and recruiters every day.