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Contributing Experts
We spend hundreds of hours researching the best HR and recruiting software so you don’t have to. We never take money from vendors during our research phase and rely heavily on practitioners and experts to help us recommend the right software. We may earn a fee if you click on vendor links on this page. Learn more
Humanly's HR chatbot for professional volume and early career hiring is simple, personalized and quick to deploy. Using its chatbot, you can automate tasks like screening, scheduling, engagement, and reference checks.
Paradox stands out from the crowd because of their stellar implementation team and their flagship product Olivia, an AI assistant that interacts with job candidates via text.
HireVue is a pioneer in the video interviewing software space and stands out from its competitors for its AI-powered on-demand interviews that helps recruiters conduct the initial screening of candidates.
After acquiring Smashfly, Symphony Talent added an HR chatbot to their offering, covering CRM-functionality, career sites, programmatic advertising, and talent assessments on a single tool.
Ideal lives up to its name. It's an exemplary recruitment chatbot that lets you send questionnaires, gauge a candidate's competency based on the replies, and help you screen qualified candidates.
Mya helps you recruit fast and reduce your hiring costs by automating candidate engagement in a very humanistic way. The fact that it seamlessly integrates with most applicant tracking systems is just the cherry on the cake.
Wade and Wendy focuses on automating recruitment processes. It's available to chat with talent 24/7 and will source, screen, and recommend qualified candidates to your team in an instant.
Brazen's recruiting chatbot lets you save time by having live chats with qualified candidates anytime, anywhere. One of its standout features is that the chatbot provides candidates with replies in not only text but also video form.
Espressive's employee assistant chatbot aims to improve employee productivity by immediately resolving their issues, at any time of the day. But that's not all. It also walks employees through workflows, such as vacation requests and onboarding.
Eightfold is an AI-powered talent intelligence platform that uses top-notch technology to solve HR problems. It's trusted by global enterprises like LG and Booking.com and helps companies build productive, automated workflows.
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Vendors Reviewed
Our criteria: How we chose the best vendors
We take our research seriously and want to make sure we are presenting our readers with the very best solutions in a given software category. Here's how we select vendors to be in our buyer guides:
- Product: We want to have a deep understanding of a vendor's product before recommending it. This usually means getting a demo by a senior executive (their CEO, head of product, etc), and/or using the product ourselves to make sure it has a solid UI, intuitive workflows, and the features to make it a best in class offering.
- User feedback: We do our best to understand what users say when they experience this product. User input allows us to accomplish a more thorough due diligence of products, put new vendors on our radar, and generally make sure we are presenting the right products to our readers.
- Financial metrics: We are very much finance nerds and so use a product's retention rates, growth, profitability, and scale to understand whether or not it is truly best in class.
- Best for a use case: Sometimes the best solution is the cheapest, the best tool for international companies, or the best for startups. We try to include a diversity of solutions so that our readers can find the tool that is best for what they need.
Here's more detail if you want to read further on how we research vendors.
In this guide you'll find
Are you looking to decrease the time your recruiting team spends sourcing and screening candidates? Then you’ll probably want to look at adding a chatbot to your talent acquisition tech stack. Several studies have proven that AI-powered technologies bring tangible ROI to organizations that implement them.
Let’s take a look at some statistics:
- Chatbots can help you save time by handling as many as 80% of standard questions within minutes. This especially helpful knowing that over half of all applicants give up on a company if they haven’t received a response from them within two weeks of applying. Moreover, 31% of those candidates expect a customized message, which chatbots are capable of curating as they leverage existing data, machine learning, and natural language processing to make interactions personalized.
- Chatbots are only getting better and smarter. In fact, as many as 73% of candidates couldn’t tell they were interacting with a chatbot when they reached out to companies to ask basic questions pertaining to their applications.
- More companies are adopting AI-powered technologies to streamline their recruiting efforts. A recent survey found that 23% of companies who are already using AI-powered technology, were doing so in their HR department.
Now that we’ve established that chatbot technology is worth the investment, let’s take a look at the best recruiting chatbots available in 2022.
Featured in
Top Recruiting and HR Chatbots
We track thousands of HRTech solutions, these are the best HR chatbots per our research and expert council as of 2022
Why we love it
:
Humanly's HR chatbot for professional volume and early career hiring is simple, personalized and quick to deploy. Using its chatbot, you can automate tasks like screening, scheduling, engagement, and reference checks.
Humanly.io's AI recruiting chatbot offloads, automates, and optimizes recruiters repetitive interactions inside the screening & scheduling, reference checking, and candidate re-engagement processes. Great for professional volume, hourly, and early career hiring.
Humanly
Review:
Humanly has designed an AI powered chatbot that is specifically-built for mid market companies who need a tool that is simple and fast to implement. Their product will allow your recruiting team to screen and schedule candidates in a DEI friendly manner that also integrates directly with your ATS so that recruiters don't need to log into another system.
They are doing all sorts of interesting things including using the data from your performance management system to continually get better at screening candidates so you can make the right hires. If you're a mid market company looking to add a chatbot, text recruiting, or AI capabilities to your talent acquisition stack, check them out.
Humanly
Customers:
Humanly is used by Swiss Monkey, Armoire, Tiny Pulse, Oakland Roots, and BPM, among others.
Humanly is used by Swiss Monkey, Armoire, Tiny Pulse, Oakland Roots, and BPM, among others.
Humanly
Stats:
According to their website, Humanly has helped their customers with the following wins:
- 60 hours saved in scheduling and screening for each open job
- An average candidate experience score of 4.8 out of 5
- Increase in diversity of the candidates at the top of the funnel
- 95% of references complete background checks within 48 hours
According to their website, Humanly has helped their customers with the following wins:
- 60 hours saved in scheduling and screening for each open job
- An average candidate experience score of 4.8 out of 5
- Increase in diversity of the candidates at the top of the funnel
- 95% of references complete background checks within 48 hours
Best For
Medium-sized companies that want to streamline their recruiting processes with a special eye towards reference checks. Humanly is especially tailored for businesses that already have sourcing sites and an ATS in place, but need a solution to connect the two and accelerate things.
Why we love it
:
Paradox stands out from the crowd because of their stellar implementation team and their flagship product Olivia, an AI assistant that interacts with job candidates via text.
Used by some of the world's top brands, Paradox's HR chatbot can do all kinds of useful things – schedule interviews in seconds, answer questions in any language, send reminders.
- Their implementation and customer service is very efficient and accessible. You will not only get a Customer Success Manager to help you with every step during your implementation phase but your issues will also likely be resolved within the same day. Unlike many vendors, you can contact their support team via phone and explain your issue in real-time.
- It’s very time-saving and cuts down on back-and-forth communication between job candidates and recruiters. As Derek B, Head of Recruitment at a large-sized enterprise puts it, “Olivia helped us shave our response time from 7 days to under 24 hours. This time saving ensured that the applicants we chose to interview were the best of the bunch.”
- Olivia, their AI chatbot is programmed to respond to candidates in a way that feels personal, as if a real person is responding. What’s even better is that despite complete automation, you can see all chats and manually override them if need be.
- Although you can get some data and feedback about your company and its processes, analytics is not very robust in Paradox. If you’re looking for advanced features that let you slice and dice your data in various ways, you’ll have to look for other applications.
- Their AI assistant is intelligent and has a human touch but at the end of the day, Olivia is still AI. At times when you want nuanced answers in conversations, you’ll have to manually operate the chat.
Olivia
Review:
Paradox’s flagship product is their HR chatbot, Olivia, named after the founder’s wife. The founding team at Paradox hated the idea of building a lifeless, robotic recruiting chatbot so they named their product after a real person in hopes of giving it some personality. Interestingly, the chatbot’s profile picture is the actual Olivia’s picture upon which the chatbot is based.
Olivia performs an array of HR tasks including scheduling interviews, screening, sending reminders, and registering candidates for virtual career fairs – all without needing the intervention of the recruiter.
Olivia
Customers:
Unilever, McDonald’s, Amazon, 3M, CVS Health, Nestlé, Lowe’s
Mcdonald's, Unilever, Disney, Nestle, Aramark, CVS Health.
Olivia
Stats:
- After using Paradox, fast-food chain Wendy’s started saving 4-6 hours per restaurant per day
- Their customer MultiCare experienced a 22% decrease in cost per hire after using Paradox
- Great Wolf Lodge, one of Paradox’s customers saw a 225% reduction in employee turnover
- Major fast-food join McDonalds saw a 60% reduction in time to hire after using Paradox
- 250+ customers
Olivia
Pricing:
Pricing is not disclosed upfront. You will have to schedule a demo to get custom pricing based on your company size. After filling out a demo form on their website, their team will reach out to you within one business day to learn about your team’s challenges and schedule a custom-tailored demo.
The pricing of Paradox's planning and services isn't disclosed on their website.
Best For
Paradox is ideal for large enterprises that deal with a high volume of job candidates on a frequent basis.
Why we love it
:
HireVue is a pioneer in the video interviewing software space and stands out from its competitors for its AI-powered on-demand interviews that helps recruiters conduct the initial screening of candidates.
HireVue is a pioneer in the video interviewing software space and stands out from its competitors for its AI-powered on-demand interviews that helps recruiters conduct the initial screening of candidates.
- HireVue is very useful when it comes to screening a large number of job candidates in a short frame of time. Its virtual assistant can do an initial screen of applicants on its own, leave messages for them, and get responses in return. All of this frees up recruiters’ time.
- It has a great on-demand interviewing feature. Recruiters can sit and watch candidates’ interviews as per their convenience. The ability to change the speed of the interview while watching can also help recruiters save time.
- Their implementation team and customer support is extremely responsive or in the words of a Global Talent Attraction Director, “I love the support, tenacity and just constant desire to do the right thing. They take the time to understand our business and I never feel like it is a ‘catch and release’ relationship that is so common in this space”
- HireVue is very useful when it comes to screening a large number of job candidates in a short frame of time. Its virtual assistant can do an initial screen of applicants on its own, leave messages for them, and get responses in return. All of this frees up recruiters’ time.
- It has a great on-demand interviewing feature. Recruiters can sit and watch candidates’ interviews as per their convenience. The ability to change the speed of the interview while watching can also help recruiters save time.
- Their implementation team and customer support is extremely responsive or in the words of a Global Talent Attraction Director, “I love the support, tenacity and just constant desire to do the right thing. They take the time to understand our business and I never feel like it is a ‘catch and release’ relationship that is so common in this space”
- HireVue is not very affordable compared to its alternatives, especially when you factor in the functionality. Their pricing plans are geared towards companies with at least 2500 employees and even then, you only get a small set of features.
- HireVue does not have a lot of integration partners and the range of software it integrates with is also very limited (mostly ATS).
- Too much automation can at times lead to unwanted candidates. For instance, the asynchronous interview feature can allow candidates to adjust their responses in order to fit the job criteria. However, HireVue wouldn’t screen such candidates out and your company may need human intervention to pick up on visual cues and body language.
- HireVue is not very affordable compared to its alternatives, especially when you factor in the functionality. Their pricing plans are geared towards companies with at least 2500 employees and even then, you only get a small set of features.
- HireVue does not have a lot of integration partners and the range of software it integrates with is also very limited (mostly ATS).
- Too much automation can at times lead to unwanted candidates. For instance, the asynchronous interview feature can allow candidates to adjust their responses in order to fit the job criteria. However, HireVue wouldn’t screen such candidates out and your company may need human intervention to pick up on visual cues and body language.
HireVue
Review:
HireVue is a hiring software that’s powered by AI. Their HR chatbot makes use of text messages to converse with job candidates and has a variety of use cases. Their chat-based job matching can help you widen your talent pool by finding the most suitable candidate for a particular opening. After a candidate initially chats with HireVue’s HR chatbot, HireVue continues conversing with them throughout their hiring lifecycle. It schedules, sends reminders, and reschedules with candidates on its own, thereby saving your time and bandwidth.
HireVue
Customers:
HireVue has customers in a variety of industries ranging from aviation to retail. Some popular names include Amazon, Unilever, Vodafone, Beacon Health System, SmartLynx Airlines, The Co-operative Bank, and National Safety Apparel.
HireVue has customers in a variety of industries ranging from aviation to retail. Some popular names include Amazon, Unilever, Vodafone, Beacon Health System, SmartLynx Airlines, The Co-operative Bank, and National Safety Apparel.
HireVue
Stats:
- Founded in 2004
- Available in more than 41 languages
- Has facilitated over 26 million interviews
- Serves over 800 enterprise customers worldwide
- One of their customers, Unilever, experienced a 90% faster hiring after implementing HireVue and increased their diversity and inclusion goals by 16%.
- After using HireVue, Amazon saved 68,124 recruiter hours, reached 300% more candidates, and saw an 86.8% candidate satisfaction rate.
- Founded in 2004
- Available in more than 41 languages
- Has facilitated over 26 million interviews
- Serves over 800 enterprise customers worldwide
- One of their customers, Unilever, experienced a 90% faster hiring after implementing HireVue and increased their diversity and inclusion goals by 16%.
- After using HireVue, Amazon saved 68,124 recruiter hours, reached 300% more candidates, and saw an 86.8% candidate satisfaction rate.
HireVue
Pricing:
HireVue has two pricing plans:
- Essentials: This plan starts at $35,000 per month for a company with 2500-7500 employees. It includes live and on-demand interviewing features, custom branding, and single language configuration.
- Enterprise: This plan is suitable for companies with over 7500 employees. Pricing is custom and you would have to request a demo to receive a quote. In addition to all the features of the Essentials plan, this plan comes with scheduling, chatbot, pre-built ATS integrations, analytics, among others.
HireVue has two pricing plans:
- Essentials: This plan starts at $35,000 per month for a company with 2500-7500 employees. It includes live and on-demand interviewing features, custom branding, and single language configuration.
- Enterprise: This plan is suitable for companies with over 7500 employees. Pricing is custom and you would have to request a demo to receive a quote. In addition to all the features of the Essentials plan, this plan comes with scheduling, chatbot, pre-built ATS integrations, analytics, among others.
Best For
Large enterprises who frequently have hiring needs.
Why we love it
:
Espressive's employee assistant chatbot aims to improve employee productivity by immediately resolving their issues, at any time of the day. But that's not all. It also walks employees through workflows, such as vacation requests and onboarding.
Espressive
Review:
Espressive’s solution is specifically designed to help employees get answers to their most common questions (PTO, benefits, etc), without burdening the HR team. Employees can access Espressive's AI-based virtual support agent (VSA) Barista on any device or browser. Barista also has a unique omni-channel ability enabling employees to interact via Slack, Teams, and more.
Espressive
Customers:
Dexcom, Guardant, First American, Survey Monkey
Espressive
Stats:
- Nearly 85% employee adoption
- 40-60% reductions in calls to HR and IT
Best For:
Enterprise level companies looking for a top HR chatbot should take a look at Espressive.
Why we love it
:
Mya helps you recruit fast and reduce your hiring costs by automating candidate engagement in a very humanistic way. The fact that it seamlessly integrates with most applicant tracking systems is just the cherry on the cake.
Mya
Review:
Mya has grown insanely fast with $32 mm of venture funding, and has apparently invested much of that capital into R&D as their offering boasts a 79% reduction in time to interview, a 93% applicant completion rate, and many more interesting stats.
Mya
Customers:
L’Oréal, Adecco, Advantage Solutions, Sevenstep, Comfort Keepers.
Mya
Stats:
- Used by hundred of enterprises
- 40 clients among the Fortune 500 company list
- 5x increase in funnel conversion
- At L'Oréal, they helped reduce the average time spent per applicant by 40 minutes.
Best For:
Companies that want to leverage the power of AI and conversational screening in their recruitment efforts.
Why we love it
:
Wade and Wendy focuses on automating recruitment processes. It's available to chat with talent 24/7 and will source, screen, and recommend qualified candidates to your team in an instant.
Wade and Wendy
Review:
Wade & Wendy’s recruiting chatbot helps your team by sourcing passive candidates, and screening candidates that come in via your careers page or sourcing activities. Their solution learns over time which profiles are a good fit for a given role which results in better and better matches. Overall this is designed to save your TA team time, and allow them to focus on more strategic initiatives.
Wade and Wendy
Customers:
Randtsad, Comcast, E-Trade Financial Corporation
Wade and Wendy
Stats:
Wade and Wendy
Pricing:
The pricing of Wade & Wendy’s plans isn’t disclosed on their website.
Best For:
Wade & Wendy is a good bet for large recruiting teams within companies and recruitment agencies.
Why we love it
:
After acquiring Smashfly, Symphony Talent added an HR chatbot to their offering, covering CRM-functionality, career sites, programmatic advertising, and talent assessments on a single tool.
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Symphony Talent
Review:
The team that pioneered the recruitment marketing software space is back with the first chatbot that is tightly integrated into a leading candidate relationship management (CRM) offering.
Please note, this solution is only for companies who’re using Symphony Talent and is not available as a standalone offering.
Symphony Talent
Customers:
Dick's Sporting Goods, FCA, RioTinto, Mars.
Symphony Talent
Stats:
- Smashfly was used by more than 600 customers worldwide.
- They helped Dick's Sporting Goods achieve an 80% reduction in cost per applicant.
- At Ecolab, they assisted with a 25% increase in talent network leads.
- This solution was also instrumental to get an 86% reduction in hiring time at Regis Corporation.
Best For:
This solution is designed to work with businesses of all sizes, but it's particularly good for recruitment teams that see digital advertising as a big component of their recruitment strategy.
Why we love it
:
Brazen's recruiting chatbot lets you save time by having live chats with qualified candidates anytime, anywhere. One of its standout features is that the chatbot provides candidates with replies in not only text but also video form.
- Their customer support is great, especially the chat support. When it comes to creating online events, their team would give you a step-by-step walkthrough of the entire process. Every month, their team arranges a monthly call between their customers and their appointed account representative to make sure everything is working fine. Their response time for customer queries is also fairly quick and you will usually hear back from them within the same day.
- Brazen makes networking easier. There are multiple networking booths for events where attendees can talk to employers via text, voice, or chat. Attendees can also easily switch between different booths.
- Before, after, and during each event, you’re provided with detailed analytics and data about signups, candidates, attendance, and other such metrics.
- Their team comes up with updates on a frequent basis and not only asks for client feedback but also takes end-user feedback into mind when rolling out new features.
- Their customer support is great, especially the chat support. When it comes to creating online events, their team would give you a step-by-step walkthrough of the entire process. Every month, their team arranges a monthly call between their customers and their appointed account representative to make sure everything is working fine. Their response time for customer queries is also fairly quick and you will usually hear back from them within the same day.
- Brazen makes networking easier. There are multiple networking booths for events where attendees can talk to employers via text, voice, or chat. Attendees can also easily switch between different booths.
- Before, after, and during each event, you’re provided with detailed analytics and data about signups, candidates, attendance, and other such metrics.
- Their team comes up with updates on a frequent basis and not only asks for client feedback but also takes end-user feedback into mind when rolling out new features.
- Customizations are limited. For instance, emails for the events are system automated and that can limit you from displaying your voice and brand.
- Compared to other popular video conferencing tools, Brazen’s built-in audio and video tool is not as stable and there can be occasional bugs.
- Initial setup can be a little confusing and it takes some trial and error to figure out a structure that helps you make the most out of your virtual events.
- The pricing of the platform isn’t transparent and self-signup free trials aren’t available at this time.
- Customizations are limited. For instance, emails for the events are system automated and that can limit you from displaying your voice and brand.
- Compared to other popular video conferencing tools, Brazen’s built-in audio and video tool is not as stable and there can be occasional bugs.
- Initial setup can be a little confusing and it takes some trial and error to figure out a structure that helps you make the most out of your virtual events.
- The pricing of the platform isn’t transparent and self-signup free trials aren’t available at this time.
Brazen
Review:
Brazen is primarily a virtual hiring events platform and BrazenBot, their HR chatbot is one of the recruiting solutions they offer in their suite of products. BrazenBot performs multiple functions including promoting your career events, answering candidates’ frequently asked questions, and routing qualified candidates to chat with the hiring manager.
One interesting feature about Brazen’s chatbot is that it provides replies to candidates not only in text but also in video format.
Brazen
Customers:
Brazen serves universities, companies, associations, workforce development organizations, and more. Notable customers include Spectrum, CVS Health, Temple University, KPMG, Lincoln Financial Group, and Houston Methodist.
Brazen
Stats:
- Founded in 2007
- iRelaunch increased their event registration rate by 250% after implementing Brazen.
Brazen
Pricing:
Pricing is not disclosed upfront. You have to request a price quote by filling out a form online with details about your company.
Best For:
Brazen is best suited for large organizations, universities, and companies with frequent and high-volume hiring needs.
Why we love it
:
Ideal lives up to its name. It's an exemplary recruitment chatbot that lets you send questionnaires, gauge a candidate's competency based on the replies, and help you screen qualified candidates.
Ideal
Review:
Ideal’s chatbot saves recruiting time by screening and staging candidates throughout the hiring process, all done through their AI powered assistant. Also worth checking out is their ATS re-discovery product which will go into your ATS, see who is a good fit for your existing reqs, resurface/contact them, screen them, and put them in front of your recruiters.
Ideal
Customers:
Bell, Dish, Staples, Novant Health, Purolator.
Ideal
Stats:
- Automate 70% of your top-of-funnel interactions
- 90% engagement rate
- At S&P Data, they helped reduce time-to-hire by 25 days.
- They also increased their retention rates by 20%
Best For:
Ideal is made for high-volume hiring in any industry.
Why we love it
:
Eightfold is an AI-powered talent intelligence platform that uses top-notch technology to solve HR problems. It's trusted by global enterprises like LG and Booking.com and helps companies build productive, automated workflows.
eightfold
Review:
Eightfold’s recruiting chatbot is designed to engage job seekers on the career site to answer pressing questions, and direct them to the best fit jobs for their interests and background. Their bot can also screen candidates. This is just one module within a broader recruitment marketing platform that is centered around a dynamic career site designed to convert more applicants into the right jobs.
eightfold
Customers:
Air Asia, Capital One, Mercado Libre, Tata Communications, Booking.com, Bayer
eightfold
Stats:
- Eightfold is currently valued between $500M and $1B
- They raised $125M in Series D funding
- At Ui Path, their product was used to increase the no. of positions filled per recruiter every quarter by 50%.
Best For:
Eightfold is mainly thought of as a product for enterprise clients and large organizations (2,000+ employees).
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Our Advice
Getting an HR Chatbot is a no brainer for talent acquisition teams. This concept has absolutely exploded in the marketing realm during the last few years - how many times a day do you see a chatbot pop up on your screen from a company’s site? They’re so popular because they work in driving leads down the funnel. In the world of talent attraction, it’s the same concept - get more leads down the funnel by engaging passive candidates.
Beyond conversion, there are so many use cases a recruiting chatbot can help with. What we have glossed over above are the non-recruiting jobs like onboarding, answering employee questions, new hire checkins, employee engagement, and internal mobility. The best hr chatbots are extremely powerful, and only getting better.
If you’ve made it this far, you’re serious about adding an HR Chatbot to your recruiting tech stack. Whether it’s to cut down on scheduling, and screening time, drive more applicants into the ATS, or one of the many other use cases, the next step will be to get a demo with one of our pre-vetted vendors to take a deep dive into their product. You can use this spreadsheet to stay organized as you do demos.
Best Recruiting and HR Chatbots
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