If you really know Arca24.com, you can imagine that we do not only focus on developing software solutions to optimize HR processes. We constantly look at the future. On the one hand we keep on supporting our clients with our technology, on the other hand we have been developing new solutions that will satisfy their future needs.

One of the strong points that enable our products Talentum, the Applicant Tracking System for HR, and Ngage, the CRM solution for the staffing industry, to be recognized as state-of-the art software is the automatic CV screening and the applicant shortlisting by compatibility.

That consideration triggered an idea:
“what about developing a robot that can automatically interview applicants? And enabling it to select the two or three applicants who best suit every job, instead of simply ranking them?”

Dear recruiters, I really know that many of you are still convinced that “only humans can select applicants!”, but are you sure about that? Nowadays software can drive airplanes and cars, they can streamline surgery procedures, support doctors during diagnosis and treatment, which is much more complex than selecting applicants for a job.

Of course I can’t tell you that such a technology will replace humans. For sure it will be able to shortlist two or three applicants’ profiles during a preliminary selection process, to make you concentrate on just those profiles and optimize your work.

That’s how we want to develop CB1-18, which is the acronym of chatbot, the first edition of a tool especially created for applicant selection that will be available in 2018.

Once a job seeker has applied for a job opening, two among our software programs will come into operation, i.e. CViewr, our multilingual parser, and Skillskan, our semantic search engine for CV matching.

The outcome will report many indicators, such as the years of applicants’ work experience, the average duration of every job, the jobs carried out over the range between the 5 and 2 last years, the number of years during which an applicant has carried out a specific job, the “importance” of that profession over the career path and the competence level. It will also be able to detect whether the main job has been carried out over the last years or not. Together with those indicators the system will consider education level, age and working sector.

That way CB1-18 will be able to get indicators from the following critical points:

• The applicant has worked as accountant for 10 years, but over the last 2 years he/she worked as porter. Why? What happened?
• Over the last 5 years he/she changed his/her job 4 times but he/she is not a temp. Why? What happened?

According to those alerts and the applicant’s profession, the chatbot automatically asks a set of questions to the applicants, in order to get to know his/her work experience and competencies.

The applicant will receive a link inviting him/her to answer an automated video interview containing the chatbot’s questions, which the applicant won’t be able to read previously or answer twice. Some of those questions will be managed from a regulation system, which adapts each single question to the answer of the previous one.

CB1-18 will be able to conduct a real selection interview. Thanks to the answers received, our engine will be able to assess the applicant’s skills and suitability to a specific job position. On the one hand it will be able to interview middle and top-level profiles to recruit for mandates or projects, just think about the selection of temporary workers, which requires short time-to-hire. On the other hand it will be able to interview a plenty of candidates in very little time, to test their technical competencies as well as to check their availability to start working in a 12-hour time.