Move over, Siri and Alexa. Karen has arrived.
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If you’re a recruiter, Karen is someone you may want to get to know.
Karen, whose full name is Karen by Karen.ai, is a cognitive recruiting chatbot, and she is the brainchild of Canadian software developer Noel Webb.
What She Does
Karen engages candidates throughout the application process, matches candidates to alternative positions, and provides screening support before, during, and after the recruiting process.
“Karen derives concepts and personality traits from candidates’ resumes and cover letters and assesses the level of engagement and gains deeper insights through a simple text chat conversation. This conversation improves the candidate’s experience of the recruitment process and represents the company’s brand,” said Webb, when announcing Karen’s debut.
Automated solutions have existed in recruitment for nearly a decade, but Karen takes these automations one step further, because Karen can learn from conversations with candidates and predict other positions for which they might be a match.
Many of the systems that perform similar functions are based on proprietary in-house artificial intelligence (AI). Karen, however, leverages a trained IBM Watson model, a proven leader in AI.
How She Helps
Karen’s skills can be applied to help recruiters with a variety of tasks, including:
- Resume review, expediting the process
- Candidate screening, through candidate ranking
- Candidate engagement, through a conversation service that interacts with candidates throughout the application process and keeps them informed about application status
The time-savings implications of AI via Karen are significant.
Karen has been shown to reduce as much as 50 percent of the time a recruiter spends reviewing resumes and cover letters. Meanwhile, because the candidate ranking feature identifies top talent, recruiters spend time engaging with only the best. The conversation service likewise saves recruiters time.
Although Karen can prove helpful in a variety of environments, hiring organizations with high volume applicant submissions can especially benefit from the technology.
For those organizations concerned about interfaces, Karen integrates with a company’s existing applicant tracking system (ATS) in order to increase efficiency while maintaining workflow.
Karen is currently available as a pilot program, to companies that qualify for a first look at her features. More information can be found at Karen.ai.