Alain Afflelou streamlines hiring with AI

Companies that invest in candidate experience improve the quality of hires by 70%. The search for talent represents a very important challenge for any company, since it involves the incorporation of a new member who will be responsible, together with the rest of the team, for ensuring the success of the organization.

We study the case of Alain Afflelou, the European leader in optics and audio. In its talent recruitment processes, its Human Resources department is faced with the need to find both generic profiles -vendors- and technical profiles -opticians and audiologists- in a sector with a zero unemployment rate where the candidate niche is very small and the demand for talent is very high.

To simplify this process for both recruiters and candidates, the company has opted for a solution based on artificial intelligence and virtual assistants. In this way, Alain Afflelou has relied on HR Bot Factory to digitize your talent recruitment strategy in the more than 70 processes that are open on average per week, thus improving the effectiveness of their contracts.

Why did you decide at Alain Afflelou to introduce AI into your recruitment?

“We have a very large volume of processes and we are a very innovative company, everything came about because of that mix. We needed something that would help us to be more agile and effective within our processes. We measure ourselves by the coverage rate, so we decided to include the chatbot as an innovative and disruptive tool that allows us to be much more agile and reduce that KPI” comments Silvia Cardoso, Alain Afflelou's Talent Manager.

In this way, thanks to the introduction of AI in the initial part of their selection processes, the HR team can carry out the first filter for all profiles, without the need to make the traditional telephone calls that consumed most of the recruiters' time. The use of AI for CV screening can reduce the time spent on this task by up to 75%, allowing recruiters to focus on more advanced evaluations.

What feedback do you have from candidates' experience with your chatbot?

“It attracts a lot of attention to the candidates and they love it. In a few minutes they do an interview in a very friendly way and on top of that they can attach their curriculum to us. In addition, not only do they do the interview, but they also receive feedback, something they value a lot.”, says Silvia.

In the current labor market, it is the candidate who chooses the company, there has been that change that implies having to work on selection processes and employer branding with a different perspective, always betting on innovation. In this way, it becomes essential to take care of the candidates' experience in order to attract the best talent.

How do you customize the process for different profiles?

Being able to fully customize the process with the chatbot, it is applicable to any type of profile. The tool is ready to collect all the information that HR professionals need regarding their competence profile in each and every one of their vacancies.

”We use the chatbot for all profiles, the difference is that we do the competency interview only for the optician and audiologist and not for the seller. In addition, we also use it with students and have just incorporated it for any venue profile,” explains Silvia.

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The introduction of a chatbot powered by Artificial Intelligence makes the process more efficient, since it allows us to review 100% of applications quickly. After that, all the information about each of the candidates is collected in an ATS that human resources professionals can access to see how candidates fit the skills and knowledge they need, and filter according to the criteria they need.

In this way, Alain Afflelou's Human Resources team is freed from repetitive tasks that are automated and can dedicate their time to tasks that really provide value in the recruitment phase and need the humanized touch.

More and more companies are betting on the innovation that artificial intelligence involves in their recruitment processes, in all types of profiles. This digitalization not only streamlines processes, but also provides a higher quality in recruitment and an improvement in the employer branding of companies.

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