SmartRecruiters Blog

Recruiting Startup of the Year Nominee: jobpal

Providing a great candidate experience for every single one of your applicants is often a goal far beyond even the largest hiring departments. Luckily, jobpal have the latest tech to help you with that.

Meet the companies vying for the title of Recruiting Startup Of The Year (RSOTY) at Hiring Success 18, in San Francisco, March 12-14. Your vote determines which six are flying to California to pitch their ideas to 1000+ Talent Acquisition leaders and puts them in the running for the grand prize.

One of these six will be selected by a group of C-Suite experts and industry analysts for the ultimate prize of a Gold Sponsorship to Hiring Success 19, worth $10,000, which includes a branded booth and dedicated demo-room for potential customers to interact with their product.

Luc Dudler is the founder of jobpal, a recruiting startup specialializing in developing sophisticated chatbots to fulfill your recruitment needs. With jobpal’s bots, you are able to automate a large element of your recruitment processes, meaning no candidate goes without being answered. He took some time to answer some questions for SmartRecruiters in order to let us know the impetus behind the idea.

What’s your company’s elevator pitch?

Personalised candidate experience — at scale.

What gave you the idea for your startup?

We were already working on a recruiting product that wasn’t — let’s say — going through the roof. When Facebook Messenger launched chatbots on their platform, everyone was speaking about customer service and how chatbots (AKA automated messaging) were changing the communication and relationship between brands and consumers. We were thinking whether there’s an analogy to recruiting and how chatbots can change the communication and relationship between employer brands and jobseekers and talent. Turns out there was, and we’re very excited about the use cases we’re working on with our clients together.

How do you envision your idea changing the talent acquisition landscape?

For employers looking for new talent it’s crucial to stay in touch with people in a meaningful way — no matter, whether it is completely new people, candidates ‘waiting’ in your database or people you’ve rejected before. Chatbots can help companies to engage with talent, help them before, after and during the application process, stay in touch with people and automate many of the repetitive tasks recruiters have to do on a daily basis.

What does ‘hiring success’ mean to you?

Hiring success for us means that the candidate enjoyed the experience regardless, whether they got the job or not and also that a recruiter has more time with fewer, more relevant candidates.

What is your favorite interview question and why?

As a 1st question I always ask: ‘Regardless of this conversation, our company and your current job what do you want to do professionally as a next step?’ You can get a lot from it.

What’s the role of technology in hiring?

I love this quote from a recent New York Times article: “In Sweden, if you ask a union leader, ‘Are you afraid of new technology?’ they will answer, ‘No, I’m afraid of old technology,’” I think it’s spot on and I also believe that technology will soon be everywhere in hiring, but the challenge is not that tech will replace recruiters — the challenge is how they can work together well.

If jobpal sounds like a great idea to you, why not give it your vote in our Recruiting Startup of the Year competition?

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