Recruitment is a critical pillar to building the right human capital for an organization. With hundreds of candidates going through its recruitment process every month, car manufacturer ŠKODA AUTO selected cloud-based IBM Watson Assistant to help make the hiring of new employees more efficient and less time-consuming not only for HR professionals but also for candidates. A digital assistant guides candidates through the data entry process in a user-friendly way, helping to avoid typing errors and assisting them in the completion of online job applications.

Working with the IBM Czech Republic AI professionals and designers, ŠKODA AUTO implemented a virtual HR assistant to give job applicants the ability to apply for a job through a virtual conversation rather than by filling out extensive paper forms. Through the automated collection of data, the solution delivers proactive and personalized services to Skoda’s HR team while providing data privacy.

Watson Assistant can be run anywhere, in any cloud environment – on premises, or on any private, public, or hybrid cloud – giving businesses the ability to apply an enterprise-class, intelligent AI-driven assistant for all of the company’s data. The virtual HR assistant is running on ŠKODA’s IBM Cloud instance, providing enterprise security, with all the data RSA encrypted.

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Since its inception in July 2018, the Watson Assistant solution has saved approximately 40 percent of the time monthly required to handle job applications by HR employees.

The solution is used today in two of the three ŠKODA factories in the Czech Republic and currently collates, in Czech language, the information from Czech job applicants, to streamline the collection and storage of applicant’s data.

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The digital HR assistant helps to speed the administration and repetitive tasks, enabling the HR team to focus on higher complexity work. With this solution available on site in the ŠKODA AUTO hiring center, with a plan to extend it as a web page in the near future, the applicants no longer need to apply using paper forms. Applicants can interact with the virtual assistant by asking questions related to the job applications such as working hours, night shifts and other questions related to a specific role. Recruiters have clear visibility of data and can easily decide the next steps in the hiring process.

“Virtual assistants are a new form of communication channel for our applicants. This simple way to interact via a chat conversation with candidates is easy to use, and makes a good impression about ŠKODA AUTO during their first contact with the company. In developing the solution, IBM spent time with our recruiters and applicants on-site, to truly understand our needs, and demonstrated that the development can be fast and flexible,” said Jana Šrámová, HR Care, ŠKODA AUTO.

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