Use of Facebook and Instagram Chatbots in Human Resources

The war for the best talent is on and HR departments need to make use of any tool available in the real or virtual world.

With this objective in mind, to attract junior and senior professionals interested in working in the energy transformation sector, the Valencian company POWER ELECTRONICS has been developing the MPOWER Master’s Degree in collaboration with the University of Valencia (UV) since 2020. The Master, which is free of charge, brings together the best transition specialists and teachers in the country to train future professionals and thus grow this large family, which exceeds 2500 people.

In this scenario, the use of social networks such as Facebook and Instagram emerge as great allies. Although if misused, they can become great generators of stress for companies that do not know how to use the “communication codes” of these channels.

This is where the three-way collaboration project between MPOWER, the Conversational Business Chair and the conversational platform Woztell was born.

The problem presented by the HR department

It all began in the corridors of the School of Engineering of the University of Valencia, where the offices of Jesús Soret, director of the Conversational Business Chair, and José Torres, academic director of the MPOWER Master’s program, are located.

Coming out of a meeting, we met José Torres and, after talking to him about the Conversational Business Chair’s project, he quickly saw the potential for collaboration and told us about the difficulty that Power Electronics has in finding engineers to train in its MPOWER Master’s program:

From MPOWER we have limited time to select suitable candidates for the Master of the University of Valencia, so we need the profile of the pre-registrants to be as tight as possible and with a very limited time and budget.

To which José Pérez, our strategic director at the Chair, responded:

We have to go out and look for the good and unsatisfied professionals, because we can help them and they don’t know it. We have to give them a new opportunity of life right in front of their eyes.

Jose Espinar, marketing director of the Chair pointed out that Facebook and Instagram could be great channels for attracting talent (senior and junior respectively) and that, using a conversational platform such as Woztell, we could launch a campaign to meet those objectives.

The challenge of finding qualified talent in just 10 days

After talking about the vision and ideas, it was time to define the challenge and get going.

The objectives were:

• To obtain between 30 and 40 potential candidates for the MPOWER Master.
• To enhance the visibility of the Master in the online environment.

These were the limits defined for the campaign:

• 10 calendar days until the end of the campaign (limiting defined by the start of the Master).
• We had a total campaign budget of €1,000.
• The MPOWER website has all the necessary information, but being an official website it uses standardized university procedures that are not very attractive to arise the interest of the university’s talent, which requests a lot of data that is not necessary for the initial process and this affects the recruitment opportunities.
• One of the challenges was to capture the data without using this form.
• This campaign competes with the rest of the training and internship offers. In addition, the candidate profile (engineers) is in high demand professionally.
• It was essential to unify the message we were transmitting to be in tune with MPOWER.

With all these variables, we got down to work to define an effective strategy within the budget and the deadline.

The solution: Facebook and Instagram campaigns reinforced by a chatbot.

After a brain storming with our marketing team, we decided that the fastest way to capture interest in the MPOWER Master was to use the preferred channels of potential candidates (Facebook and Instagram) and, without leaving these channels, to inform about the Master while capturing the data of those interested.

In addition, we used a media campaign coordinated with the social media campaigns to amplify the message.

To summarize, the proposed solution was:

A differentiating approach was developed with the rest of the masters and offers to engineers that would allow us to highlight and offer them what they are looking for. The general idea of this approach was:

Focus on employability and career development opportunities through free training through the MPOWER Master’s program.

We distributed this message with the following strategies:

• Our marketing team created ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram.
  
  • The Woztell team, with support from the marketing team, designed the automatic management of interested people through 2 chatbots on Facebook and Instagram providing information about the Master.
  • These two chatbots were able to perform automatic pre-registration of interested people.
• Support for the campaign through the dissemination of viralizable news in digital and organic press media, with QR redirected to the Instagram chatbot.

Implementation, how we turn it into reality

Of the 10 days we had available, we spent one day conceptualizing the campaign and defining the strategy together with the marketing team, so we only had 9 days left to prepare everything, launch the campaign, optimize it and get the expected results! In addition, we had to coordinate the marketing team, the Woztell technical team and the MPOWER team.

The marketing director of the Chair, José Espinar, tells us about the day-to-day running of the campaign and the work we did day by day.

The first day was intense, we defined the messages and conversations, created the necessary documents for the technical team to implement the chatbots and designed the necessary ads.

We wanted to launch the campaign as soon as possible to be able to make optimizations, by way of summary we carried out the following steps:

• We defined the message.
• We defined the chatbot conversation flow.
• We created the necessary resources for the configuration of
• Facebook campaigns including text and images.
• We set up the chatbot for Facebook Messenger.
• We set up the campaign in Facebook Business Maxnager.
• We configured the document where MPOWER would receive the list and data of the candidates.
• Launch the campaign on Facebook.
• Creation of the document where to collect the candidates and their relevant information.

All this was done with the following tools:

• To create the draft messages and conversations, we used an online spreadsheet.
• To create the chatbot flow, we used Lucidchart as a support tool.
• The design of the images was done with the online tool Canva.
• The configuration of the campaigns was done directly in Facebook Business Manager.
• To implement the chatbot we used the conversational platform Woztell.
• Google spreadsheets to collect the information.

*At the end of the document you will have at your disposal the templates and resources we used throughout the process.

Chatbot functional diagram

We dedicated the next two days to optimizing the whole process, improving the ad campaigns using the first results and correcting and improving the chatbot conversations to maximize the results.

We also realized that by reactivating some conversations with live chat, we could improve performance. When we talk about live chat, we refer to a human agent that resumes the chatbot conversation when it detects that it is stuck or when it can provide the information it needs to the candidate.

Our main tasks were:

• Optimization of the chatbot conversations.
• Optimization of the Facebook campaign.
• Support with live chat to candidates.

We added a new tool in this phase:

• To manage conversations, we worked directly with the Facebook Messenger tool, using its conversation manager.

Once we had the campaigns and chatbot well optimized, we expanded the reach of the campaign by adding the Instagram channel.

This resulted in the following tasks:

• We created the necessary assets for setting up the campaigns on
• Instagram including text and images.
• We configured the chatbot for Instagram Messenger.
• We configured the campaign in Facebook Business Manager.
• Launching the campaign on Instagram.

This time it was not necessary to use additional tools.

El chatbot en acción

The campaigns supported by the live chat were already up and running at full capacity, the following days were dedicated to prepare the press release that we were going to send to the media.

• Optimization of the campaign on Facebook and Instagram.
• Support with live chat to candidates.
• Development of the press release.

There was only one day left and our goal was to launch the press release to enhance the outreach and meet the objective of increasing the visibility of the Master in the Valencian Community.

Our main tasks were:

• Support with live chat to candidates.

• Launching the press release.

• We used Comunicae again to launch the press release.

The last day was for data collection and campaign finalization. With all the work already done we wanted to analyze the results well and be clear about the value provided in this campaign for MPOWER.

We performed the following tasks:

• Support with live chat to candidates.
• Campaign completion.
• Results analysis.

The results are captured in a spreadsheet so we can make graphs and quick analysis of performance that we will see in more detail in the next point.

The results

After the development of the campaign, it was time to analyze the results and how the campaign had worked.

The objective of the campaign was:

• Obtain between 30 and 40 candidates.
• Obtain visibility of the Master in the Valencian Community.
• Adhere to a budget of 1000€.

The results obtained were:

If we analyze the objectives distributed by channels:

Facebook campaign

• Duration: 9 days.
• 58,095 ad views.
• 807 interactions with the ads.
• 79 conversations initiated with the chatbot.
• 19 leads:
• 14 automated.
• 5 with live chat reinforcement.

Campaign on Instagram

• Duration: 5 days.
• 29,845 ad views.
• 183 interactions with the ads.
• 52 conversations initiated with the chatbot.
• 19 leads:
• 16 automated.
• 3 with live chat reinforcement.

Media campaign

• 42,099 distributions made.
• 60,907 impacts on distribution channels.
• 192 mentions made.
• 4,400 search results in Google under the title of the press release.
• Estimated audience: 2,151,115 potential views.

Conclusion

In conclusion, given the time and resources available, we believe that we far exceeded the proposed objectives.

José Torres, academic director of this master’s program, summarizes his experience as follows:

Having chatbots in the IG and FB social networks has allowed us to attend the interested parties 24 hours a day, and answer questions automatically. This has allowed us to greatly increase the number of candidates we have managed and our HR team to interview only those who are really interested and have a great chance of joining MPOWER’s Master’s program.

Finally, asked if the work can be fully automated, Torres explains that:

We have had to learn which part of the conversation can be automated, although it is important that a human agent supports the chatbot in resolving unanticipated candidate queries, thus updating the list of available answers.

Resources used, templates and downloadable examples

Campaign team

• Graphic designer
• ChatBot manager
• Community manager
• Marketing manager
• Marketing team

Tools used

• Canva: ads design.
• Facebook Ads e Instagram Ads: ads campaign management.
• Lucidchart: functional diagram drawing of the ChatBot.
• Woztell: creation of 2 Chatbots (Instagram and Facebook).
• Facebook Messenger: visualization and management of answers in real time.
• Comunicae: press release diffusion.
• Google sheets: notes, texts and candidates list.