Manila Electric Company - MERALCO's TRACI Chatbot
Name of Organization / Company: Manila Electric Company (MERALCO), Pasig City, Metro Manila, Philippines
Category: Award for the Innovative Use of Technology in Human Resources > All Other Industries
Entry Title: Meralco's TRACI Chatbot - Recruiting in the Social Media Era
Essay
THE SOCIAL MEDIA ERA AND CHATBOTS
Social media has been flourishing a few years now. In 2018, a survey done by UK Firm We Are Social ranked the Philippines as the top country in terms of social media usage1. 67 million out of 105 million Filipinos spend almost 4 hours a day in social media.
The high user engagement has made social media a fast-paced market for products, services and job opportunities for businesses. This made the case for chatbots, an emerging artificial intelligence platform that is projected to frontline customer engagement. In 2020, it is projected that 25 percent of customer service interactions will be through chatbots.
RECRUITING THE FUTURE WORKFORCE
In 2017, Meralco’s Talent Recruitment Office saw a huge increase in engagement with their Facebook site. User likes per post increased dramatically by 500% from 2016. The surge was mainly due to the fresh grad millennials looking for work.
Meralco now has to adapt in this new playing field to attract the future workforce. The current recruitment process is manually intensive and has burdened its recruiters for years now. In 2017, the recruitment office has received 48,825 job applications, and with only seven (7) recruiters, it has been a challenge to provide good candidate experience and project a good employer image.
Every day, recruiters assist walk-in applicants, send acknowledgement to applications submitted in job websites and answer follow-ups and inquiries received thru e-mail, Facebook and SMS. From time to time, recruiters also conduct job fairs and caravans.
Recruiters need to act fast to complete recruitment process for applicants that make the initial cut or they risk losing them to other companies. Recruiters also spend time consolidating/processing data as each channel has its own database.
The process time spent for each manual activity may take up 4 minutes to 4 hours each.
THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION JOURNEY
The complications brought forward made the case for Meralco to create its own recruitment chatbot. TRACI was the first of its kind in the Philippines, piloted in April 2018 in Facebook Messenger then fully launched later that year.
An applicant would only need to chat with TRACI, fill in required details then upload a photo/PDF of their resumes/CVs. All these are stored in an existing SharePoint site.
TRACI has then gained popularity from FB-based job applicants. To date, TRACI has been used by 5,440 users, received 2,991 and made 30,000 user interactions. Her Facebook page now has 1,402 user likes and 1,440 follows. TRACI has lifted the burden of recruiters as submission of application, inquiries and follow ups are now done through TRACI.
During the last quarter of the year, TRACI has produced 20 new employees and 20 interns. Some 15 more shortlisted applications are being processed to date.
THE ROAD AHEAD
TRACI, utiliz ing artificial intelligence (AI) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA), still has much to offer. Jobstreet and LinkedIn will remain as a popular local channels for candidate sourcing. AI and RPA will be able to extract application data and consolidate in the SharePoint site. Meanwhile, TRACI will be able to update candidates of their job status via email or SMS. With the centralized data, the recruitment process will be fully centralized.
LINKS:
URL 1: https://www.facebook.com/traci.meralco/
URL 2: https://www.pressreader.com/philippines/businessmirror/20181205/281848644692277
URL 3: https://www.unbox.ph/editorials/five-ways-meralco-is-evolving-as-a-company-with-mtech/
URL 4: https://www.esquiremag.ph/culture/cars-and-tech/human-machine-interactions-chatbot-a00288-20190125