Short answer: recruitment is a two-sided market and a single contact form cannot serve it. A recruitment agency chatbot's first job is to ask whether the visitor is hiring or looking, then run two entirely separate intakes: a vacancy brief for employers, a screening path for candidates. It should never make hiring decisions, reject candidates on its own, or give employment law guidance.
Two audiences on one website
Recruitment sites carry client traffic and candidate traffic simultaneously, and the two want opposite things.
Employers want to know your sectors, your fee model, whether it is contingent or retained, your rebate terms, typical time to shortlist, whether you handle contract as well as permanent, and whether you have people available now. Their enquiries are commercial and they are usually urgent because someone has just resigned.
Candidates want to know what roles you have, whether you cover their discipline and location, whether you handle contract work, what the rate looks like, and how to register. Their enquiries are high volume and mostly arrive outside working hours, because people job hunt in the evening.
Serving both through a generic form means client enquiries queue behind CVs. That is the wrong priority order for a business where one vacancy brief is worth several hundred registrations.
Capturing a vacancy brief properly
The information that makes a role fillable is well known and almost never in the first email:
Job title and a realistic description of the work. Location and whether it is on-site, hybrid or remote, with the actual expected days. Permanent, contract or temp. Salary or rate range. Start date. Number of hires. Whether they are working with other agencies and how many. Whether the role has been advertised already and for how long. Who makes the hiring decision and how fast the interview process moves.
The last two are the difference between a role you can fill and a role you will burn a week on. A vacancy that has been open four months with three agencies on it and a slow two-stage process is a different proposition from a fresh exclusive with a decision-maker who can interview on Thursday.
Clerkzo's in-chat form takes custom fields, so the employer path can collect all of this in a structured way while the enquiry is warm, instead of a consultant extracting it over two calls. See lead capture.
Screening candidates without making decisions
The candidate path should collect: discipline and current job title, years of experience, location and commuting or remote preference, right to work status in the relevant country, salary or rate expectation, notice period, whether they are looking for permanent or contract, and their key skills or certifications.
That is enough for a consultant to know within seconds whether there is a live role. It is not enough to reject anyone, and the bot should not try. Automated rejection is both a legal risk and a reputational one, and candidates rejected by software talk about it publicly. Configure the widget to capture and route, never to decline.
Two more hard boundaries. The bot should not discuss anything protected, age, health, family circumstances, nationality beyond a straightforward right-to-work question. And it should not give employment law guidance to either side, notice periods in law, redundancy rights, IR35 or contractor status determinations, discrimination questions. Those go to a person, and often to a specialist. Clerkzo's guardrails keep the assistant inside the content you supply and refuse anything outside that scope, which is the right default here.
What it can answer all day
For employers: your sectors and specialisms, permanent versus contract coverage, geographic reach, how your fee model works in general terms, rebate periods, typical shortlist timescales, whether you do executive search, how to brief a role.
For candidates: which sectors you recruit in, whether you cover their location, how to register, what happens after registration, whether you handle contract roles, how you handle CV confidentiality, and where the live vacancies are listed.
That is most of your website traffic's questions, answered at eleven at night when a candidate is browsing and at seven in the morning when a hiring manager has just had a resignation land.
The cost of a slow reply in recruitment
Recruitment is a race twice over.
On the client side, a manager with an urgent vacancy calls several agencies. The one that responds first often gets the brief in detail, gets to ask the shaping questions, and sometimes gets exclusivity. The ones who call back tomorrow are working from a second-hand version of the brief against a head start.
On the candidate side, good candidates are on the market for a short time. A strong contractor between engagements will be placed within days. If your registration process leaves them waiting until Monday, someone else has already put them forward. In contract recruitment particularly, the window can be a single afternoon.
Both sides mean an unanswered evening enquiry is not a delayed opportunity, it is usually a lost one. The general case is in how fast should you respond to leads.
Setting it up
Clerkzo crawls your website, so your sector pages, about, process and FAQ do most of the training. Add a knowledge file for the internal things: current live roles by discipline if the list is stable enough, your fee bands, your rebate terms, which sectors you decline, and how registration works end to end.
Then route hard by side. Employer enquiries should trigger an immediate notification to the consultant covering that sector, by email, webhook or Telegram. Candidate registrations can flow into the leads inbox for the resourcing team, moving New to Contacted to Qualified to Won or Lost. The pipeline view matters here because recruitment lives and dies on follow-up discipline, and a candidate marked Qualified with no contact for a week is a visible failure rather than an invisible one.
Flat pricing from $19/mo means a busy hiring quarter costs the same as a quiet one, which suits a business with unpredictable volume. See pricing and how it works.
Frequently asked questions
Can it screen candidates automatically?
It collects screening information. It should not make accept or reject decisions, both for legal reasons and because candidate experience is part of your brand.
Can it take a full job brief?
Yes, via an in-chat form with your own fields. Most agencies capture ten to twelve fields, including the process and competition questions consultants forget to ask.
Will it answer employment law questions?
No. Configure it to hand those to a consultant, and for anything genuinely legal, to a qualified adviser.
Can it separate client and candidate traffic?
That is the first question it asks, and the two paths collect completely different fields.
How quickly can we go live?
One script tag, roughly ten minutes, with done-for-you setup available.