Travel the world. Make friends for life. Develop skills you never knew you had. Go places you never imagined. This is the draw of the Royal Navy.

But the recruitment process can be a daunting one. Potential candidates are exposed to military jargon from day one, and interviews, medicals, and swimming tests mean it’s often a 6–12-month journey to entry. If you don’t have friends or family from this world, it can feel alien.

Additionally, due to the pandemic, face-to-face contact throughout the recruitment process has reduced, meaning those with concerns were struggling to find answers. Particularly those from diverse backgrounds (e.g. women and ethnic minorities).

All this, and in a job market that’s increasingly competitive for recruiters, converting latent interest in joining the RN had become even more challenging.

We needed an innovative approach to support candidates through the process, ultimately aiming to reduce drop-off from hesitant audiences.

An audit of the recruitment pipeline revealed that women and ethnic minority audiences were dropping off at various stages within the process at a much greater attrition rate than White/male audiences. Across the long journey, we needed to reassure applicants and provide more touchpoints for hesitant audiences to engage.

While the Royal Navy website held many of the answers to their concerns, research showed that the audience often weren’t finding the information they needed to reassure them due to tricky navigation, confusing language, and generic rather than personalised answers.

Many of them were leaving the site with their concerns still present.

We knew that questions left unanswered by us would instead be fielded by other unreliable sources such as forum contributors or the candidate’s own (often negative and mistaken) pre-conceptions.

It was paramount that we find a means of serving potential candidates quick, clear information to address all unique questions.

While optimising our paid media strategy was important, if we were going to meet recruitment ambitions, we needed to ensure those who were interested but hesitant were being reassured as quickly and effectively as possible.

To achieve this, our strategic focus pivoted to ensuring that every potential candidate coming to us was provided the answers to the questions that could make or break their decision as quickly as possible.

This meant shifting focus from attempting to generate incremental demand through media, and instead we looked to reduce drop-off and improve retention among those who have engaged.

Ultimately, we needed to move our flow of information and candidate engagement from clunky, confused and generic, to direct, reassuring and personal.

This led to us designing and launching a UK government first: a Royal Navy AI Virtual Guide - a sophisticated web-based conversational AI assistant which supports candidates through the recruitment journey.

The build was inclusive for Gen-Z from the outset. It ensured answers around race, religion, sexuality, and gender were incorporated. Housed on the RN website, every applicant receives a tailored journey, with each conversation unique to the candidate’s needs, starting with the candidate choosing from six diverse personas to chat with (e.g. Raj, a 38-year-old British Asian male Weapons Engineer, and Drusilla, a 21-year-old female in catering).

Through advanced natural language processing models, the virtual guide answers complex and open-ended questions from candidates in real-time. Over time, the assistant gets to know the candidate and provides personalised answers, proactive content, and guidance based on their progress.

It helps candidates discover the most suitable role for them and can even assist in completing their application form within the chat interface.

The build took 4.5 months, launching ahead of a multi-channel burst of paid media driving a +5% YoY increase in traffic.

Between launch in March 2023 and December 2023, the AI Assistant has delivered impressive results. The AI saw more than 38,000 users and successfully answered over 76,000 questions, while facilitating the creation of 4,247 expressions of interest.

Significantly, interest from British women increased by 8%, alongside a 9% increase in British EOIs from ethnic minority backgrounds since the Virtual Guide’s inception, indicative of the AI’s ability to effectively reassure around common concerns.

The AI has driven a 74% reduction in live-agent chat support traffic year on year, demonstrating its function as being readily available to answer questions as an initial point of contact 24 hours a day.

Finally, it’s providing invaluable insight into potential candidates (through the nature of the questions being asked), thereby helping the Royal Navy understand their concerns and frustrations. This insight is now being used to help shape future messaging to be used in above-the-line communications.