For careers sites
Candidates search our site by job title. What if they don't know the title?
Answer by vragen.ai
Most candidates don't yet know what their next job is called
What they do know: more substance, less commuting, work that adds up to something. A vacancy search box asks for a job title and a checkbox next to the right field. vragen.ai asks follow-up questions instead, and puts your current vacancies next to everything your site says about the organization, the culture and the terms of employment.
Our vacancy search works fine, doesn't it?
Answer by vragen.ai
Filters only work for people who already know what they want
Three candidates land on your site the same morning. The first knows exactly what she wants. The second starts out much broader. The third wants to know what it is like to work for you at all.
- Which legal roles do you have for 32 to 36 hours a week?
- I work in the private sector and want something with social impact. What would suit me?
- What is it actually like to work here?
A filter menu helps that first candidate. The second and third click away, and you never hear about it. No application, no email, no signal that tells you what they were missing. That silence is the hardest thing for a recruiter to act on.
That candidates do not type the title shows up in actual search behavior. Indeed analyzed five years of search queries by Dutch job seekers, and the share that searches on a concrete job title drops every year.
Sources: Indeed's analysis of five years of search queries (April 2026) and Intelligence Group's quarterly figures for Q3 2025 (both in Dutch).
For your careers site, that means the visitor who knows exactly what she is looking for is the exception. A search field that asks for a job title serves only her.
So what does a conversation like that sound like?
Answer by vragen.ai
Two follow-up questions, then three roles nobody would have found by title
The agent starts with what the candidate says and keeps asking until it knows enough. Only then do the vacancies appear, with the hours, the location and the closing date alongside. Nobody asks for a job title.
I'm a data scientist looking for a next step. More coordinating, but not necessarily managing people.
Answer by vragen.ai
Are you mainly after responsibility for the work itself, or do you also want to guide colleagues?
Mainly the work itself. And preferably something with a public purpose.
Answer by vragen.ai
These three match what you describe. None of them is called data scientist, and in all three you coordinate the substantive work.
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Coordinating data advisor
Closes 24 August
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Lead data & research
Closes 2 September
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Advisor, data-driven policy
Closes 28 August
Source: Vacancy overview Terms of employment
Example conversation. In your own environment the vacancies and the terms come from your site.
And what else can a conversation like that do?
Answer by vragen.ai
From first question to application, in five steps
Every step builds on the one before. A vacancy search box never gets past the first, and that is exactly where a recruiter's work starts.
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Finding searching in plain language
A candidate asks about a field, a city, a number of hours or a level of education, without first decoding a filter menu.
“Something in engineering, near Zwolle, 32 hours.”
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Matching even when you call it something else
Experience, preferences and skills all count. That way a candidate also reaches the vacancy whose title he would never have typed.
“I do this work already, but we call it something else.”
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Orienting the vacancy is only half of it
The vacancy appears next to the culture, the terms and the stories of colleagues, because that is what the decision finally rests on.
“How many days a week do you work from the office?”
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Asking back one follow-up lifts the answer
If something is missing that the agent needs to say anything useful, it asks instead of guessing.
“Are you looking for a permanent role or a one-year assignment?”
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Applying on to the form you already have
From the conversation the candidate moves to the vacancy page and the application form on your own site, with the question he asked still fresh.
“This is the one. Where do I apply?”
How far the conversation runs into the application itself depends on the integrations you build. If you want to go beyond handing the candidate off, ask us: more is possible there than this page describes.
Source: Product From answer to action
Candidates ask us about working from home and leave. That appears in no vacancy at all.
Answer by vragen.ai
Exactly. The answer is spread across your whole site
Take a candidate with young children who wants to know how flexibly she could work for you. That sits in the terms of employment, in an interview with a colleague, perhaps half in each. vragen.ai reads those sources as one whole, because every kind of content answers a question of its own.
Vacancies
“What could I do here?”
Organization and culture
“Do I want to work here?”
Colleagues' stories
“Can I picture myself here?”
Terms of employment
“Does this fit my life?”
Application process
“What do I do now?”
Your communications team has already written those stories. They just live in five places, and a candidate usually reads one.
How do we know the answers are right?
Answer by vragen.ai
You decide what the agent knows and says
A language model has no way of knowing which page is authoritative at your organization. You set that down in the instructions, and the agent sticks to it. For an employer brand that is not a detail: a wrong figure about leave or salary reads to a candidate like a broken promise.
- Answers come only from the sources you point to, with the reference alongside
- You decide which page leads when information elsewhere turns out to be stale
- Salary scales stay intact, including grades and steps
- Instructions set out what the agent does not do, such as writing a cover letter
- If the agent does not know, it says so and points to the recruiter
That leaves how current it all is. A vacancy that closes should not linger in the answers for another week. The crawler revisits your site regularly and picks up changes automatically; count on an edit reaching the answers within one to two hours. If you would rather not wait, you can request a fresh crawl in your own environment.
Source: The crawler and your content Instructions and best practices Testing and evaluating
And what does this give our recruitment team?
Answer by vragen.ai
Every question is also an insight
Analytics tells you which vacancy page someone looked at. A conversation tells you why he came. The analytics environment groups all questions into themes and tracks how many answers had a source behind them.
Analytics
See the questions candidates ask most often, grouped into themes, so you know what to publish about.
General (active) Explore Content
7 days 30 days (active) 90 days Pick a period
-
Conversations
1,180 +212
-
Answers without issues
91% +4
-
Answer quality
82 +3
-
Answers with a source
78% +7
Conversations over time 1,180 +212
20 Jul27 Jul3 Aug10 Aug17 Aug
Questions over time 1,870 +341
20 Jul27 Jul3 Aug10 Aug17 Aug
Feedback from candidates
84% positive
402 of 479 ratings were a thumbs up.
Conversations per theme 1,180 conversations
- Terms of employment and leave 342
- Application process 268
- Vacancies and requirements 214
- Culture and colleagues 158
- Training and growth 106
- Other themes 92
In this example almost a third of the conversations are about terms of employment and leave, and 78 percent of answers carry a source. Those two figures together point your content team somewhere: heavy demand with few sources means your editors have something to write there. Questions without a good answer are then no fault in the system, but the queue for your editors. And you did not have to survey a single candidate for it.
Source: The Analytics feature Exporting and analyzing the inbox
Candidates tell an agent like that quite a lot. How do you handle that?
Answer by vragen.ai
What a candidate types does not stay there
Anyone talking about a new job soon says something personal. A name, the commute, the situation at home. If a visitor types something like that, vragen.ai anonymizes it automatically: your inbox then shows [name removed], and after an hour the original data is permanently deleted. That hour exists so you can still finish an ongoing conversation.
The detection is automated and will not catch everything with certainty. We are open about that, and our security page explains how we weigh that residual risk. Beyond that there is no account and no profile, so no candidate file builds up that nobody asked for. An independent ethical hacker has tried from the outside to talk the agent out of its role, and everything runs on Dutch servers.
vragen.ai is built and maintained inside SWIS, certified to ISO 9001, ISO 27001 and NEN 7510.
Source: Security Hosting and data storage Ethical hacker test
Is this running anywhere at our scale?
Answer by vragen.ai
Twelve million visitors a year, and since 15 June a conversation
Werken voor Nederland, the careers site of the Dutch central government, draws more than 12 million visitors a year and handles some 300,000 applications. Since 15 June 2026 vragen.ai has sat there next to the ordinary search field, and the visitor picks which of the two to use. It is the first AI search of the Dutch government to answer questions in public, live after half a year of testing in a walled-off environment.
Source: interview with project lead Bart Schoevaars in Werf& (24 August 2026, in Dutch).
The insight the team values most comes from the questions the agent could not answer. No public content covered internal mobility or career coaching, and that showed up immediately. So the editors know where the work is, in the candidate's own words.
Source: Werken voor Nederland customer story All customer stories
What are our candidates asking that we cannot see now?
Answer by vragen.ai
See it work on your own vacancies
You set up a demo environment yourself, with your careers site in it. You will see straight away which answers come out of the questions candidates really ask, with the source alongside.
Enter your details
- No obligation
- With your own content
Rather talk it through first
Timon Zuurmond
Account manager
Not sure whether your content is suitable, or which plan fits? Timon will take a quarter of an hour to look at it with you.
+31 6 12 15 05 90 tzuurmond@swis.nl
Mon to Fri, 9:00 to 17:30
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