The buzz on using AI in recruiting has reached a near-fever pitch. Some of the hype has been good while some has not been, let’s just say, not so great. The most interesting thing is that it’s seemingly always talked about in theoretical terms — what could go wrong, why it might have negative consequences, and so on. There’s not much being shown that tangibly displays real word uses cases of AI in talent acquisition right now.
And it is being used. Quite a bit, actually. To great success.
The reality is that companies are using AI and their candidates and hiring managers love it. Here are five organizations doing AI right within TA and HR.
Nestlé saved 8,000+ hours per month by automating interview scheduling.
We all know Nestlé as the world’s largest, most diversified food and beverage company. What we probably don’t know are the challenges that recruiters face when trying to hire a large volume of people for their various locations across the globe. For example, before conversational AI, they spent 8,000 hours scheduling and rescheduling interviews — or the equivalent of 52 full-time employees doing this work.
Nestlé’s Talent Acquisition Global Transformation Lead, Gui Neves, wondered if they could offload that much work and that many conversations for a significant number of candidates without sacrificing the quality standards that people come to expect from this global brand. They decided to bring in conversational AI to automate tasks like screening and interview scheduling. Conversational AI also helped the candidate experience by being available 24/7 to help candidates with their job search and get their questions answered.
After just one year of conversational AI, Nestlé:
- Answered 1.5 million candidate questions.
- Saved 8,000 hours per month and saw a 600% increase in interviews.
- Scheduled 25,000 candidate interviews.
General Motors saved $2 million in recruiting costs in less than a year.
General Motors is one of the largest automotive manufacturing companies in the world, and recently invested $35 billion into creating an entirely electric car lineup by 2035. With 1-2 million candidates a year, GM had to leverage 55 recruiting coordinators to screen and schedule candidates.
GM turned to conversational AI to accelerate its hiring process. Their AI solution automatically syncs with recruiters’ calendars to optimize the number of interviews they can take, automates scheduling by reaching out to candidates with interview times, and reduces ghosting by reminding candidates about interviews and keeps GM top of mind.
When GM looked at the results of this work, Eileen Kovalsky, global head of candidate experience for GM, said it best, “The recruiters are feeling that impact right away and it’s freeing them up to do more empowering work.” That impact includes:
- $2 million saved in recruiting costs so far.
- 74,000 interviews scheduled through automation.
- Nearly a million candidates engaged by their conversational AI.
McDonald’s reduced time to hire by 60% and saved store managers 5 hours per week while increasing candidate satisfaction.
McDonald’s is about as ubiquitous as they come, of course; it’s the world’s largest restaurant chain by revenue and one of the best-known brands in the world. With 95% of its locations owned and operated by franchisees and a hiring experience that was inconsistent, the McDonald’s recruiting experience didn’t match the rigor of its customer experience.
McDonald’s turned to conversational AI to keep the human element of hiring while automating the portions of the process that could be sped up while still maintaining candidate satisfaction. What they dubbed the “McHire” platform was deployed collaboratively across the global organization.
The results after launching conversational AI were nothing short of remarkable, including going from hiring in weeks to just a few days. McDonald’s also experienced:
- 95% positive candidate experience.
- 60% reduction in time to hire.
- 83% of interviews completed.
- 90% adoption across franchises globally.
Southern Rock Saved $840k in recruiting costs by increasing conversion through a conversational ATS.
You might not be familiar with Southern Rock but they are actually one of the nation’s top franchise organizations, operating over 150 McAlister’s Deli restaurants. When Courtney Dempsey joined Southern Rock in 2021 as director of digital recruitment, she saw some challenges across the organization: a hiring bottleneck, overspending on career sites, a one-person recruiting department, and an inconsistent hiring process.
What could help them? It turns out that AI could automate many inefficient parts of the hiring process. They were able to implement a Conversational ATS solution that engaged candidates automatically, served up jobs that were great fits for a candidate’s experience, and answered questions about the role or company without delay.
The results speak for themselves. Because their Conversational ATS was drastically increasing candidate conversion, Southern Rock reduced their paid advertising spend by 70%, decreased turnover by 60%, increased applicant flow by 50,000 people, and ultimately saved $840,000 in about a year.
Autism Learning Partners saves recruiters 7 hours a week.
As a full-service provider specializing in autism treatment and other developmental disabilities, Autism Learning Partners (ALP) offers Applied Behavior Analysis treatment across 17 states — with their frontline behavior technicians making up 90% of the organization.
ALP’s hiring before AI didn’t set them up for success. New employees joined the organization with little background knowledge, new employees would leave the organization shortly after joining, recruiters were doing significant manual work, and ALP couldn’t meet their goals of servicing as many families as they could.
They turned to a Conversational ATS to auto-schedule candidates for interviews, answer questions from candidates (giving people a realistic perspective about what the job entailed), and deliver relevant information to candidates. With AI automation, ALP was able to increase hires by 50%, save 7 hours of manual work a week per recruiter, and reduce manual screening by 95%.
Sobeys hires employees in 48 hours with a conversational AI.
Sobeys is a Canadian grocery retailer with more than 123,000 employees and 1,500 stores across all 10 provinces. The sheer volume and breadth of locations that Sobeys operates means they have to work hard to maintain a consistent cadence across their entire hiring team.
With the objective of transforming the talent acquisition function, the team began to evaluate and select hiring technology that would enhance the candidate experience and streamline hiring with automation. Not only did they need to upgrade their hiring process, but they also wanted that technology to integrate with their current tech stack.
They brought in Sam, a conversational AI that helps the grocer increase candidate conversion with instant engagement and schedule interviews automatically with hiring managers. Sam also powers their virtual hiring events that dropped the average hiring time to two days with an 80% reduction in interview no-shows.
The Saxton Group saves more than $1 million in hiring costs.
The Saxton Group owns and operates 72 McAlister’s Deli restaurants in 3 states, one of the largest operators within the chain. Since beginning operations in 1982, the franchise group has since created over 3,300 jobs and reached over $2.5 billion in sales. Like most restaurants coming out of 2020, maintaining and hiring new employees was incredibly challenging for the organization — they knew they needed a game changer for how they hire.
As the organization faced staffing challenges, it began spending more than $25,000 a month on job advertisements. While this helped get candidates in the short-term, it didn’t solve the actual problem: They needed to convert candidates to new hires faster.
After implementing a Conversational ATS, The Saxton Group was able to help candidates find the right role quickly based on their experience. Since the ATS is powered by conversational AI that is able to communicate with candidates 24/7, they were able to answer questions and schedule interviews instantaneously. The Saxton Group also reduced the time a candidate needed to apply from 15 minutes to just 3 minutes.
The Saxton Group also saved over $1 million by relying less on job advertisements and reducing the amount of time managers need to hire new employees.
The data speaks volumes: AI can have a significant, positive impact on an organization’s bottom line and the candidate experience. It already is — for some of the world’s largest employers, no less. While there is speculation on the future of AI in hiring (and rightly so), these five organizations are proof that when used strategically to support their hiring teams, AI is already making a positive impact.
