The one thing that has struck me in the first half of 2025 is that despite people talking about AI nonstop, it can be hard to actually find real world examples of organizations using it in recruiting. Fortunately The Josh Bersin Company (where I’m a senior faculty member, for full transparency) recently released a great in-depth look at how Medtronic is using AI at scale to hire thousands of skilled workers today.
Medtronic faces the same challenges that many employers face.
- Trying to hire high-demand, skilled workers.
- Fierce competition
- Certain locations have more pain than others.
- Traditional channels are not working as well as they have in the past.
- Large HCM recruiting module that has limitations in moving fast.
- Executives are breathing down your neck for results!
Medtronic is using the same playbook I have been seeing pretty consistently now for the past couple of years, when it comes to organizations willing to get out of the traditional hiring box and begin using layered in AI technologies to help them process candidates faster than ever before, and definitely faster than most of their competition.
Despite people talking about AI nonstop, it can be hard to actually find real world examples of organizations using it in recruiting.
There are two main AI-powered solutions that are working for everyone:
First, moving from a traditional, old-school apply process where candidates are forced into creating profiles and jumping through hoops, Conversational apply has been a godsend in terms of time and conversion for organizations like Medtronic. Candidates go from 10-15 minutes to finish an application process, to maybe 3 minutes or even quicker in some cases.
Better yet, once candidates finish their faster application process, they are immediately invited to self-schedule their next screen or interview. So, you go from a traditional process where a candidate takes 3-5x longer to apply and then probably never hears back or it takes days before they hear back from a recruiter, to almost instantly setting themselves up for the next step in your process.
It seems too simple to work, right? That’s what I hear from every single TA leader who is turning on this level of AI in their hiring process. “It’s simple and it just works, Tim.” It just works, is something we rarely hear in recruiting technology!
The part that most TA leaders are seeing after they make this change is also surprising for them because the two vested parties in the equation, whom they are trying to appease, have just succumbed to our bad process. Candidates and hiring managers are almost simultaneously impressed by the experience they receive. It turns out that when you make everything simpler and faster, both parties will be happy!
At the end of the day, the TA leaders who are most successful tend to be the ones who our executive teams can rely on to produce results. So often, those individuals are pretty rare. This happens when you don’t have a repeatable process that works on both sides, and the data to be able to predict what your outcomes will be. Using an AI-powered application process that increases conversion across your funnel allows TA leaders to better understand what their hiring machine is capable of. It allows them to accurately predict the level of hiring they’ll be able to produce over time, and this just makes great business sense for the organization.
Medtronic is a classic American manufacturing company that produces world-class medical technology equipment. For most of their history, they hired just like everyone else. Post jobs, wait for candidates to apply, and then process what comes in. A company that relies on constant innovation of its own products made the decision to innovate its hiring process using AI, and it has made all the difference.
