Workday is a Paradox client.
Perhaps not the most delicate or artistic opening line I could have crafted, but it’s by far the most important. The next 1,000 words or so of this article are going to be a detailed and comprehensive outline of why our conversational recruiting software perfectly complements Workday Recruiting and helps create world-class candidate experiences, but none matter as much as those first five. We’re the recruiting tool that Workday’s recruiters use to create better candidate experiences.
(Oh, and we also have a number of Workday certified integrations and have won a number of awards, including being named 2025 Partner of the Year for AI Excellence).
But enough about us. Let’s talk about you. Like 60% of the Fortune 500 you use Workday, and you’re probably pretty happy about it. You also might feel like your recruiting process could be better. Faster. Easier. More candidate friendly.
And you’re right, it can be. Workday Recruiting is a fantastic product, with a strong foundation as an applicant tracking system and core functionality to support high-volume hiring flows. But it can't be everything to everyone, especially candidates. So if you want to improve that, you need to bring in other tech to your stack — something that integrates smartly with Workday Recruiting and has features that weave seamlessly into the rich tapestry of functionality that Workday already offers. And ideally, it’s just one extra tool, not many.
That brings it back around to Paradox. Let’s dig into why we’re so complementary to Workday Recruiting, and how we work in tandem to help create the high-volume recruiting experience your organization needs to win top talent and grow your business.
Of course, don’t just take it from me. Take it from Workday — they think we’re that tool, too.
The basics — what is Paradox and what does it do that Workday doesn’t?
The easiest way to explain this is by thinking about internal and external hiring needs.
Workday is focused primarily on the internal stuff. It’s a great system of record. It’s amazing at storing and sorting data (including the litany of legal requirements) and offering robust utility for your talent teams. It creates the structure and compliance that every employer needs. But since all of these features are solely focused on organizing and enhancing candidate information once it’s already in the system, the main value it’s deriving is for you, the user. And it’s best-in-class at it; there’s a reason it’s used by the majority of the Fortune 500.
Instead of requiring candidates to come to you and go through an application process on your career site, our software allows candidates to engage on their terms in a natural way that doesn’t interrupt the organic flow of their day.
On the flip side, Paradox was built to be an external-facing hiring machine in a way that a traditional ATS never was, offering an experience that candidates love — and by extension — actually converts them at incomparable rates. Our software is powered by conversational AI, which takes the form of a recruiting assistant on the frontend that proactively (and automatically) guides candidates through hiring stages via text on a mobile device. Instead of requiring candidates to come to you and go through an application process on your career site, our software allows candidates to engage on their terms in a natural way that doesn’t interrupt the organic flow of their day. Our assistants can effortlessly automate a range of tedious administrivia that have plagued recruiting teams for years:
- Job search
- Applications
- Screening
- Interview scheduling
- Assessments
- After hour communication
- Questions and FAQs
Ultimately, what this means is that we can go out and engage candidates wherever (and whenever) they are, gather critical information and even take action to get them screened or scheduled, and then all of that data is seamlessly routed and stored back in Workday. The end result is a drastically simpler (and better) candidate experience on the front end while also enhancing the recruiter experience on the back end by removing time-stealing tasks from their workload without sacrificing any robustness in terms of data or organization.
It’s a perfect pairing with almost effortlessly complementary functionality that also eliminates the need for additional point solutions. Peanut butter, meet jelly.
Why Paradox plus Workday creates an ideal experience for candidates.
OK, let’s go down the rabbit hole a bit deeper. I talked at a high level about what Paradox does to elevate the candidate experience, but I’d like to actually show you with a real world example.
One of the many joint Workday and Paradox clients is Johnson Controls (JCI), a global manufacturing leader with 100,000 employees across 150 countries. Needless to say, they have a fairly complex recruiting process that spans dozens of different languages while interpolating regional search volume with very local hiring experiences. So it’s sort of the ideal use case of Paradox’s nimble candidate-facing experience and Workday’s organizational mastery working together to make sense out of a process that would otherwise be impossible to scale efficiently. Here’s how this actually manifests itself tangibly for the candidate:
- Let’s say JCI’s North American talent acquisition team is looking to hire for a manufacturing plant in France. Now, normally there would be a language barrier to overcome, but fortunately Paradox’s conversational platform actually speaks French (and about 20 other languages). So as soon as the candidate enters the application process — which can happen a few different ways, but most commonly by scanning a QR code on a job ad or via chat widget on a career site — the candidate is greeted with a message they’re instantly familiar with.
- It sounds simple enough, especially to many of us English speakers who have never even considered that the job we’re applying for might be in an indecipherable dialect, but this can be an immediate friction point and lead to drop-off before a candidate even says “hello”. Paradox eliminates this.
- From there, the candidate can go through the application process right on their phone. This is one of the biggest benefits of leveraging Paradox — there’s zero additional systems or logins required of the candidate. It just happens…right on their phone. Seamlessly.
- That application and candidate profile is then stored back into Workday (in the recruiter’s native language!), where the recruiter can then decide what action they want to take. If they want to schedule an interview, that interview request is sent back via text message.
- Paradox can also send “smart reminders” for the interview or other critical information to ensure that the candidate stays warm and engaged throughout the process.
- The result for JCI: Reducing candidate response time from 10 hours to 10 minutes, a nearly 100% candidate satisfaction rate, and a 15% increase in overall hires.
There’s dozens of other use cases (hey, here’s a few if you want to peruse), but this is one of my favorites. Massive, multilingual, global process simplified into a well-oiled hiring machine with just two interlocking, complementary systems.
That’s the power of Paradox and Workday.
If you use Workday, you should be using the thing that Workday uses.
Let me say this: Paradox’s integration with Workday is literally my job. And it’s truly rare for two systems — and two organizations — to have such synergy. It’s a true partnership with a shared purpose of creating the best hiring experiences in the world.
We think we’re doing that right now.
Paradox plus Workday creates a truly engaging, conversational experience at any scale, while also ensuring that the organization gets the critical information they need, when they need it. And the best part is that you’re able to do much more with much less work — the AI automation of Paradox drives tons of admin work normally handled by recruiting, freeing them up to spend time on literally anything else of value.
But again, if you’re looking for validation that Paradox works well with Workday, then you can stop looking. Workday uses us. That’s good enough for me.
