Conversational AI

Joshua Teo (00:03):
The Syntel Group consists of four businesses, Syntel, Optus, NCS, and N zero to together. We have close to 25,000 staff across Asia Pacific. We hire close to about 4,000 people every year. Well, in the past, a lot of the time was actually spent on the logistics, especially for the scheduling of interviews, last minute changes, looking at whether the CV fits the job. But with Paradox, the solution allows us to avoid all of that. After we implemented Paradox, the assistant would actually help candidates find an appropriate job, and it also applies a couple of screening checks to make sure that you are the right person for the job.

(01:10):
Via Paradox, I would say that we have cut out about 75% of this processes and simplify the way we operate. Or if I were to sum up in a nutshell, what we really love about the Paradox solution, the fact that Paradox was able to help us screen the cvs, allows us to have a shorter or accurate list of cvs to review is about the increased efficiency, sort of 24 7 access for both the candidate as well as for the hiring manager, the function which allows paradox to remind people about the meetings so that there's no excuse for missing those meetings. And we are very proud to say that the fastest interview schedule was nine seconds. And last but not least, the rescheduling rate has fallen from 19% of our interviews to now 10% of all interviews. Once we implemented this solution, we were able to redeploy close to 10 staff to other areas that were more value adding. For example, a few of the team went to work in onboarding, several of them became experts in talent acquisition themselves, and they were very, very pleasantly surprised by their own growth, and we are very proud of them as well.

Mark Darrington (00:07):
We saw AI as a great tool for our evolution. As a company. We're in a very competitive field. Our individuals who work for us, they can work in many different industries. Implementing Paradox in our company, I do feel confident that we'll find the individuals that we need. I do feel confident that it would actually help us get people to start even faster. Our challenges as a company with hiring has been just finding the right people. So our recruiters do spend a lot of time with candidates that are not qualified for the position, and we wanted to make sure our recruiters had an assistant to help them weed out the individuals that were not needed and bring the correct individuals to our recruiters. In a blink of an eye. Paradox is saving our recruiters a lot of time. They don't have to use multiple different systems. Paradox is talking to SAP, allowing our recruiters to move through the process. Extremely easy with each candidate. It's going to give us more time to be able to focus on other things outside of just recruiting and by having the assistant added to our career page.

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Heather Joines (00:10):
Hiring managers only want to see qualified candidates and they want to see them as fast as possible. By being able to spend time with candidates that are more qualified, makes the business more effective and takes pain points out of the hiring process. In a hectic world, it is important to be able to do things in the palm of your hands. Live allowed us to do that. Scheduling interviews is difficult for both a candidate and a recruiter, and we wanted our recruiters to be able to spend more quality time with candidates, and that meant that people could do it on their break and a recruiter wouldn't have to spend time chasing down times to meet with people and they could actually have real conversations about jobs. Conversational career site allows the job seeker to give parameters of what they're looking for and gives us the ability to comment back in real time. It feels more interactive and real and authentic. Never did. I think I would have something that would be available 24 7 aside from myself that could speak to candidates on demand. It becomes a partnership rather than someone seeking a job. It makes it feel more like you are doing something together, and I think employers who care about the experience before you're even a candidate are the ones that you want to look at because it actually matters to them.

Krista Sequeira (00:09):
Recruiting is about building relationships. When you do have multiple candidates of varying levels of experience and backgrounds, how you manage building those relationships with the candidates can be overwhelming. At Dell, we are relying on our recruiters to play more of that role of consultant to their business, consultant to their candidates. How does this person kind of fit into the culture with your traditional interview scheduling? It is a very time consuming process. The amount of time that our recruiters and other team members are spending on scheduling interviews, it's like two to three hours per candidate. Paradox was one that really stood out. It's 30 seconds a minute to actually get an interview scheduled. So the amount of time that it's going to save us is really exponential, and in turn, we're expecting a significant cost savings as well. Workday is where we house all of our HR information.

(01:01):
So whatever tools we consider, that's an important factor. It's going to take that burden off of our recruiters, off of our candidate experience team. It's also going to enable better relationships with our candidates because we're going to be moving them more efficiently through the process. How you find the candidates might be different, but building those relationships at its core is really the same. AI is really going to help us drive that engagement with people, with candidates throughout the process so that they feel engaged. Paradox provided the most comprehensive solution for what we needed at Dell Technologies.

Danielle Lend (00:08):
My name is Danielle Lend. I'm the CEO of Wendy's. New Zealand people are very important to our business. Without them, we can't operate. We can't open the doors every day, so recruitment and getting the right staff is very important to us. Speed to market for candidates was very important, so having Paradox has saved a lot of our managers time. My favorite thing that Lou can do is that she can answer some questions that the candidate might ask, schedule an interview and push them through the process very quickly. Blue can get them from a candidate to an employee within two or three days. It works for a lack of candidates, but also works in a market where there's an abundance of candidates.

(01:06):
We included things like an assessment. Each candidate, once they've done their application, if that application looks like a good fit for the business, they automatically get sent an assessment. It's about 45 seconds long and it gives them rating. You can have green, yellow, or red. Now that we have a lot of candidates, we only accept green candidates. We were accepting yellow and candidate market was tough, but no red. Prior to this, we probably would've struggled with dealing with those applicants. Now, Paradox deals with it all for us. We also have found that we have managed to get a more diverse culture within our restaurants because there is no bias in this system, which is great. They then reflect the community that we live in.

(01:53):
All our onboarding now is also on paradox, and not only do we have the payroll integration, all our important onboarding documents are all there for the candidate to review, and then that is kept on their file, and then you have that complete oversight, which you just didn't have before. I would say to other CEOs that having an online and a AI based recruitment system, I would say that this is probably one of the best investments that we've made because it's so simple to use. It's been easy to roll out. All our managers in our stores have been able to understand it and get on board with it. The candidates love it. They actually think they're talking to a real person. Many of 'em don't realize it's ai, so that's amazing.

Craig Gjelsten (00:04):
Neighborly is a franchisor of home services all through separate branded entities, which are all part of Neighborly. The issue we're facing right now in the trades industry is we have a mass exodus of people leaving the industry and we don't have the same volume of new people coming in to fill those positions. In my role, it's imperative that I keep up with what's happening in the recruiting world, and right now what's important is speed, and that is an element that Paradox has provided that we didn't have previously. Primarily through Automation Paradox has changed the overall value proposition for our franchisees in that we've offered them a system which is efficient and effective, much more so now than what they previously had because of the automation features. It's also saved our franchise owners up to six hours per week in administrative time, allowing Maya our assistant to do many of the processes that they had to manually complete before. We also found out that one third of interactions are happening outside of normal business hours, which allows our franchise owners to have a little bit more of a personal and a family life as well. Paradox has been much more than just helping us with text to apply. They helped us examine every facet and element of recruiting that we were previously doing based on their recommendations and their prior experience with other clients. So it's really been a valuable relationship above and beyond just recruiting as we know it.

Shay Johnson (00:04):
The best new way to hire is probably to rethink everything that you thought you knew about hiring.

Victor Gaines (00:15):
Innovation can look like a lot of things, right? It's often something creative, something that's disruptive, something that's game changing.

Alexa Morse (00:22):
There was a need to really transform what that experience was about. Such a pivotal moment in someone's life, which is getting a new job. To be a talent leader. In today's world, you are someone who is innovative. You're someone who is not satisfied with the status quo.

Rebecca Volpano (00:54):
It was a hands down, easy decision to move towards. Conversational ai. When we went from email to text, we broke our system.

Victor Gaines (01:07):
What used to take us days to get through those and get them scheduled, and now that happens in like seven minutes.

Speaker 6 (01:12):
But we've been able to really increase, not just show rates for interviews, but really our conversion of applicants to interviews. After we partnered, we saw a 313% increase in hiring.

Victor Gaines (01:28):
When we started to realize the full suite of capabilities that paradox had. We were sold, and for us it felt like a silver bullet.

Shay Johnson (01:39):
What started out is applications are cumbersome and take a long time to complete, and that was the pain point, and now it's become all about how do you really create efficient work for recruiters? How do you recruit candidates, the volume that we're recruiting them at?

Speaker 6 (01:55):
I don't think any of us really knew that AI recruiting was even a thing or what the possibilities were with it. How do we drive efficiencies and remove times Steelers from our recruiters and enhance the candidate experience along the way?

Alexa Morse (02:14):
Whether you're working in a quick service restaurant, retail center, or even a large bank should always be thinking about how we're going to retain that employee from the second they begin engaging with the company. The technology aspect of all of this has allowed us to do what we love.

Rebecca Volpano (02:31):
When humans get to spend more time with humans and less time with technology, that's when the magic happens.

Cory Smith (00:05):
Paradox can really help revolutionize the candidate experience over success factors.

Josh Zywien (00:11):
Our relationship with SAP boils down to three key areas. One is how do we make it easier to schedule interviews for recruiters in corporate environments?

Kristen Bailey (00:21):
Something that recruiters really don't like is having to work in multiple systems, having to toggle between multiple screens on their computer to get their work done. We seamlessly integrate so that the recruiter can do everything they need to do in one place.

Josh Zywien (00:37):
Number two is text to apply. When candidates get to that login screen, you see huge, huge drop off there.

Tori Lasiter (00:43):
Applying for a job should be boundaryless. You shouldn't have to create usernames and passwords and logins. To apply for a job. You should be able to apply by texting a keyword or scanning a QR code.

Josh Zywien (00:56):
And then the third is in a high volume environment. You can still use SAP as your backend system of record, but for all your field hiring, we're going to layer right on top of that. We're going to deliver this exceptional, frictionless mobile experience for both hiring managers and frontline candidates.

Cory Smith (01:09):
And when you're amplifying that by hundreds of interviews, the amount of time saved for the recruiters or the interview coordinators is a lot.

Josh Secrest (01:17):
We're seeing teams on SuccessFactors going from sometimes a month, multiple weeks to hire down to a couple days. It's changing the way that they're hiring throughout their organization. And that seamless integration is really making things easy, both in implementation and making sure that you're seeing ROI quickly within that rollout.

Kristen Bailey (00:01):
One of the hardest things to solve in any recruiting process is scheduling.

Adam Godson (00:06):
If you do a analysis of where people spend money in talent acquisition, everyone thinks it's at the top of the funnel, finding people, advertising, sourcing. It's actually a whole lot of labor in the middle of that process. In scheduling interviews, rescheduling interviews, the time it takes to interview and decide people.

Kristen Bailey (00:22):
A typical interview might consist of anywhere from four to six interviewers, sometimes in the same day, sometimes in the same location. Sometimes it's virtual and onsite.

Cory Smith (00:33):
If a hiring manager doesn't have interview availability for a long period of time, it's going to take a lot of manual action by the recruiter to chase down the hiring manager, chase down their executive assistant. That all leads to longer time to hire. Our technology allows for that to all happen automatically while allowing the recruiter to focus on other high value recruiting activities.

Adam Godson (00:53):
The paradox approach to interview scheduling has really two elements that are important. One of those is having it be conversational instead of forms or user interfaces and having people log into things. It is done through a conversation with our assistant, and the second is handling all the complexity that is underneath the waterline. How do I schedule interviews that have a panel interview, but some of these people are not those people? How do I follow that with a stack interview? How do I get the prep materials to the right people in multiple locations over multiple days? I want to be sure no one has too many interviews in a week and people can reschedule no more than three times

Kristen Bailey (01:32):
Through the conversational scheduling experience. That problem is solved in minutes.

Josh Secrest (01:37):
What Paradox was able to solve was really streamlining and making scheduling interviews instant easy. What that looked like for our recruiters was as they were in their a TS, whether that's SAP or Workday, they were able to quickly advance someone to an interview, and really the assistant was able to go off and do the rest.

Adam Godson (01:57):
There used to be an idea that experience and automation were two ends of a spectrum, and you had to choose one, and with new technology being conversational ai, that's not the case. You can actually have a better experience and automate the process. It works for everyone.

Josh Secrest (02:11):
How do we make everything easy? How do we make everything seamless? We make it conversational.

Steffanie Chaviano (00:10):
In our space, we get so nervous about ai, get scared that you're losing that people element. What I have learned and what I'm so excited about is that if you utilize it in the right way, it actually is an incredible partner.

Carlos Fernandez (00:25):
So working together with paradox, we put our emphasis to capture, to really drive that forward.

Speaker 3 (00:32):
And so we've been able to really increase, not just show rates for interviews, but really our conversion of applicants to interviews.

Shay Johnson (00:39):
Being able to look at a candidate's profile and see not just an application, but having an offer and an onboarding experience, all going through the same sort of virtual assistant that's keeping everything consistent, that's keeping everything moving.

Rebecca Volpano (00:51):
So if I'm a prospective candidate, I can engage with Olivia and get my questions answered. I can also use the quick apply process to get myself in front of a recruiter. So if I think about what

Steffanie Chaviano (01:04):
The right way to hire is, it's utilizing tech in the right way so that recruiters and others have the bandwidth to have the right conversations with candidates and really bring in quality and present quality to your hiring managers.

Seema Shah (00:04):
For us to be able to get to our candidates, for them to be able to respond and let us know that they're interested in working for us, us to be able to schedule our interviews in less than 15 minutes with our candidates. This is where the value is. In 2020, as an organization and TA leadership team, we took a step back and we wanted to look at our tech stack. How do we free up time for our recruiters to spend time speaking to candidates, speaking to hiring managers, and really having conversations what could support this and make it a seamless experience. And this is where we came across Paradox.

(01:13):
We can interact with our candidates, not just through email, but really opening up those channels of communication. Again, through the technology interacting through SMS in the US and in Canada. But really the channel to interact through WhatsApp globally really was an important step and part to maintain the experience that happens in real life. We have answered over 190,000 questions from our candidates. We've scheduled over 10,000 interview requests and we have achieved an 89% completion rate for our application. That speaks volumes for ROI. We are engaging with candidates across 174 countries in 17 languages. Our personal assistant can just pick up their languages and their method of communication preference automatically. It makes the experience feel more human. It is really about having that one-to-one connection. And I think while we are able to establish that prior to paradox, we can speak to people, we can hire faster and we can spend more time focusing on the value in the people.

Mary Battle Broxton (00:15):
We are a lifestyle retailer in the farm, ranch, and welding space. Oftentimes, we are in more rural markets. We're expanding fast and opening up a lot of stores in places that we haven't before. The biggest impact that Paradox has had on our candidate experience has actually been decreasing. The time to apply text, to apply, takes our application, puts it right on a candidate's phone. It creates a conversation for them. Instead of a daunting form, they get to receive texts in real time and updates as well on their process and their candidate journey. The light bulb moment for me was when we started to get anecdotal feedback from candidates who really got a chance to feel like they belong to our organization already, like they were a part of the team. The workload on TA teams has been impacted by getting to converse with candidates that are more aware of our brand, armed with the information that they want and need. It makes it less transactional and more personal. We're able to really get to know our candidates in a way that we wouldn't have been able to before.

Rachel O'Connell (00:05):
We as a hospitality industry, we're having trouble getting candidates to respond to us. We were opening our Minnesota property back in 2017. We started to text them on our phone. We realized that texting candidates really worked. The solution that Paradox offered was very simple. Even if you're not familiar with technology, you are familiar with texting. The paradox solution feels like you're interacting with a person and not with a piece of software. That allowed our candidates to apply quickly, easily in a format that they're already familiar with. It has facilitated a lot more applicant volume because of the ease of application for our recruiters. They're able to see kind of everything all in one spot. For me, the biggest return on our investment has been the reduction that we've been able to make in our recruitment marketing. When your system facilitates an easier process, that volume goes up without having to spend the additional dollars, and so we've really seen a lot of savings in that space. Recruiting people is a people function. There's a human element to what this technology facilitates. As a hospitality industry, it is a more human-like interaction. Without that human touch, you can't facilitate a strong process to have conversational technology be part of the work that we do. We found something that really has transformed the way that we recruit.