Jennifer Gullo (00:00):

It still cracks me up. One of the most popular questions we get on the day of orientation from our candidates is they wanted Meet to live You.

Aaron Einhorn (00:08):

Does the team tell 'em like So I have a secret for you. It's heartbreaking. This is Jennifer and she works for Coca-Cola. The largest Coca-Cola facility in the United States

Jennifer Gullo (00:29):

We're the largest privately owned bottler in the us. In the us. There you go.

Aaron Einhorn (00:33):

And the first bottler of Coke in the world. Jennifer's worked there for 14 years, was in an HR role and proposed a talent acquisition job or idea three years before she went into it. And then three years later, the bosses tapped her and said, Hey, you know that thing that you pitched a while ago? And she was like, which thing? A while ago, I pitch a lot of things and they put her into a talent acquisition role.

Jennifer Gullo (01:01):

This is Aaron. Aaron has been with Hammer for 15 years and he came up sweat equity style. He started with all of the frontline positions, continued growing and maturing himself, had a passion for people. His team believed in him, put him in an HR role and he has had a continuous growth in the HR department. He loves tech. And so when there was an opportunity to move forward with ai, he did the paradox rollout and he's extremely successful and loves his company. So I accidentally got into HR because I was completing my undergraduate degree and master's program while working in a restaurant in the French Quarter, and I was our senior kitchen manager. But I was kind of in that crux, where is it about am I going to be the gm? Do I want to keep moving in this area or as in my master's program, do I want to do something different?

(01:59):

And the worst training that had ever come out for a server in probably the history of the world, it's a little dramatic, but it's pretty true. And my GM said, okay, you've got to make a decision here or be part of the problem or be part of the solution. I assumed that no one from HR would have any interest in what I had to say, but I called and I was very kind and humble about my feedback. And then that turned into a volunteer opportunity to, Hey, go fix this. Come back and fix this for us. I did. And then I got a next assignment and the next assignment and the next assignment, and I changed my MBA into a master's of management in hr and the rest is kind of history.

Aaron Einhorn (02:42):

So my accidental HR journey, my career started as an hourly associate in a Panera Bread, worked for Hammer Enterprises. Honestly didn't know that Hammer Enterprises existed. I didn't even know what a franchise was. I just thought I worked for Panera. They promoted me to a shift supervisor, which was really great. And I was on the GM path to be an assistant manager and a general manager. And one day my DM came in and she was like, Hey, I'll be back in three days. We're going to promote you to an assistant. You're ready. Okay, cool. And then she came back three days later and she's like, actually, we're not. And I was like, did I forget to put on deodorant? And she's like, no, no, no. We have this HR position. You've got great people skills you should apply for it. Applied. Didn't think I was going to get it, and they picked me. And that was the start of my HR career. I was an HR coordinator, HR manager, HR business partner, senior HR business partner. Always had an affinity for tech. So when we had our previous A TSI was involved in that. And when we got Paradox, I was on the team that implemented it originally and led the second implementation of Paradox onboarding.

Jennifer Gullo (03:49):

So when I originally got into hr, I really thought I was going to be this soft, fluffy, rainbow and unicorn world. I was extremely pie in the sky, my expectations were completely wrong, and I thought that it was going to be hiring, training, succession planning, performance management, occasionally an investigation. And as I continue to mature and learn more, I broke it down to becoming much more simple of it's just about making people's lives better. And so sometimes that looks like putting yourself physically or mentally in their role and trying to create some way to provide efficiency or productivity and just make the quality of what they do. eDay mean something. I love that it continues to evolve. I am not by nature the most tech savvy person at all. So when I learned about Paradox, I was intrigued. But also my company is kind of technology resistant in some ways.

(05:00):

We've been around 125 years and we're very people oriented. As we continue to grow, I love that we're starting to really have different philosophies about work and that work is a thing you do and not a place you go. And that we want to spend more time doing value added people work and less time on tedious paperwork. That's been amazing. But I still struggle sometimes with letting data tell the right story. And also sales has 100% never been my thing, but I'm always having to sell the value of my team, sell the value of the new resource that I think is going to make a better experience for the candidate, and that's going to provide a higher quality for the talent that we bring in. And I take the responsibility of creating success for the next hundred 25 plus years very seriously. And so sometimes trying to find that right balance is challenging.

Aaron Einhorn (06:05):

I mean, ever since I was a little kid, I just wanted to help people when I was little, even when I wasn't so little, I wanted to be a police officer because the idea of waking up and going out and helping people was really rewarding. When I went into hr, I guess I wasn't super in focus that that was a way that I could help people. It was on such a micro scale like, okay, I can help this person get a job or I can help this person who's having a problem with their manager. And as I've grown and as my organization has grown, I am so fulfilled by the latitude that I'm granted to help people. I see talent acquisition as helping millions of people see a job that might be right for them. Thousands of people, tens of thousands of people schedule an interview for a job that could positively impact their life. Then the HR side of me is helping the 7,500 people that work for Hammer Enterprises have a great experience, have a career I've had where they can join a company, grow with a company, hopefully retire all with one company.

Jennifer Gullo (07:19):

That's awesome. When you can inspire achievement in others like that,

Aaron Einhorn (07:22):

It drives me.

Jennifer Gullo (07:23):

Me too. I get more excited when I see someone that I helped in their career on one of those announcements that say that they got promoted than if my own name was on it. The sense of pride is it's

Aaron Einhorn (07:36):

Intense. Successes are ours, failure is mine. Right?

Jennifer Gullo (07:39):

I like that.

Aaron Einhorn (07:40):

I totally resonate with watching somebody that you influenced grow and be successful and thrive.

Jennifer Gullo (07:48):

Yeah, that's good. I got a call from a paradox rep who looked me up on LinkedIn and I am not a person that believes in coincidence at all. So he looked me up on LinkedIn, he was very new to Paradox and I answered the phone. It was in the midst of Covid as well, and it was right before 4th of July weekend. And he started, I looked you up. I'm new to this company, I really need to practice my pitch. Could you just hear me out? And I said, I'll give you three minutes. How about that? I'll give you three minutes and if it seems like it's a worthwhile investment, we'll put 30 minutes on the calendar. And so I listened, and his name is Jeff Lackey. He's still with Paradox Today. And it was a great pitch. This is the first time I ever heard anybody talk about conversation about AI or about having great conversations or great conversations leading to a better experience for a candidate and just speaking the right words to my heart.

(08:55):

And so we found 30 minutes and I told him, Hey, you've got to go make sure you're a gold standard SAP vendor. If not, we don't have anything to talk about. And then I remember this, it was yesterday. I said, okay, so what are you doing this weekend for the fourth? And he was actually going to propose to his fiance. And so I was like, okay, well I need to see pictures. So when I started with my first three minute conversation with Paradox and listening to AI and what it could potentially do for our experience in our process, he was getting engaged and recently just had his first baby. So I feel very much part of the Paradox family.

Aaron Einhorn (09:42):

That's cool.

Jennifer Gullo (09:43):

So when you guys started looking into AI for your recruitment process and just different parts of hr, was there a lot of fear and what did that look like? How'd you guys get over that? How did you overcome it?

Aaron Einhorn (09:57):

We have two recruiters and they're not traditional recruiters in the sense that they're on the phone

Jennifer Gullo (10:01):

Talking two for the whole company.

Aaron Einhorn (10:04):

Yeah, for the 200 restaurants, we have two recruiters.

Jennifer Gullo (10:05):

Oh my goodness.

Aaron Einhorn (10:06):

But they're more like recruitment coordinators. They're air traffic controllers that manage getting the candidates, making sure that if a store needs applications, that there's an Indeed ad or a ZipRecruiter ad and that the applications are coming to the store so they can make a hire. And I remember role-playing this conversation with myself, how do I convince these two young ladies that work for us? That paradox isn't going to replace them. It does. A lot of it screens applicants. At the time for grand openings, they were screening applicants.

(10:43):

And I just remember this inner dialogue with myself of how am I going to convince them that this is not going to replace them? And when we signed up with Paradox really quickly, we went to work at, okay, this is not a system that's going to replace you. This is a system that you're going to use to help our organization to help our restaurant managers staff their restaurants to help the HR team staff at the management level. And I look back on it a year after we implemented interview schedule with Paradox, which was we started it in 2021, I looked back on it and I was like, man, we had nothing to worry about. This is so not going to replace you, but what it did is it expanded your capacity. Instead of being able to help maybe 10 people this week or 10 hiring managers this week, now you can help 30 because you have this tool at your disposal that you didn't have before that amplifies your capacity or your ability to do your job.

Jennifer Gullo (11:49):

We did something super similar, but I have 28 recruiters across six states, and we do everything from Frontline all the way up to our C-suite, and they were really nervous, and when we did our face-to-face training with them before we went live for Paradox, our entire training segmentation was about making life better. And that was absolutely the way that we approached it is we want to give you more value add and more influence with paperwork and less time running around paperwork and chasing people's calendars. But I think it probably took a good six months, I don't know how long it took you guys, but it took us about six months I think, before they stopped checking in and getting nervous that we were going to reduce head count or was there going to be a second shoe that dropped because now the technology was making time to feel better or helping us move faster.

Aaron Einhorn (12:53):

Did you have that same six month, one year, two year look back where you were like, wow, this expanded their capacity a lot?

Jennifer Gullo (13:02):

Yes, yes. And I love that the assignments that they started getting to be part of, we really pride ourselves. So United Philosophy is hire to retire, and so we want you to build your whole career with us. We don't want you to feel like you have to go someplace else to get experience or to get an opportunity. And so my recruiters, because they weren't having to spend as much time on these tedious daily tactical transactional tasks, now they were able to be more physically present in these internal promotion interviews and be able to influence those hiring managers. And we've also been able to utilize some of that, I'll call it extra time to work with our learning and development team to provide more intensive training on legally defensible hiring questions, mechanisms, just giving them more capacity or high impact projects for the business, things that they couldn't have done if we didn't have the technology in place to take away those tactical tasks.

Aaron Einhorn (14:13):

What part of very different structure, right? Like two recruiters, 200 restaurants, you said 56 locations bottling the most popular drink in the world, I think.

Speaker 3 (14:26):

Yeah.

Aaron Einhorn (14:28):

What parts of your recruiter's jobs did Paradox automate or good question, where did it expand their capacity?

Jennifer Gullo (14:37):

So what we first started off with was chat to apply and the capture, and we use SuccessFactors as our a TS. And so Olivia was amazing in that our were about 70% of them were applying through mobile devices, but if you were trying to fill out that application or create a password and a username on Yes, yes, you were probably saying a bunch of words and none of them were good, and so now they were just interacting with Olivia, which was seamless, and they didn't even know all the information she was collecting, whether it was their contact information or asking them about different jobs that were open. It was so seamless. It still cracks me up. One of the most popular questions we get on the day of orientation from our candidates, and they're mostly frontline candidates, 85% of what we do is frontline is they wanted me to live you.

Aaron Einhorn (15:38):

Does the team tell 'em?

Jennifer Gullo (15:40):

So

Aaron Einhorn (15:40):

I have a secret for you.

Jennifer Gullo (15:41):

It's heartbreaking. It's heartbreaking sometimes for the candidates that they're just like, wait, she's not real. And we're like, I mean, we started off obviously with all of the mapping conversations and we have now moved to the contextual messaging, which is fantastic, but initially my systems, my HR systems manager and I think mapped over 800 responses. So when they love her, I'm like, they love us.

Aaron Einhorn (16:15):

It's just really that's what the AI assistant is, is an extension of your company's soul.

Jennifer Gullo (16:22):

Yes, that's well said. I like

Aaron Einhorn (16:24):

That. Do you use interview scheduling?

Jennifer Gullo (16:26):

We do. We do. And that was probably the biggest challenge from a change management perspective for my recruiters, I had no idea how rigid some of them were with the way they wanted to schedule. I, I'm aging myself, but there was this movie way back called Rainman, and he was very regimented and rigid in his scheduling and used to buy his underwear only from Kmart, and I found out that a lot of my recruiters were operating in that way. They wanted to schedule only merchandisers on Tuesdays and Thursdays and drivers and material handlers on Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays were all for salaried roles and helping them get to the understanding that the dynamic scheduling that Olivia could provide that they were not doing themselves was better for the candidate and it's also a better use of their productivity and time and that they don't need to stay touching these tedious little minor details. It just took a long time for them to trust it and to change their way of doing it. But I used a lot of analogies in our training. I said, what if your child needed stitches and you need to go to the doctor? And they go, well, we only do that on Tuesdays.

(17:45):

I'm like, let the dynamic scheduling work for you don't work so hard. So we've finally gotten there. We're actually just about to launch right now. We're doing video pilot. Do y'all use video interviews at all?

Aaron Einhorn (17:59):

We haven't needed to just because the hourly employees come in and meet directly with the hiring manager. So the way we use interview scheduling is to just get them to a restaurant to show up. Not that we couldn't, we just haven't

Jennifer Gullo (18:13):

Piloting that right now with that high turn five major roles for us, and it's really, really great and I am thrilled about getting that going. That's

Aaron Einhorn (18:25):

Cool.

Jennifer Gullo (18:25):

Yeah,

Aaron Einhorn (18:28):

So we're obviously structured differently because where you have many recruiters, we have many hiring managers, so the value add for interview scheduling for us was this restaurant manager that's running around with 1,000,001 things to do today. Well, even though they're short staffed or maybe short staffed, pre paradox, contacting candidates was not the top of mind. What was top of mind was running the lunch rush, running the dinner rush customer engagement. And so what would happen is a month would go by and they need four employees or 40 employees, and now it's okay, sit down at the computer, look at resumes, call people, schedule interviews. Oh, they got to reschedule the interviews. Oh, I'm not working that day. Hours and hours and hours lost to this task called recruiting, just getting people to your front door,

(19:25):

And that's the different value add than how your recruiters benefited from it. At Coca-Cola, our managers, at least I feel our managers benefited. It, benefited from it in the time savings, just lifting one really complicated task off their plate. Now you have a 24 hour, 365 cute little loaf of bread and Panera or pasta noodle, elbow noodle in Noodles and company that's always ready and able to talk to a person now with contextual ai, answer their questions beautifully and schedule them for an interview and let the manager know like, Hey, this is what I did. This is when they're scheduled. Be on the lookout for 'em. If you multiply that over the ball parking, so don't quote me, but roughly 300,000, probably between 250 and 300,000 interviews that we scheduled since 2021 and then multiply that by the time saved. I think that was the real, in our use case, the real value add.

Jennifer Gullo (20:28):

Yeah, that's huge.

Aaron Einhorn (20:30):

You went through the document upload process where you program, I call it program Sam's Brain. That's how I refer to it. And I vividly remember working with the team from Paradox for us was Elvis and Hunter, kind of cutting edge contextual AI team.

Speaker 3 (20:47):

And

Aaron Einhorn (20:47):

I vividly remember thinking to myself and talking with our recruiters, we're going to give the brain everything, all of our policies, hundreds of pages, hundreds of PDFs, our whole website,

(21:01):

And I learned they helped me, right? Elvis and Hunter helped me, but we learned pretty quickly actually less is more because you don't want conflicting information that's going to trip up the AI assistant. You want just the right, it's like too little or too much, and then right in the middle you want just the right amount of information so that my company's culture really translates through the conversation and it was super fun to watch. We would pull the lever and it would be too little information, okay, we would pull this lever, okay, that's way too much. Now we're getting conflicting information that doesn't make any sense. And we just adjusted and adjusted until we got to this perfect balance where very rarely does our AI assistant get an answer wrong. I mean very rarely. And if the AI assistant does get it wrong, it's an email over to Paradox. It says, Hey, notice this, and it's like a quick fix. It's fixed within a day or two. So that was my experience was starting with too much, backing it off and getting to a point that now Sam really represents our company and I'm confident and proud about how he speaks about Hammer Enterprises. What was your experience?

Jennifer Gullo (22:23):

So for us, when we went over to Contextual, it was still really, really new. When I went through client board in 2023, it was on the whiteboard, so Hunter and Elvis were great explaining what it was, and I could not wait to get my hands on it. We'd had one or two instances where a candidate had some sort of issue with maybe a death in the family and the way that they had said it through the text message, Olivia was quick to help them reschedule, but the level of empathy and care that as a company that we have, we lead with our hearts and we're servant leaders, and it didn't quite match up. It was again like, oh, I'll help you reschedule that. And now there's just that heart of we're so sorry that you experienced a loss. The least we can do is help you with rescheduling this interview. And so it just really just again, kind of like you said, realigned with our values and the way that we have an associate first culture. And so making sure that from day one when we start engaging with a candidate, we want to be exhibiting that in every interaction. I feel like because that extra little level of empathy, it helps us shine, it helps us continue to make sure that everything is in alignment with our core values. So we love it. And on average, we at about 500 or so thank yous for Olivia a week.

(24:04):

That's cute. And so many people want to meet her, and I love that. I mean, I know it's like me saying I want to meet Siri, but when someone has helped you so much that you feel connected to them, then you move to a different playing field. It's amazing.

Aaron Einhorn (24:25):

I think the thing that I'm so excited about is for the last, we've probably been uncon contextual for between 12 and 18 months, probably a little less than 18 for the last year, give or take. I've watched Sam get so connected to the candidates, to the new hires, to answering people's questions. I think what I'm really looking forward to is the world of possibility with opening up Sam to our hiring managers and being able to help with real world problems like, Hey, I want to open my job, but I don't know where to look. That's a real world hiring manager problem because my hiring managers aren't in paradox every day and they aren't hiring all the time. They forget. We are in paradox every day. We live it, we breathe it. It's second nature, but for them it's not. And I can't wait for Paradox to start helping my hiring managers. I can't wait for Paradox to start helping the HR team that I'm a part of. We've seen the paradox has proven the value in AI assistant conversations with candidates. I can't wait to see with that soul that you were talking about, right? With that associate first approach, a manager that says, I'm really short staffed and I don't know what to do. And Olivia, the AI assistant has a really thoughtful and appropriate response to that. I can't wait for that. That's

Jennifer Gullo (25:55):

Next level.

Aaron Einhorn (25:57):

The cool thing about AI is that it's always learning. It's like this sponge that's never full. Right. Tell me what you see for the future in not only us learning from the AI assistant, but from the AI assistant learning from itself. Tell me what you see for the future in terms of how great this is going to get.

Jennifer Gullo (26:21):

What I love about all of this is kind of the unknown. I like all the good things that we're realizing together in learning from what other companies are doing and thinking through new ways to solve problems. By nature, I'm a creative problem solver, but this is just, again, just very different. When I use things like copilot today, figuring out how to ask the right question, you'll ask a question, but sometimes you got to ask it two or three different ways to actually get in the vicinity of the answer. And so I love the fact that I we're about to see things like panel interviews, Olivia working with hiring managers to help them coordinate schedules with panel interviews. So this is not such an overwhelming task and just solving real world things in a very easy user-friendly environment where they don't have to have a new login and password to do it, where it's going to kind of integrate into teams and can even look at rooms that are available in that location. I mean, that's amazing. That's amazing.

Aaron Einhorn (27:37):

I don't know if this is your experience in your business, but the restaurant industry sometimes has a bad reputation for kind of old school archaic processes. I'm sure that happens in every business, so I'm sure that does. It definitely does. I'm confident it's not just me, but we are definitely guilty of some old school. We do it because we've always done it this way and it hasn't not worked so we'll just keep doing it. I think that back to when we were doing our introductions, one of the things that I value about Paradox is Hammer Enterprises is doing something cutting edge. We're a part of organizations that use contextual ai, and we're in the early infancy of this technology. And in five, no, in three years, it's going to be a lot more mainstream than it is, and we're going to be, I like to think that we're going to be one step ahead of our competitors because we got into it when we did.

(28:37):

And for me, being a huge nerd and super interested in any new technology, when self-driving cars came out, I couldn't wait for that technology. This is like that for work, right? For me, it feels very cutting edge. It feels very revolutionary. It feels like we're doing something that's going to be super prevalent in the future, and I'm going to get to look back on my career and say maybe my industry wasn't always cutting edge, but I was pushing for revolutionary processes, interactions and relationships. My current job title is senior HR business partner, and I have one and a half roles. I have a field HR market that I'm responsible 36 Paneras in Chicago land, and I'm the paradox guy. So the job title that I'm trying to create for myself is any version of director of talent acquisition candidate experience. I've just developed a really strong passion about creating an onboarding experience for a new hire. That's great. So currently senior HR business partner, what I want would be National Director of Talent acquisition or candidate experience.

Jennifer Gullo (29:54):

You've got

Aaron Einhorn (29:54):

This.

Jennifer Gullo (29:55):

You'll

Aaron Einhorn (29:56):

Have to put in a good word for me.

Jennifer Gullo (29:57):

I'll do it.

Aaron Einhorn (29:58):

What about you? What do you do? What do you think you

Jennifer Gullo (30:01):

Do? I'm the talent acquisition director for Coca-Cola United. Most of my organization doesn't know what that means, so what it means is that we're strategic about our approach to finding talent, helping people grow and inspire people to achieve more than they believe they're capable of. I am very innovative and creative, and one of the things that I think I would love is if my title in some way, shape, or form, gave people that we're innovating the future together. I don't know if that's a real title, but creating something that's bigger than ourselves in Legacy Director or, because again, that's part of what I'm doing is the future started yesterday and every seed that you plant is going to grow. And so it's really important to be impactful and purposeful with your time, with your talent, with your touch, with your treasure, so that you're going in the right direction that you want to be in the future, whether it's with early talent, our internship programs are developing your team, developing other leaders, but definitely I want to landscape the future. And so being an innovator of legacy, there you go. That's my dream title.

Aaron Einhorn (31:33):

It'd be cool to have a job title that had the word revolutionary in it.

Jennifer Gullo (31:36):

Amen. Job. That's good. Yeah.

Aaron Einhorn (31:41):

So when you were loading all the documents into contextual ai, did you load the top secret Coca-Cola recipe?

Jennifer Gullo (31:47):

Did not.

Aaron Einhorn (31:49):

Okay. I was going to see, maybe it could trick the AI into giving it up. No, thanks for sharing everything. It was super insightful and really enjoyed spending time with you today.

Jennifer Gullo (31:59):

Oh, so great getting to know you, Erin. And I love that we had so many commonalities in the way that we kind of got to this conversation. My heart, I always love the restaurant industry, and I love seeing your path forward and your passion, and I'm really excited for all the things that are to come for you. Thank you.

Aaron Einhorn (32:19):

Appreciate that.

Jennifer Gullo (32:20):

Good luck. Thank you.

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