Ally Bonner (00:00:04):

Hello everyone. We're going to give just a couple minutes for all of our attendees to funnel in today. As you're funneling in, share your name, where you're from, what company in the chat, so we can get an idea of who all is here to join us for today's story. So like I said, we'll give it about one minute and then we'll hop in to our story that we're here to share today. For all of you that are just now joining in the webinar, if you can share where you're from, what company you're from, maybe what's interesting you about this webinar today, you can go ahead and throw that in the chat so we know as something to touch on throughout the presentation, you're also more than welcome as we're going through to share any questions that you have in the chat, we'll have some time for q and a at the end based on any questions that come through throughout the webinar. So please feel free to drop those in as we're going through. All right, we still have quite a few people funneling in, so we'll give it another minute or so here before we hop in. Hello, Dustin. Thank you for being the first one to share where you're from. Thank you for joining us today. Tyler, good to hear from you again from Kohl's. Thank you for joining, Scott. That might be the first time somebody shared their LinkedIn link. I love it. Thank you. All right, once I see the attendees numbers slow down a little bit, we'll hop in.

(00:02:28):

All right. I say that we hop into it. We're a couple minutes after, so we'll go ahead and get started. We're all here to share the Burlington story of the road to 2000 stores, so how Burlington fuels hiring for their retail expansion with conversational ai. I'm Allie Bonner. I'm one of our VPs of client success here at Paradox and have had the pleasure of working with both Atlanta and Tracy for the last about year and a half. They actually just passed their one year live with Allison anniversary, which is awesome. So I'm going to pass it over to both of them for a quick introduction and then we're going to share their amazing story.

Alanna LeBlanc (00:03:07):

Cool. Thanks Allie. Hello everybody. Alanna LeBlanc. I lead our functional support side of our HR systems team at Burlington and been with the organization just over three years, which great to say that a key pillar of that has been the paradox implementation.

Tracy Aguilar (00:03:26):

Perfect. Hi everyone. My name's Tracy Aguilar. I oversee recruiting for the stores and distribution centers here at Burlington, and I've been here a whopping 11 years. Time flies when you're having fun and with projects like this, how can you not just stay and keep doing great things? So really excited to share our story today.

Ally Bonner (00:03:46):

Thank you both so much. So I want to start at the beginning of the journey and really where Burlington came to bring paradox on board. So can you share, before implementing Allison, which is your AI recruiting assistant, what was really the biggest pain point or bottleneck that you all were having in the interview scheduling process and just recruitment process in general?

Tracy Aguilar (00:04:08):

Perfect. Yeah, no, I can take that. So as we were embarking on this journey, there were two main points specific to interview scheduling that we were looking to solve for. One was with a growing fleet of stores, we really only had a one size fits all interview approach, which can create challenge, right? Markets are different, nuanced new stores, smaller stores, and volume, et cetera. So that was a challenge that we were looking to solve for. The second piece was it was not owned at the local level, meaning there were two to three steps of this is what I'd want my interview cadence to be of approval and manual data entry to get that up and running, to be externally facing for the candidates that were applying. So it was time consuming and we just thought, well shoot if this is what we're doing at 850 stores because we have been talking about this and exploring this for a bit, what's it going to look like when we get to that 2000 stores? So that's what really drove our exploration process.

Ally Bonner (00:05:10):

Awesome. Tracy, so just clicking in a little bit further on that, what was really the metric that you all focused on during the implementation of paradox?

Alanna LeBlanc (00:05:21):

Kind of a loaded answer, but speed to hire was certainly top of mind, which there's a lot of underlying metrics when you say speed to hire because that can mean a lot of different things, but it's really, I've learned core to that retail high volume space. So our original intention was really just shaving off time in the recruitment process, and we started with just focusing in that scheduling stage, which for us has ended up, meaning scheduling takes five minutes or less with Allison. So time to schedule that interview, interact with Allison, and if you're qualified as a candidate, you can schedule an interview within five minutes.

Ally Bonner (00:06:00):

Awesome. Thank you for sharing that. So given the expected growth of Burlington, both of you have mentioned that Burlington was expected and still is in the process of growing and something that's been so fun in our project together is seeing the growth of your organization, what was really the tipping point that signaled the need for a more scalable solution like Allison?

Tracy Aguilar (00:06:22):

Yeah, so for this journey it was, I'm lucky to say that we weren't broken and seeking a fix, and that changes a mindset. I think when you're embarking on a project. We weren't on defense, we were on offense. We knew the growth that was coming. We knew our process wasn't broken, it was currently working. We weren't fielding a lot of complaints internally from our internal customers or even from a candidate experience. And so this was really a self-driven exploration to understand how can we make sure that we have a scalable solution to 2000 stores, right? We've had a centralized approach to high volume recruitment, which is DCS and stores for the last eight plus years. So that in and of itself wasn't new. When you think about exponential store growth, I thought about my current size team, they were doing a great job, but what's the reality of being able to times two or times three to get to that 2000 store count?

(00:07:23):

And so that's really what that underlying curiosity factor was for us. We knew of paradox, we had seen some demos and it really, I think it was the perfect storm of, Hey, if we could do this, how do we pull this off? We went into it for interview scheduling, but oh my goodness, look at all these other functional wins we would potentially get, and then how the heck do you make the appropriate business case to get the right folks on board? So I don't know if it was one tipping point or just some basic math that said, chances are when I go to my leaders and say, Hey, I need three times as many people to do what I do today. I might've gotten some feedback. So we really leaned into technology for this.

Ally Bonner (00:08:01):

Tracy. I love that. Oftentimes when we're working through an implementation with a client, it's typically because something's broken or there's really that significant need. What I find so interesting in our project together is that Burlington was one of the fastest implementations that we had the opportunity of working on at scale, and it was really due to how quickly you all moved and turned things around. So even though the process wasn't broken, what do you think helped your team deliver and stick to timeline so well during the implementation?

Tracy Aguilar (00:08:37):

First of all, buy in at every level for what we were building. I think I can only imagine at times it's harder to dig in and roll up sleeves on a project if you've got some folks that aren't completely bought in. And so to have that advocacy from Alanis's, from my team, from our internal communications team to help us make sure that we built out an appropriate change management message and from our senior leaders that were helping us navigate some of the nuances, I do think that's a piece of it. We also partnered with our business partners, so they were part of the journey, the build. Early on in my time at Burlington, I learned how monumental it is to get the feedback and partnership of the end user as well as the key leaders that you need to lean into for a successful implementation. And so I really think that was it. And not to mention the paradox product's kind of amazing. And so when you know where you're at and it's not broken and where you're going and it's only going to get better, that would be my take on that answer.

Ally Bonner (00:09:43):

Awesome. I do think a lot of clients get a little nervous about sharing too early with their end users because maybe they're in testing, they think the product isn't perfect, but we really always encourage clients to take that step and you're a success story of what that can mean if we get those end users bought in early. So thank you for sharing that.

Speaker 4 (00:10:05):

Of course.

Ally Bonner (00:10:06):

And transitioning a little bit, what did you notice about candidate volume meaning a true candidate application after implementing Paradox?

Tracy Aguilar (00:10:15):

Sure. So for the listeners out there, brace yourself because the candidate volume didn't increase. If anything, it decreased. Now it's okay because really a part of this journey and a part of this platform allowed for us to better tailor the best candidates, the most appropriate candidates to come through the process. And so when you think of a candidate funnel, a top of the funnel, very, very large, we don't have a challenge with candidate flow. What it was challenging was making sure that we're maximizing the best candidate flow to extend our jobs and offers to. So as an example, we were able to layer in questions about scheduling, availability and rate of pay, openness to, and by getting those answers upfront, it would allow for us to just help prioritize who we would chat with first. The other piece is with that rate of pay question, which at times could be a sensitive question. So I say this understanding that the fact of the matter is that we we're respecting the candidate's time if they're not open to our rate of pay. Conversely, we're also respecting our leader's time because they're not going to get to an interview, fall in love with Atlanta, and then realize that she's not open to what we're able to pay. And so although it could be seen as a negative, the reality is it was really allowing us to optimize our leader's time and the candidate flow we did have.

Ally Bonner (00:11:44):

Awesome. We have several clients who not only focus on the rate of pay, but also the job. Maybe the job isn't desirable or there's a very specific personality type that's the best fit for the job. So we can help really serve that up to the candidate and allow those candidates to really self opt out and save both the candidates time as well as hiring managers, recruiters, et cetera. So I think that's a perfect example where more isn't always what's best, and you all really focused on how we can get those quality candidates, the ones that we know will accept the job in the end through the process quicker. So how did that have an impact on overall interview volume and really how did that help contribute to that?

Alanna LeBlanc (00:12:29):

Yeah, so Tracy talked to the candidate volume piece and on the interviewing as a stage in and of itself is significantly more efficient both for the business and less administrative for a centralized TA team. So to get there, they conduct fewer interviews to get to that right hire. Our candidate volume is if the same or a little bit less, but that interview volume has been reduced by about 50% because we're very intentional in what we do screen for to make sure that the time that our hiring teams are spent interviewing is with candidates that are ultimately willing to accept the job at the end of the day. So we're able to maintain the staffing levels haven't deviated, we still need to make the same amount of hires, but just that interview volume is a little bit more intentional of who is in front of our hiring teams to be able to convert into a new hire at the end of the day.

Ally Bonner (00:13:32):

Awesome. So we worked on a lot together throughout this implementation. Tracy, you shared, you started looking at scheduling and then really widened the scope. So there was a lot that we did together. What other areas did the Berlin team explore during the implementation that led to even greater success overall?

Alanna LeBlanc (00:13:55):

Oh, I want this question. This is my fun fact question. So we recognize a few, I guess, silver linings at the end of the day that as we're going through, before we even start an implementation, you hear like, oh, this is what we can offer. This is what Paradox does. Here's the stats that we can kind of provide the business. But there's been a few things that kind of jumped out as extracurriculars that we're like, okay, if we can recognize or realize that that will be good, but not something we're necessarily jumping into capture right away. But the first thing that is definitely a win for our business is Allison's multilingual. So she responds in the language that a candidate Converses in. It's not necessarily like a setting that the candidate has to choose of like, oh, this is my preferred language. They can just start conversing with Allison and she'll converse right back in that natural language for them.

(00:14:53):

The second item in retail, there's a seasonality to staffing levels. Especially for us as a traditional retailer, we have a true seasonal period. So in paradox, I just knew that we had to be able to support seasonal staffing, whatever that needed to look and feel like Paradox had to be able to adjust for that. But with the platform, so I'm more of just covering our basis. We have to be able to staff for seasonal, we'll figure out how to do that. Turns out we didn't really have to do much there because of the way the platform is architectured at the end of the day, we are able to turn up basically our hiring numbers for a seasonal, I guess staffing need, but there wasn't necessarily a separate build that we had to do in paradox. There wasn't really reconfiguration to support a seasonal staffing or significantly higher field needs.

(00:15:55):

It was really just seamless, something we didn't have to fully pay attention to. There wasn't project hours dedicated to a seasonal build out in the platform like we had to do traditionally before, which for, I mean my team's sake, team's sake is a really big win for us within that centralized HR space. And then the third area, which is the fun fact that I hope you have a stat to share Ally on this because the data that wowed me is really in regards to our after hour engagement. The ability to keep candidates engaged and conversing with Allison outside of the nine to five timeframe keeps them engaged for Burlington as an employer overall, which is not something that is scalable for us as a team. And that's really just Allison working on our behalf ever since go live.

Ally Bonner (00:16:47):

Yeah. Yeah, that's awesome. We love to say that Allison's the 24 7 recruiter, so when you're human recruiters and hiring managers are at home or doing something else, Allison is still communicating with candidates. Burlington actually saw about a 38% after hour candidate activity, and that's around the benchmark that we typically see a little bit above with our other clients at Paradox at this scale. And really what that means is anything outside of 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM in the candidate specific time zone is considered after hour activities, which is awesome because typically they would be waiting for either those interview scheduling requests from a human trying to get in touch with them or waiting for a response for a question or answer, and Allison's doing that within seconds. So it's always a really awesome stat to see with our clients, especially knowing we always see it around that same percentage. So we've spent pretty much this whole time talking about the success of technology and how well this implementation has gone with the Burlington team, but no technology is successful without a very strong change management plan. Would you mind sharing how you thought about and manage change management to ensure that there was great adoption within the organization at Go Live?

Tracy Aguilar (00:18:09):

Sure, absolutely. I can take a stab at this one. I think one of the biggest learnings I've had, and I can confidently share it now because when you look in the rear view mirror, you have nuggets of knowledge that you can pay it forward. Is this introducing Paradox and Allison to our tech stack was transformational, not transactional, but depending on how you tackle the to-dos, depending on how you tackle the change management or what you're looking to accomplish, IE quicker interview scheduling, it could feel like it's intention is transactional. And so the reason I want to share that is as we, to Allie's point earlier, we just celebrated our year anniversary, so I dunno if it's a birthday or an anniversary, we should probably talk about that. Ann valuable. Yeah, either it's been a year and we were very focused on pulling in our HR partnership at the local level.

(00:19:10):

We leaned heavily into their guidance and perspective. As we built the platform, we leaned into our senior level operators to make sure that they could poke holes and ask questions and gain a comfortability. Before we went broader, we opted for a big bang approach versus a tiered approach. And so it was a flip of a switch and we all went live. The reason I share this is that first 30, 60, 90 days, four months, it was pivotal, it was Hypercare Paradox was right by our side, and it was also we went live in May. It was kind of rounding that corner into that seasonal time, which for any of us retailers out there, you know that that's a do or die, right? You have numbers to put up, they have to be right hires, et cetera. The reason I share all this is once that hypercare dies down, there's still that transformational of how do you continue to educate?

(00:20:05):

So I just thought that was, I wanted to pay that forward because we are still learning that now. How do we refresh? We're coming up on another seasonal build. How do we make sure folks have been promoted or changed roles or new leadership? How do we make sure everyone is as excited as informed today as they were a year ago when we flipped the switch? A couple other things, Allie, before I pass the mic back to you if that's okay, is I'd want to share Paradox was right there by our side. So there's clearly an internal approach that we as a Burlington family had to take partnering with our internal communications team, thinking through the appropriate levels. We did a drip campaign to build the excitement before go live. I think those were all mission critical things that Paradox can do outside the system. They make a heck of a video to put into an email campaign to our stores and distribution centers. There is a coaching technology that they layer into the paradox tool itself to remind end user to do X, Y, Z or explain something. And those are all things that we went live at go live, but then we added in based on feedback and hypercare and regular calls with our business. So that might've been a bit of a tangent, but it wasn't all done. By the time we pushed go there were continued iterations and evolutions as we leaned into the system.

Ally Bonner (00:21:28):

Tracy, I love that you shared that because from a paradox perspective with working with our clients, we think about change management in two separate buckets. One is that initial go live and then one is really that ongoing training and support. Listen, implementations are high pressure. Everyone's moving as quickly as possible to get it live, and a lot of the focus generally goes straight towards what's that training that we can do to get this up and running as quickly as possible. And we love to partner with our clients for the videos like you mentioned, as well as if you have a learning and development course, we can help build out some of that content for you. But then thinking about how can you continue to do that ongoing? So the learning and development course is a great way of doing that. That way when new people are brought onto the organization or promoted, it's part of essentially their onboarding experience at the organization.

(00:22:19):

And then to the call out, we do have that inline popups that we can do or step-by-step experience, which is good for that ongoing training, especially when we think about maybe areas with low hiring volume, they might only be hiring one candidate a month versus another one that's hiring multiple a week. So making sure that we can help support those different levels of hiring managers and or recruiters in their experience with the recruiting process with their candidates. Absolutely. So thank you so much for touching on all of that. I think we never go into an implementation with a client that's like change management is so great for us and we always do it well. That's never been the case. We typically start our change management conversations with what's gone well, what hasn't gone well, and we rarely get anything in the what's gone well category, and I think you all did a really incredible job, and just being able to share that with other organizations is amazing. I think it's so critical to making sure the success of the technology. Just transitioning a little bit, I think you touched a little bit already on this Tracy, but if you were to implement Paradox today, what would you do differently in the change management realm?

Tracy Aguilar (00:23:37):

I did. I already hinted to that a little bit because honestly, I'm living it now. I think if I could do it again, I probably would've gone a little deeper into the field org in our DC org to make sure that our leaders, that lead developed that comfort level to understand how to use the tool. And I guess the lens that I look through now is as a TA leader and Alanis team as systems experts, we knew this is an amazing tool that not all orgs get to lean into. And so there was an excitement there and knowing my client group and the pace in which they work and the speed in which they move, which is actually the same thing. So I repeated myself, it's, I don't want it to feel like, oh God, a tool. I want it to feel like, oh my God, a tool. And so if I had perhaps let them kind of play around in it a little bit more, it will help them do the job that they need to do. So there's an appetite for it, we're going to reteach all those good things. But I probably would've gone a little deeper into the org. But overall it was such a success and even with the things that we've learned along the way, still Allison is probably the best hire we've ever had, so

Ally Bonner (00:24:58):

Love it. So from a leadership's perspective, really evolved regarding TA and technology. How has that changed since the implementation of Allison?

Alanna LeBlanc (00:25:12):

So I mean, the initial exploration was really just in that interview scheduling play. So I think as we were willing to explore more of the platform and match up what the offerings were to some of the opportunities that we could try to capitalize on, we saw more that we liked and that scope evolved where we had to probably at that point tap on other business partners outside of just our HR family to help create that business case. We have an internal strategy team at Burlington that I didn't even know existed, and then as soon as they came on board to this project was like, oh, there's no way we could have done this without them really building that business case. Because outside of just having them match numbers and ROI and all the real business nitty gritty, the way that it brought out some of the key pillars that we needed as a project team is something that we're bringing forward to other projects outside of just any kind of paradox play going forward.

(00:26:17):

It's a little bit more in how we probably need to operate as a systems team to bring in and match best practice to being able to not necessarily quantify an ROI, but really talk about the impact and the sustainability of whatever we're doing, whether it's an enhancement, an optimization, a new product, a new platform, adding to our tech stack, maybe taking away from the tech stack in other ways. It's more of that mindset shift that I think was just one of those internal offerings from bringing that strategy team on board and having that openness in that mindset to, okay, but what about this? How do we explore things diligently and make decisions on yes, there's an impact here? What's the framework that we can use in that decision making process? So really bringing in some of that leadership outside of just our HR group that we're most familiar with has kind of been a little bit pivotal going forward.

(00:27:27):

But then going back to the paradox specific side, this is really the first AI system or platform that we've even entertained. So as internal teams, we have to be able to focus on those efficiency gains, which obviously led us here to choosing Paradox, having a successful go live, successful hypercare seasonal, one year anniversary, all those things. And now we're at that unique experience of people wanting more, which is a blessing in a lot of ways, interesting in other ways where no one ever asked for this. Like Tracy said before, it was something that the TA team kind of brought to the table. So it's a really unique space from a systems partner perspective of people asking for more and wanting more in really intentional ways because something was so successful before. So I really attribute that to that mindset shift and then bringing in and setting up the right core project team that had shared perspectives across the board. I mean, I really don't think we would be here without all of the partnerships that have been built internally and externally with our CSM team.

Ally Bonner (00:28:43):

Yeah. We talked a bit earlier about this not being transactional, but really being transformational. You mentioned people at Burlington wanting more, so I'm sure everybody here is wondering what's next on the roadmap for Burlington. What specific areas or capabilities are you all excited for us to continue to partner and grow together?

Alanna LeBlanc (00:29:09):

Yeah, I mean we're definitely entertained by offering more to the business. So we'll always explore more products that we can add on. Paradox is always rolling out new features on a monthly cadence right now. So there's always something to adopt one way or another. But as far as the things that keep me up at night because I'm that excited to dive into, probably it's shift management at this point, that's a big play for our dcs. So I think there's some improvement efforts there with some new enhancements that Paradox is rolling out this year. And then I would lie if I said I wasn't excited about Contextual Care and really exploring that kind of next iteration of how Allison can provide that candidate and even employee experience to our associates and candidate pools.

Ally Bonner (00:30:05):

Awesome. Contextual q and a is a big focus for Paradox with our clients this year. And for those of you that are on that are clients, or for those of you that are exploring Paradox, we're really shifting the way that Allison or your AI assistant can help take in more context. So let's say a candidate sharing, Hey, I'm in Detroit and I'm really excited for my upcoming interview. Allison would be able to identify, okay, it's Detroit, it's the middle of winter. Hey, it's make sure you dress warm. Some of the interview will be outside. So being able to take more of that context in and making that more of a conversational experience. Our whole platform and the way that we operate is on conversation, and so being able to really enhance that conversation is the output of that contextual q and a. So we're excited to take the next steps with Burlington on that.

(00:31:00):

Well, thank you both so much. I know I asked a lot of questions about our journey together today and it's perfect timing. We saved about 30 minutes for q and a and I've been seeing our chat had a lot of questions coming in. If anybody else has questions that they haven't put in the chat yet, please do so now we're going to take the rest of the time to answer all of the questions. So the first question we received was how do you measure the duration to scheduled interviews? So I can take that one because Paradox has obviously reporting built in specifically to interview scheduling for time metrics. We measure everything depending on how far you take the recruitment process. With the Paradox technology, we are able to measure that time. For example, if the candidate starts its conversation, which is their application, we measure that start time when they complete it, and then we will measure when that interview scheduling request was sent.

(00:32:01):

So if it's candidates qualified, we move them to auto schedule. We'll measure that time and then the time it takes for the candidate to reply to the interview scheduling request, the time that it was scheduled and then the time that it was completed. So we really are measuring all of those time points along the way. That way as we go through, Tracy mentioned Hypercare earlier post Go live for both Hypercare and then our ongoing quarterly basis, we're looking at any of those areas that might need improvement and how we can help you all improve to make that faster if that's something that you're looking to achieve. So that was a great question,

Tracy Aguilar (00:32:37):

Allie. Could I share something specific to the metrics aspect? So in the conversation we just had, I really didn't touch upon that at all, but that was such an amazing side effect or addition in regards to the partnership with Paradox, obviously standing up Allison, but the amount of data points that we now have and use to make decisions around what markets we actually have to sponsor. I mean for any TA leaders out there that field questions around, oh, this market or this building or this store is a hard to hire, is it, let's look at some numbers. And then as you look at that data, you can understand, ooh, this is a coaching of a behavior and teaching them how to use the tool better or Oh, actually this is a hard to hire, right? Or the pay rate might be a little too low and we're missing out on X percent of candidates. So it has equipped our HR team, our talent acquisition team, and then therefore our business leaders with the appropriate knowledge to drive even better results. So I never touched on that, but it was a great takeaway in partnering with you guys.

Ally Bonner (00:33:44):

Yeah, thank you for sharing. We had another question. Why did applicant flow decrease post implementation? So I'll start and then Tracy, Alana, I'll pass it off to you. So something that Tracy touched on earlier was that we were asking questions in the process to candidates to really have them have that opportunity to opt out. So when we say application volume, that is an entire candidate getting through the conversation and getting to that completed applicant state. So that completed applicant state went down because we were asking the question, are you okay with this pay range, which Burlington was not asking before the implementation of Paradox. And so if a candidate said, no, I don't agree to this pay range, then they're not considered a completed applicant because we're moving them out of the funnel. So dunno if there's anything else Burlington team to touch on there.

Tracy Aguilar (00:34:40):

That's exactly what I would've shared. Yep,

Ally Bonner (00:34:42):

Perfect. I'm also laughing because somebody named Allison put in the chat. My name is Allison, so it's interesting to keep hearing my name throughout the chat. I feel famous, so I love that we were able to bring that Allison to you today. I love that.

Alanna LeBlanc (00:34:58):

My wife's name is Allison, so she kind of I think got sick of hearing the name Allison for a good portion of our deployment.

Ally Bonner (00:35:07):

That's hilarious. We had a question from Shannon Shay, is there a legal disclosure necessary for when candidates are communicating with Allison to know that it's ai? So I can take this one. There is the option. We have a lot of flexibility within the Paradox platform in how you want to configure your Allison for se. So an example is that a lot of our clients will use a data at the very beginning. So before the candidate even interacts with their Allison ET all, there will be a disclosure with terms and conditions for them to agree to. It is totally up to our clients and their legal teams. So we cannot give legal advice, but we recommend that you work with your legal teams to decide what makes the most sense for you all in those cases. But we absolutely have functionality across the board to support it depending on what the need is for you and your legal team. So that was a great question. Somebody asked, can you speak more about the videos to the stores and dcs? Sure. So yeah, you can go ahead and I'll piggyback off

Tracy Aguilar (00:36:18):

Tracy. Well, I was going to say your answer will probably be better, but it was a hype fitting. We were able to partner with Paradox's amazing marketing team. They obviously through this journey got to know us. We were able to give them some screenshots and information, and so they created what we call the hype video and probably for two to three months after go live, I would hear that in my sleep, the music, because you have to watch it many times to make sure we're good. And Allie, feel free to expand on that, but it was maybe three minutes long, give or take, but just to get people excited about what Allison would be doing on their behalf.

Ally Bonner (00:36:55):

Yeah, our team is more than happy to partner through the implementation process and thinking about your different audience groups. And really, I love to frame the hype videos as what's in it for me. So being able to display that what's in it for me in a hype video to really help get people excited. It's quick a way to get them engaged and we see such good results and feedback from the hype videos. So love that you touched on that today, Tracy. Okay, so question. I think this one's going to be for you both, since you all have multiple locations, can you touch on how you navigate and manage paradox with all of those locations? So posting jobs, updating screening questions, et cetera. We also have quite a few locations and have separate locations under our one login, but everything still has to be updated at each location. It's kind of exhausting updating every job, posting in every location when something changes. An example, an added benefit or screening question.

Alanna LeBlanc (00:37:58):

Good question. That is something unique to how you want to set up your job structure. Most of our jobs are streamlined across our location types, so whether it's a store or dc. So we don't really have too much that is different as far as our screening questions. We have the ability to make them different, but they are maintained at that job level, which we really tried to stick to a streamlined enterprise style approach to most of the, whether it's the screening questions, job descriptions, anything that's really contained within the paradox platform, just to make those updates simple enough. But it is something that is a little daunting because we do have a lot of locations. Each location has their set of jobs, even if it's every place has a cashier job, you have that many jobs because you have that many locations. So making those updates in mass, we still partner with our paradox team, but it is something that we have to be very intentional about. I think there was a second part to that question that I didn't address yet, Allie?

Ally Bonner (00:39:16):

No, I think you got it all. The second part was expanding on it.

Tracy Aguilar (00:39:20):

The one I would love to just add on to Alana's point is when we embarked on this journey, we knew we had a chance to change. And so what we didn't want to do is bring some of our bad behaviors or we did it this way because that's how we've always done it into this new chapter with Paradox and Allison. And so we really pushed our own thought process to make sure that we were bumping this system up against Alan's point and enterprise solution. So while in the beginning of this time together today, I talked about that autonomy at the local level. There's certain things that we're good with giving autonomy at the local level, picking what hours within a day they want to interview because you got to make sure that the leadership team's there writing a job description, not so much. And so there's certain things that we were able to lock down, but to Alan's point is consistent and we did build out two workflows is what I would call it now. My tech partners might coach me in the moment, but basically I have a stores workflow and we have a distribution center. They are not the same, but within the same paradox umbrella, we're still able to drive the results. It's just that I had two approaches always keeping that enterprise concept in mind.

Ally Bonner (00:40:38):

Awesome. I love this. Next question. It is from Allison, the real one, not the avatar for Burlington. Why did you choose to go with a Big Bang launch versus a tiered approach? What was the thinking behind this?

Alanna LeBlanc (00:40:56):

I can start, Tracy, if that's alright,

(00:40:57):

Go for it. I had selfish thinking behind it to be honest, because it was pretty much at that point of deciding a rollout plan. There was no way we weren't implementing, there was nothing that was coming up in the design process that made us feel hesitant of, Ooh, let's get feedback on this. Before we really make concrete decisions. We were either making those decisions in real time by involving more parties in those conversations, but really this is silly, but there wasn't a way we weren't going to roll this out. The biggest risk honestly, is that change management aspect. And if you can knock that out and get ahead of that to really create that awareness and desire upfront, then your knowledge transfer and reinforcement is a little bit easier. But part of, so we still need that pilot or phased approach experience to collect feedback.

(00:41:57):

We still need that feedback. I just wasn't honestly willing to do that with a live system. So we built that more into our testing phase. So we kept, our testing for us was in three phases. Our systems integration testing came first. Then our functional testing, which is our core projects team's first look of really going under the hood and being able to get our hands on a testing environment to play with, make bigger corrections, things like that. And we spent a lot of time in the functional testing phase because we used our pilot approach in the UAT phase. So user acceptance testing is where we brought in business leaders. So we brought in store managers, district managers, our regional HR partners. We brought in area managers in our DC's warehouse space that we still needed to get their feedback, just not necessarily in a live instance. It definitely made system maintenance more palatable because we weren't live, there wasn't any kind of cutover splicing of this group isn't working in this system to hire people. This group is still following this very different manual touchpoint process. It was just an easier sense of rollout, but that doesn't negate the still need to gather feedback from our business users. We just brought them into user acceptance testing and made that a little bit more robust rather than a live environment.

Tracy Aguilar (00:43:33):

The one piece that I would add too is we did separate out stores going live first and then dcs, but it was still that big bang approach.

Ally Bonner (00:43:45):

Awesome. That's always the question that comes up for our large enterprise clients and implementation. You all are an amazing success story of Big Bang. I think oftentimes clients are just scared to make that jump, but typically when they do, we see the rollout in the adoption much quicker than we would if we do a tiered approach. But there's benefits and cons to both. Next question is for the dcs, are your hiring managers in Paradox or are they simply receiving the interview confirmation email?

Alanna LeBlanc (00:44:24):

I mean they're in paradox. They're in as hiring managers. So they have the autonomy to set their interview schedules. They can see who's upcoming for the day. We really tried to train a little bit more on in the flow of work. So most of our locations, whether it's a store or DC, should have a version of mobile friendly devices, whether it's in the DC it might be like an IT cart that they kind of bring around with a thin client on it. In our stores they have a manager on duty tablet. So Paradox platform is readily available in front of them. It's also very mobile friendly as a platform in general. So the technology and the interface aspect is very easy to use, but they are provisioned as full autonomy and hiring managers. So really their ideal is that they should be able to log in for the day, be able to see what interviews they have upcoming.

(00:45:20):

Maybe they need to adjust some availability. Let's say they just got done conducting five interviews in a row. They should be able to pull up their candidates awaiting action and make those hiring decisions of yes, move them to offer, nope, decline them, disposition them. It should really be within the flow of work. There's not a lot of decision making that has to happen. It's more of yes or no. And then all the automation kicks off and Allison keeps pulling the candidates through the recruiting process. It's not just getting the candidates engaged and getting them scheduled for an interview. There's other automation built in to our workflows that keeps that hiring manager basically interviewing, making interview decisions, confirming a start date, when's the person starting. That's really it. The rest kind of is done behind the scenes with Allison's assistance.

Ally Bonner (00:46:10):

There's another question that's a little bit further in the chat, but Alana, it kind of relates to everything that you just shared. So what a TS do you use? Burlington is using Paradox is their full a TS. So do your managers do everything in Paradox and what are the steps, which I think you pretty much touched on for managers using the paradox platform. So yeah, paradox can overlay any a TS or it can be a standalone a TS. So depending on the needs of the business, the investment that might've been made for other ATSs, we have the ability to either overlay or be standalone. Next question is how do you all provide resumes to hiring managers when scheduling interview for your stores or dcs? So

Alanna LeBlanc (00:46:59):

A couple things. We don't require resumes just with the types of roles we're hiring for. We find those candidates don't necessarily always have a resume and if we require resumes, they're going to have to go out and create one. They probably don't already have one. So that was a cognizant decision we made in going to Paradox that we don't require resume. They can certainly submit one as part of their application process, but we don't want that to be a barrier into them being to interview and ultimately be hired on. So if they do submit a resume and any of their application and screening question responses our surface to the hiring manager on their candidate profile. So it's all stored within the paradox home UI sense that hiring managers have access to. But we don't require resumes for the majority of our roles, so it's not really something we're faced with having to do too much with.

Ally Bonner (00:48:05):

Yeah, and I would say too, we are typically seeing this across the board for hourly, high volume, just not expecting those or those resumes to be provided. We have an option to collect resumes and keep it optional, but for the most part, clients are choosing to opt out of it. It's just not necessary. And we can collect all that we need to through conversation. Next question is, do you use sites like Indeed and LinkedIn for job postings and how does that work with Paradox?

Alanna LeBlanc (00:48:39):

We do. We also use a third party career site, which we feed all of our Paradox jobs to our career site that can still house our corporate jobs as well. So there's different segments on our career site that categorizes our jobs for our overall enterprise. And then those feeds get picked up by LinkedIn and Indeed.

Ally Bonner (00:49:03):

Perfect. And just to expand a little bit more on how does it work with Paradox, that's one example. We also have the ability to send master feeds to indeed LinkedIn, et cetera. So really just depends on your setup and something that we talk about through the initial implementation process. Next question, Vanessa was curious, how did you navigate getting hiring managers support for using the auto scheduling tools and how did you manage the challenge of keeping their calendars current for both virtual and onsite interviews?

Tracy Aguilar (00:49:38):

Yeah, so I could probably take a stab at that one. I do think it's important that I mention that we were already eight years into a journey of centralized recruitment support, just not leveraging a system of paradox. And Allison, Allison is new to us in the last year. And so with that being said, that question probably goes back multiple years around what that journey would've looked like. And the first time we did broach the topic with field partners, I definitely was looked at as though I had multiple heads and a couple eyes per head. So it was like a, what are you thinking?

(00:50:17):

There were some bumps, and again, this is going a trip down memory lane, but again, we had partnered way back when with our strategy team and did an in-house time study to really talk about how much time is spent with the administrative steps of hiring versus the actual most important steps of hiring through a hiring manager's lens, which is interviewing, assessing, and making a hiring decision. And once we were able to quantify how much time our leaders were spending doing the non-essentials of hiring IE, looking at resumes, playing phone tag, because let's be honest, they're calling and they're on the floor, they're not at their computer. And all of a sudden we got some really quick traction around, Hey, what can you build centrally? And so once we had that green light, that's when we had worked with a different platform. That's why it was not autonomous at the local level. We kind of had to partner with regional levels, territory levels, and some store ops partners to say, okay, you're going to be interviewing Monday, Wednesday, Friday and fill in the blanks. Paradox has changed that for us completely. It's now localized based on their preference, scheduling, et cetera, but we had an eight year headstart on that. So that was not a pain point. If anything, we'd already built that muscle and we got their buy-in pretty quick eight years ago with that.

Alanna LeBlanc (00:51:43):

Two other things I would share, which is a little slightly technical in nature, something a little bit different for us than maybe most clients. We use location calendars in paradox rather than personal calendars. So we're integrated with Outlook, but we use a location calendar rather than, I'm going to schedule an interview with Tracy on Tracy's Outlook calendar. The idea is that it's a little bit easier to manage for our locations because they might have a store manager, they might have an As assistant store manager, they might have three supervisors that are all considered hiring managers. So they need one centralized view at interviews and to be able to set their interviewing blocks and times. One thing that is still a little bit of a learning curve is how they can splice out that interview schedule of, we do all in-person interviews thankfully, which makes it a little bit easier.

(00:52:45):

But in our DCS in particular, they might have really niche, some very niche roles. They're not hiring for them often, but maybe there's only one person that can assess a forklift driver. So they only can have very specific interview times available that that leader that's going to conduct that interview is there where they only want to be able to schedule those candidates. So some of that are the things that Tracy's team still works with the business on to be able to reeducate and re-skill in those areas because it's a little bit more niche, it's a little bit more nuanced and more specific points in time. So that's kind of the ongoing nature that I wouldn't say adoption is amazing. And I also think some of that is because so much else is kind of dummy proof in how to use and leverage the system and the tools that some of those niche things that, oh, now they have to go and pay attention with high attention to those areas to make them work. That's still easy to do, but everything else is so simple that sometimes those things stand out a little bit more.

Ally Bonner (00:53:54):

Elena, I'm glad you touched on that because we do have the option for that location calendar, as you mentioned, versus personal calendar. So through the design process of initial implementation based on your requirements, we'll help you decide which calendar better fits that. But a lot of the times for clients like Burlington that have stores and dcs that are onsite location, the location calendars is much easier to use and manage ongoing. Somebody also asked, tied to this, is there an internal workaround for how you handle hiring manager recruiter's, calendars being fully booked or not great calendar hygiene? I can take this one. So couple different things that Paradox is able to support with here for if you're using a personal hiring manager calendar, for example, we do have a user permission that could allow for let's say an HR business partner to actually go in and make updates on their calendar or their open interview time.

(00:54:54):

So we have some flexibility that we can allow other users to help support. And then the second part I'd say to that is ongoing reporting. I'm going to be on record and say it. I call it the shame board. And that we usually set up with clients as a way to say who's not opening their interview times, who's rescheduling on the candidates a lot, et cetera. Some of those reporting touch points that can indicate not great adoption. That's something that we look at through ongoing hypercare as well as our quarterly business review and really give you all access to that data so that you can have people at the localized level really help support those people who are having troubles and not fully adopting when it comes to calendar hygiene. So we have about five more minutes, which I think is perfect. We have just a couple more questions left. One question was follow-up question about using this tool to confirm candidates desired pay. Do you also post compensation ranges in your jobs and for the candidate to have this context before interacting with the ai? If so, how does that affect how you set up the tool to handle this part of the conversation?

Alanna LeBlanc (00:56:09):

We do. We do post our, what would be a range? Most of our roles are not range, they're just very specific, what we call an inhi rate to the role. So there's not any kind of, which makes it easy In some ways it's not really any negotiation necessarily to pay. So it's something that we can post pretty easily in our job description. So that's already outward facing to the candidates. And then we can technically store that attribute within Paradox and then reuse that in the job description and in our screening question.

Ally Bonner (00:56:45):

Awesome. Next question is, do you have more than one a TS?

Alanna LeBlanc (00:56:49):

We do. Part of the discovery with the Paradox platform was really just looking to add in a better way to interview schedules. We weren't looking at the a TS component, figured out that we're actually eager to learn a little bit more about that a TS component. So we spliced our audience, our Burlington audience of who uses what platform. So in the high volume, which is our DC and store hourly roles uses Paradox as an A TS, and then our corporate professional level roles use a different a TS. We also use the component of Paradox that is a conversational nature. Allison sits on our career site and anyone can interact with her. Once you get into that job search functionality, she'll still surface our jobs to our corporate a TS, you just won't apply through Allison. She would send you the link to that job to go apply outside of the Paradox platform. But then anything in that high volume traditional retail space would be, you would just keep going in your conversation with Allison and you wouldn't know any different.

Ally Bonner (00:58:09):

Awesome. And that's the approach we see a lot of our clients that have a large hourly high volume focus is really that split approach. We had. The question, is there a way to require some physicians to provide a resume and not others? Yes, absolutely. That functionality is available in paradox. So again, through the implementation and design, something that our team would help you make a decision on. Next question, I think we can fit it in. Do you have mass interviews at your dcs? If so, what interview scheduling function are you using in Paradox?

Tracy Aguilar (00:58:46):

Yeah, so I'll take a stab at the question and then probably pass it to Alana. What I would share is you have the opportunity to set up group interviews behind the scenes within the Paradox platform. And so we have used that. We shifted to that with our seasonal hiring approach. And then my second part of that answer is for new stores as an example, we've shifted recently to the event functionality, which wasn't ready or launched upon Argo Live, but we have since implemented it into our strategy events. Perhaps depending on the question might be more appropriate based on what you're looking to solve for, but we are able to interview in mass.

Alanna LeBlanc (00:59:29):

Yeah, I think your answer fit the bill. Perfect.

Ally Bonner (00:59:33):

Alright, I think that's all the time. Sorry, there was a couple more questions that we couldn't get to. As our marketing team mentioned, if we don't make it to your question, please feel free to reach out to the follow-up email that we send within the next day. Otherwise, Tracy Alana, thank you so much for your time today. We appreciate it. We hope everyone enjoyed spending the past hour with us. It was our pleasure to really go through and share this story with you all. Thanks everyone.

Tracy Aguilar (00:59:59):

Thanks. Bye-bye. Thank you.

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