Speaking your candidates' language matters. Just ask Johnson Controls.

Johnson Controls illustre la portée mondiale.

If you’re not fluent in French, you might be confused. Or frustrated. Or already reading a different blog. 

Language is the most important facet of communication. It’s not just a means to an end — you have to get it right. Especially in talent acquisition. If your candidate doesn’t understand you, it’s a dead end. Period. It doesn’t matter how much they want or don’t want to complete your application at that point — they literally can’t. 

‍With 100,000 employees across 174 countries (that’s 89% of all countries), Johnson Controls’ (JCI) is a worldwide leader in manufacturing smart buildings and electrical equipment. JCI’s success is dependent on their ability to scale and localize hiring across individual regions. But historically manual hiring processes slowed things down. Recruiters were tasked with speaking to engineering, operations, and manufacturing candidates around the globe, and were forced to jump between candidate correspondence and Google Translate all too often. And added touch points = friction-filled, slow hiring experiences. 

“If we can speak to people, we can hire faster. That speaks volumes for our ROI,” said Seema Shah, JCI’s global TA operations manager. 

And after an initial search for interview scheduling automation, they decided that Paradox could be leveraged as the multi-pronged hiring solution they needed — with a conversational AI assistant, they could automate their hiring process and immediately speak to all of their candidates at once. But their current solution is more than just interview scheduling; it spans the entire hiring process up to the interview. And in just one year since implementation, JCI saw these results:

JCI now has a hiring process that operates at the scale they need. And it’s driven by an AI assistant named Emma.

The value of speaking the right language.

Functioning as a candidate concierge, Emma is a conversational AI assistant that integrates with Workday and lives as a widget on JCI’s career site. When interested candidates want to apply for a job, Emma can automatically take them through the screening and interview scheduling process in minutes — all through a short text conversation.

Locally, this process greatly speeds up how JCI hires. If a plant manager in Dublin needs to quickly hire 50 manufacturers, they can open a requisition and let Emma handle all the administrative work. One plant, one city, one language, easy. But what about hiring for an executive role with a global candidate pool? That’s where Emma really shines. 

Fluent in 37 languages, Emma meets each candidate where they are, and interacts in their language. So if a candidate starts speaking in Mandarin, Emma will change her communication on a dime. And if the recruiter filling the role is based in America, Emma will translate back the candidate profile information and give updates in English, seamlessly. No wasted seconds, no friction. Just candidates getting screened faster, scheduled faster, and having their questions answered faster.

Speaking of questions, in 2023, JCI got 190,000 of them — across 17 different languages. Emma answered every single one of them in seconds. That type of functionality would be impossible to do manually. But for a company the size of JCI, it’s necessary to maintain staffing levels.

“You can't put a value on how this experience has been a game changer for our candidates,” said Shah. “Emma automatically understands their language — she creates a local experience.”

How Emma helps recruiters.

Emma’s connection with candidates spans entire hemispheres, but her impact is equally felt by individual recruiters. 

In large part, this is because Emma has added a new element to JCI’s hiring process: flexibility. When JCI wants to open up their candidate pool globally to truly find the best person for a corporate job, Emma can do that. And when they want to hire en masse for a hyper-specific location, Emma can do that too. 

‍Whatever hiring goal they have, Emma can deliver it.

Despite their size, Emma makes JCI nimble; they can hire whomever they need, wherever they need, in any language, seamlessly. And recruiters never have to spend time worrying about translation, or missing out on top talent because they couldn’t screen fast enough. 

“Being able to not have to think about scheduling and to know that it will happen,” said Shah. “It's a huge cost and time saver.” These aren’t just empty words. Since Emma’s implementation, she’s scheduled over 10,000 interviews for JCI, with the average candidate getting scheduled in under 15 minutes. 

And with Emma’s integration atop Workday, recruiters can continue working in the system they’re most comfortable in. 

“To get a tool that can overlay on top of Workday and free up time for recruiters to talk to people, that's a no-brainer,” said Shah.

In all, you might think that this type of automation is a sort of “rolling out the red carpet” for candidates. But it’s not that. It’s much simpler: JCI understands their global audience has different preferences that need to be accommodated for. 

Emma is just proof that they care about their candidates.

Et leurs candidats en sont reconnaissants.