Aaron Matos (00:05):

My name is Aaron Matos. Welcome to our presentation. I'm the founder and CEO of a company called Paradox. We happen to be a Workday partner, a Workday Ventures company. we've been around for about five years and I'll talk a little bit more about Paradox as we go, but this is the voice of a customer session. And so I'm super excited to introduce Eileen, who is from General Motors and will talk about the need for speed and how we're super charging the candidate experience recruiter process with scheduling at General Motors. So, Eileen, great.

Eileen Kovalsky (00:41):

I think I'm just supposed to show this, but I'm not reading it. Can you guys hear me? Okay? Great. before I get started, I just have a really quick question. By a show of hands, how many of you have been working remotely for like the past two years? Because of covid? Yeah. How many of you tried to put your clothes on this morning and they were really tight? <laugh>?

(01:05):

Yeah, so that was fun. <laugh>. anyway, my name is Eileen Kovalsky and I'm the head of candidate experience at General Motors. And you might be like, what does that mean? It's actually the really cool Jo, it's a really cool job. So my team and I get to directly impact the experience that our candidates hiring managers and recruiters have throughout the hiring process. So it's, it's pretty awesome. So most of you probably know General Motors for the company that we have been, right? We make cars and trucks. some of you may be customers. I know Aaron's a customer and he is driving around in his shiny new Escalade right now, so thank you. You're welcome. But gee, unlike a lot of companies is evolving. we are changing because we need to change because we have this opportunity to continue to lead and we're really excited about that.

(01:59):

It's not change for the sake of change. It's changed because we have to change. What's really cool is myself, my team, we get to directly impact that change in the organization, which I don't know how many of you are in talent acquisition or operations, but you're often the red-headed stepchild. So being able to impact something like that is pretty significant. We have a very ambitious mission. we are a company that used to build cars and now we are the leader in electric vehicles, which is pretty amazing. we really, really, yeah, let's give some applause up there. That's pretty cool.

(02:40):

We see a future with zero crashes, zero emissions and zero congestion. And it's a very ambitious mission, but we think that it is totally achievable. So for us to become a different type of company, we have to hire different types of people. The types of candidates that we recruited and hired 10 years ago, even five years ago, very different from the types of candidates that we have to hire in the future. And let's be honest, those candidates aren't just sitting around waiting for us to come pick 'em off a tree, right? We have to roll out the red carpet a little bit and entice them to come make a change when they may not be looking. They really have no patience for a cumbersome, lengthy, not great experience, right? They just, they don't have to. It's kind of a candidate's market right now. However, in 2016, that's exactly what we had.

(03:37):

We had a tedious, antiquated process with multiple technologies across different parts of our process. We would ask our candidates to create login after login after login and enter their information here, here, here, here, and here. It's just not great, right? Who wants to do that? and so in 2020, we made the decision to get rid of all of the, the multitude of technologies and consolidate to work, work a hcm, which has been really a game changer for us in the way that we interact with our candidates and how's our data. But we started asking the question around 20 20, 21, like, how can we make this even better, right? We've, we've got this great platform, it's all encompassing, but how do we make it even better? How do we take that experience and really amp it up? And and so we started asking the question, right?

(04:37):

About how do we how do we improve that process? And so this is probably gonna sound familiar to a lot of my, how many of you guys are in talent acquisition? Wow, I thought there'd be more hands. You could do two hands. It's okay. <laugh>. So as much as Workday helped us, it didn't help us manage our candidate flow. And I'm gonna be really honest, like there's probably nobody in this room that hasn't heard of General Motors, right? We don't necessarily always have a candidate flow problem. We have a candidate management problem. At least that's what my team and I like to say. We have so many candidates, and I'm not saying this to brag, this is just the reality, right? We've got a lot of candidates. So to apply to our vacancy is, but we don't have enough time in the day to talk to them all.

(05:23):

And so often our candidates were applying and they might wait days, probably more like weeks go into the black hole, maybe hear from us. Maybe not, not cuz we didn't think that they were important just because there wasn't enough time in the day tasks, like scheduling an interview as an example, would take us anywhere from five to seven days. And that's not to complete the interview, that was just to get the, the meeting on calendar. Forget about if it had to be rescheduled once, twice, three, four times, whatever it might be. This was a long arduous process to handle all of that scheduling. And actually, let me just preface. we, so we have recruiting coordinators, right? Whose sole jobs are to schedule interviews, reschedule interviews, deal with candidate communications, send out prep materials to hiring managers. To do that, we needed a team of over 50 contract recruiting coordinators. That's all they did all day long. And they only did that for a select population. US and Canada experienced positions. So our hourly positions, they weren't working on those. And our early career talent positions, they weren't working on those. So we're talking, it's, it's a silo, right? And we're still like, still needed over 50 people.

(06:44):

And so we started asking the question, how can we make this experience better? sorry, I thought I was looking at something else. Is there a way to actually automate this process, right? It's a repetitive administrative task. It's pouring, it's monotonous. How do we take all of that manual work outta the process and actually automate it? And can the automation not only improve our experience but also save us time and better yet, save us some money, right? Because it's it's a lot of work.

(07:22):

So everybody say hello to EV-e. so we turned to our friends at Paradox and we said, Hey, you know, we have this vision of being able to automate all of our interviews. We'd love to talk about what a solution could look like. Now, Paradox, you may all know calls their chatbot, EV-e, we wanted to put a little bit of GM flair into that. So we call her I'm sorry, they call her Olivia. We call her EV-e. Does anybody know why we might call the chatbot? EV-e? That's awesome. Awesome. So, choosing Paradox for us was really simple. We wanted a partner who's done this before. We wanted a partner that has proven they were able to work with large global organizations with complex situations that also were able to help us improve our experience with Workday. It was really important to us. The paradox was a Workday partner.

(08:21):

and we knew that the commitment of paradox and Workday working together would be a game changer for us. And so initially we started with some very simple use cases. When we went live in November of 2021, we started with phone screen scheduling and interview scheduling. And we wanted to automate the process of just those two items to start. And so you got a little bit of a glimpse of how EV-e works when she is scheduling an interview. but we also wanted to give candidates a way to interact in a non-conventional type of way. Historically, our candidates, if they wanted to schedule a phone screen or an interview, had to wait for a recruiter to pick up the phone or email them, call them back, maybe play phone tag a couple of times here and there, miss an email. I don't know what your inbox looks like.

(09:15):

Mine is ridiculous, right? So very easy to miss an email. and so when we implemented our chat bot for scheduling, we said we wanted the candidate to be able to reach us any way that is most convenient to them. So we have ev available to the candidate to communicate with us through sms, through WhatsApp for our candidates outside of the United States and even email. And then we said, Hey, we would also love if EV-e could answer questions. So historically, you don't really get to interact with a candidate until they apply, right? You don't know who they are. They might be surfing your website, your career site. You have no idea that they're even there. They don't know who to ask a question to because quite frankly, they don't know who the recruiter or coordinator might be. And so EV-e, we wanted a way for EV-e to actually answer basic questions, maybe even go a little bit further.

(10:15):

and so our second phase of implementation was putting EV-e on our career site. So EV-e sits on our career site, which means EV-e starts interacting with our candidates before they're even applicants. Somebody can go onto our career site, ask a question, search for a job, evie's gonna hand deliver it to them. Which when you think about this historically if you have your career site candidate has to go find first, find your career site, then they have to figure out where, where you hit your job tab. Then they have to click on the jobs and they have to go, oh, okay, well what does this company maybe call, I don't know, a cookie baker or a software engineer. And then search for it and then figure out, well, where do I wanna work? And how do I find if the job is remote or how do I find if it's hybrid or whatever the case may be.

(11:12):

It's kind of cumbersome. We didn't have great stats in our career site previously. We lost a lot of fall off, right? We weren't seeing the conversion. And so Ev-e is now able to answer questions from candidates 24 7. You pop onto the career site, you wanna know about benefits, EV-e will give you information. If you wanna know about our culture, she'll give you information. If you wanna know where our locations are, where our plants are, she'll tell you that if you ask her to help find a job, she'll deliver the jobs right to you and you can apply right through the chat, which is pretty amazing because that didn't happen before. So less than a year later. So I think we have been live for about 10 months now.

Aaron Matos (11:58):

A year ago we met.

Eileen Kovalsky (12:01):

We did meet. So let me tell you guys a really funny story. Thank you. So I'm gonna tell you the story of how I met Aaron <laugh>.

Aaron Matos (12:10):

It was a year ago.

Eileen Kovalsky (12:12):

<laugh>. So I was at HR Tech last year. I knew Aaron's name, but I had never met him. And we had lunch. We were in the middle of implementation, we were having lunch, lunch with the paradox team. And Aaron was late and the only seat open at the table was directly across from me. And so I had a couple of my coworkers with me. We had the whole paradox executive team. Were sitting down, were enjoying lunch. By the way, if you guys have not been to the Four Seasons, if you go get the iced tea, it's literally the best iced tea you'll ever have in your life. So Aaron sits down and he is like, Hey, how's it going? And I'm like, good. He goes like, how's implementation? And I'm like, it's not so good. I'm like, we're really struggling. We're not getting what we need.

(12:52):

This isn't working. I will preface that I joined GM about 15 months ago. And so the project had already kicked off, right? So not necessarily all of the decisions that I might have made, but we were definitely struggling in a couple of ways. And I said, I'll be honest, I probably would not have made this decision had I been here two years ago. And he was like, what? What do you mean? And one of my coworkers said, do you know what you just said to the CEO? And I'm like, oh, I dunno. But we're still friends. So it's okay now we're

Aaron Matos (13:23):

Close friends.

Eileen Kovalsky (13:23):

<laugh>, now we're buddies. but honestly, the results have been absolutely amazing. So let me, let me share some stats. So since it's actually November, wow, this number changed. So over 50, almost 51,000 interviews, EB has scheduled in less than a year, almost 51,000 interviews with absolutely zero human intervention. I mean, that's pretty amazing, right? that's work that our team no longer has to do, which is huge because let's be honest, our recruiters and our coordinators could be doing more, more effective work, right? They can be prepping a hiring manager for an interview, or they can be having that strategic or difficult conversation about what's realistic and what's not. Or they could be screening candidates, right? And to, to prep that candidate's sleep. So what's really amazing is that out of that number, about, I would say about a third of those interviews were actually phone screens.

(14:18):

So the, the meeting between the candidate and the recruiter and those historically have always been manually scheduled by the recruiter. So I vividly remember recruiters telling me the stories about how they would, you know, send an email and or maybe call and place some phone tag and back and forth, back and forth, might take a couple of days to actually get a phone screen, a 30 minute phone screen booked onto a calendar. and so that's that's pretty amazing, right? Because this is now time that the recruiter doesn't have to do. And I'm gonna share an early success story with you guys. So when we implement it, I'm gonna be totally honest, right? The the biggest challenge for us has been change management. If you are at all thinking about doing any type of technology change or changing your process, start the change management six months earlier than you're thinking you need to.

(15:12):

And then probably started a little bit earlier than that. And so, so we had our recruiters, let's be honest, right? They've been with GM for a couple of years that we didn't have this type of technology. They were a little hesitant. Our hiring managers, everyone was a little bit iffy, right? Is this gonna work? Is it, is it gonna be a pain in the neck? I don't know right? What to expect. and so we had a recruiter that called us probably right before Christmas. and again, I don't know about you guys. I don't often get calls to be like, yeah, you did a great job turning this on, right? We get the, this isn't working, this is cumbersome, I don't like this. So to get a one, a call or an email from somebody saying like, thanks is, is like, really makes my heart smile.

(15:54):

But so this recruiter called us and she said, Hey, I just wanna share with you the impact EV-e has made on my life. I have a very high rec load. It typically takes me hours or days to schedule phone screens. I usually do it at the end of the day. I load up all my emails, I send 'em to the candidate. I try to circle back later in the night checking my email. But and then the next day, maybe I have some people that answered and gave me a time and I can actually like get that booked. And she said, Eileen, this was amazing. I moved like 30 some odd people to phone screen automated, right? So we had to put some new statuses in Workday in order to trigger the automation. So she said, I moved like 30 something people into phone screen, automated.

(16:41):

It was like five 30 at night. I walked away cuz my kids were starving and I had to go feed them dinner, which I often don't do. <laugh>. she goes, and then I came back 45 minutes later and I had 30 confirmed phone screens on my calendar for the rest of the week. And she's like, I am sold. I will be your biggest advocate. I will tell everybody, I will scream it from the rooftops. This has been absolutely amazing. I can't believe it. And so the adoption for phone screens, quite honestly was pretty quick, right? Because the recruiter felt that impact right away, which was great. little, it took a little bit longer with our hiring managers, right? They were a little skeptical. Managing calendars is a little difficult. But once they got it, they were like, wow, this is, this is incredible.

(17:27):

So the impact, this is the impact, right? We've shaved a ton of time off of our process. and I love that this number is updated now, this is fantastic. So it was, we've shaved about 10 minutes off in the last 30 days. So the the impact has been quite, quite insane to be honest with you. We went from on average, 5, 6, 7 days to scheduled interview to like less than a half an hour. That's confirmed on calendar, accepted. I mean that's, I mean, that's ridiculous. more importantly, no one had to physically do that, right? EV-e handled all of that while we were sleeping, making our kid dinner, talking to a candidate, talking to a hiring manager, completely done it. It's really been incredible.

(18:16):

And so the bigger impact is we actually were able to save a little bit of money. and so that came because we removed two things, or we improved two things in the process. One, we no longer needed this huge team of recruiting coordinators. So I was actually able about mid-year this year, Tina, about mid-year this year we were able to reduce our coordinator staff to, we reduced it by about two thirds. So we have I think about a dozen and a half coordinators now supporting the exception. And that's been amazing. So huge impact to our bottom line and to headcount. We've also been able to get candidates in front of hiring managers faster, which has significantly reduced our time to offer. I mean by days, right? In some cases it could be a little bit more than that. So we've, we're estimating that we've saved the business in less than a year, just about 2 million just in administrative tasks alone, which is pretty incredible, right? Like, I'm gonna pat myself in the back a little bit there.

(19:19):

And so we've done all of this creating this incredible experience because you know, we need to, right? We need to be competitive in this space. It is a candidate's market. So because I'm the, the head of candidate experience, that's what we focus on, right? Improving the experience. And we we're super excited cuz we've been able to implement a process that everybody loves, right? Candidates love it. We, we hear about it all the time from candidates, which again, is not very common that you would hear. I don't know. Hey, you did something great. I'm really impressed. Usually, again, you're hearing it when it's, it's not so great. we've had candidates repeatedly tell us like, this is, this is amazing. And I think so it's cool. You get some really cool stats when you partner with Paradox as well. You get some really nice data.

(20:10):

EV's received over like 10,000 thank yous in less than a year, which is pretty amazing because it's a piece of recruiting technology. It's not an actual person <laugh>. So the fact that they're saying thank you to the chat bot just amazes me. But like, yeah, that's awesome. and so the, I I guess just to kind of like wrap up our story, right? What has been most impactful for me? I'm gonna share one more testimonial that we got from a candidate. Again, I don't know about you guys. I've been doing this 25 years. I don't hear from candidates unless something is broken. We got an email, it was actually an email from a recruiter who supports our IT recruitment, some really difficult purple squirrel with pink tail types positions. And she got an email from this candidate and he said, I just have to commend GM one, you're putting your money where your mouth is.

(21:02):

You talk about the fact that you wanna be innovative and you wanna be a leader in the technology space. And the fact that I didn't have to wait around for somebody to call me back to schedule an interview has been, he's like, I'm so impressed, right? He said, I'm also interviewing at some of the very well known, I will not say their names, but very, very well known technology organizations that may start with a T or a G. and what he said was, those companies might wanna take a lesson from GM because this has been nothing short of amazing. So thank you. Because, you know, I was like, wow, that that was really amazing. so listen, if that's not a success story, I don't, I don't know how else to tell the story, but what I will say is for, for my team, especially for us being able to have direct impact and influence over being able to change the way that GM shows up in the market and the way that we attract and bring talent into the organization, I mean, that's been an incredibly rewarding experience for us.

(22:09):

and partnering with Paradox has been absolutely amazing. So I am going to turn it over to Erin so he could tell you a little bit more.

Aaron Matos (22:17):

Thank you. We're friends now, right? We are <laugh>

Eileen Kovalsky (22:21):

<laugh>.

Aaron Matos (22:25):

She's telling that story. I'm like, that was not a good lunch

Eileen Kovalsky (22:29):

Actually. Lunch was delicious.

Aaron Matos (22:30):

Lunch was fantastic. <laugh> it was, hi, nice to meet you. And implementation's not going well. Has anyone ever done an implementation? Aren't they fun? I think in enterprise software there's like, I call it two gates of hell. There's procurement and implementation. And then once you get through them, it's all happy.

Eileen Kovalsky (22:45):

It is, it's happy.

Aaron Matos (22:48):

I'm a super lucky dude who gets to stand up here and kind of follow some of these stories and we get to work with some of the best organizations in the world who are trying to push the envelope and not only being partners with Workday but working with enterprises like this is amazing for, for me. And I, I, I'm, I'm humbled honestly to hear this stuff because when you set out as a dream to do this, like, it's interesting, I'm at this, we're at a software conference and I have a really strong bias and I've been doing software or internet stuff for 20 plus years. But before that, I started my career in HR and I started my career in HR because I was working full-time through school. and I realized that people viewed work as kind of a four-letter word. And it was really weird to me because I grew up on sports teams and we loved to play and we loved to practice and we loved to do things competitively.

(23:45):

And it became really apparent to me in undergrad that companies that what I call got the people thing, right? built teams that could change the world. And that's been my obsession my whole entire career. Yes, we build technology. I don't think it's about the tech, I think it's about the people. And we started this journey at Paradox a few years ago because I was, we, we, we, I started a job board back in 99, 2000. I thought it was late to the internet. you guys remember that 2000 timeframe? We launched in February, 2000 because we couldn't launch in January, 2000 <laugh>. You know why we couldn't launch in January, 2000? Cause the world was going to end, thank god it didn't end. and I built the job board business and, and it was wonderful. We had tons of clients around the country. I over expanded back in, in oh eight. I won the bad timing award. Oh eight. I started the company in February, 2000 at the peak of the nasdaq. I expanded in oh eight. I had won bad timing all over the place. but by, by 1516 it became apparent to me that we had built all this technology.

(24:55):

But a couple things were wrong. One, I thought the candidate experience across all of our ATS systems was horrible. It was, I had to go to a site and then I had to tell them, Hey, I wanna search for a job in X place. And like we put all the work on the candidates and it drove me nuts. And then I had another problem, which was I walked into one of my clients and I remember walking into this room, I called this my pebble in the shoe moment, if you've ever had the pebble in the shoe moments. And I walked in and there's 40 recruiters all at their computers. And all I heard is typing. And I think recruiting is a people game. And we got tied to software rather than making our software work for us. And so we started experimenting and, and we love this quote by Astro Teller who was the, he was the head of moonshot at Google, which sounds like a cool job to have cuz they just are printing press.

(25:50):

And so they got to do fun stuff. But he has this quote, which is change your lens and perspective shifts will change your view more than than smartness will. And we started playing with conversational AI chat back in 2016. And we saw, I, I saw, I mean I've worked with thousands of clients. I saw people's eyes light up at what magical experience it could do. And we had this vision with our change of lens, which is what could an assistant do if we could, you know, at gm I want that EV to reach out just like a recruiter does and shake that candidate's hand and say, welcome to General Motors. we're excited that you're interested in our opportunities. We'd love to schedule an interview with you. We can't do that at scale with humans as much as we'd like and our technology fails.

(26:41):

And so we viewed this as, as what if we could build an assistant that can help assist? Cuz cuz the i the definition of an assistant is someone who helps get work done and we want to help the candidate, the hiring manager, the recruiter, all to get work done. So this is kind of our north star of what we're trying to do. And when I hear stories about, you know, candidates thanking people for a better experience, that makes me happy because 20 years ago we always used to say about technology, you can get it cheaper, faster, better pick two. And I don't think that's true anymore. You can actually drive more cost effective solutions and a better experience and you can do it faster. So we have this vision and our mission is to give everyone an assistant at work, ultimately to free up people to spend more time with people, not software.

(27:30):

We, we are a software company that wants to build software that you don't use and that becomes invisible and that truly is consumer-like in, in its behavior. And we think that happens through conversations because we think the thing that humans are best at is conversations. And so we're trying to build that at scale. we do all sorts of work. I'm not up here to, to do a sales pitch. We'll do some q and a. but I'm blessed. We get to work with some of the world's leading organizations, obviously like gm, Unilever, Disney, Pfizer general Motors, FedEx Lowe's, I mean big organizations. And we've been able to handle this stuff at scale. we also work with companies like McDonald's where we've taken their time to fill their scheduling challenges different. our scheduling challenge at GM is professional at McDonald's. It's a simple process that you want to squish down and make as automated and repeatable as as possible.

(28:22):

We talked to McDonald's and we said, you have the easiest thing in the world to do, except you gotta do it at all these locations. And it's really hard at scale. But we took their time to fill from 17 days down to under three, save their hiring managers between four and six hours a week at scale through automation. And so we're blessed. We love the Workday clients, we love the Workday ecosystem. We don't believe you have to to change or switch softwares. We want to help improve it. So thank you for giving me five minutes to do this and we'll do a q and a because this is Eileen's show and I also just wanna humbly say thank you.

Eileen Kovalsky (28:56):

Thank you.

Aaron Matos (29:04):

This is an intimate enough group so we can show questions. Go ahead.

Audience (29:08):

Yeah. What did you have to do to get ready for implementation system to magic stuff

Eileen Kovalsky (29:14):

That this is done? So I'll repeat the question. so she asked what do, what did we have to do to get ready for implementation to make sure that the system could do all the really cool stuff? so it was a little bit of work, right? <laugh> just a little bit laughing. <laugh> I have so my team here and they're crying. No, I'm kidding. again, we're going through transformation. So what did we have to do? Well, one, we had to first understand what was the problem we were trying to solve for first and foremost. And then we needed to think about, okay, how do we make that better? Because we don't wanna take something that's old and clunky and put it into a shiny new object. We we're actually gonna take this opportunity to streamline and bring efficiency and improve the experience. And so it was a aen group effort, I'm not gonna lie, right?

(30:02):

We have I have Tina, one of my coworkers here who was responsible for the technology, Debbie as well, Debbie and Tech and Tina partner very closely together. And they really drove a lot of the I guess the project as a whole, right? We, we had somebody from our process team on the T I SSI to help us document and understand what was it going to look like. We had a partner with our HR IT organization because we had to make changes to Workday, which my team does not own, right? We can't get in there and start building new bps. but so we had to pull in our IT team and then we had to work very closely with the paradox implementation team to document every possible scenario. What I will say as, as just like a, a best practice is the more due diligence and discovery you do up front, the better, the easier your implementation will be.

(30:57):

And again, key here, we miss this. I will take full responsibility for this on the GM side. We didn't start the change management soon enough, so because we were asking so the way that that EV-e actually works is she reads the calendar. So when the invitation goes out, EV-e will look at the interviewers that are in Workday and they'll look at the calendar, try and find, you know, two slots we interview in panels. So it's a group of two. I don't know about your organization, but in our organization people are very protective of their calendars. They block time, they don't move time. We're double, triple, quadruple booked sometimes. And so EV can only read free or busy. Attentive is a busy. And so getting our hiring managers to understand that they had to free up time was indeed a challenge for us, right? We do a ton of education on that.

(31:48):

but once again, once they got it, they got it. And so I would say the biggest the biggest prep was all the prep. It was understanding the problem, solutioning for something better. Again, you don't wanna take a clunky process that's not working well and put it into something new. and then starting that change management early so that everybody really understands the impact. And what I would say as well is like, get out in front of your business, don't rely on TA to, to be the messenger. Like really get out in front of the business and talk to them about what that means. What is the role of a hiring manager or an interviewer? It's to interview a candidate for the role that's open. So let's make ourselves available. I think we got, you

Audience (32:29):

Wanna help with. so if you just wanna tell me the question, I'll repeat it up to you. Yeah. Or you come up. Yeah. So

Audience (32:38):

If you want, we can always form a line. Yeah. So I'm, I'm curious, what'd you learn about reschedulings through this process? Cuz that is being a TA leader, that's one of the biggest complaints I hear from my team about like, who's at fault? Why does it happen? All that, what did you learn about that through the process? So

Eileen Kovalsky (32:56):

This has been a game changer for us because previously, again, manual scheduling. So our coordinators had these like tracking sheets that they used for their own organization. And so we couldn't really tell you what the reschedule rate was unless we sat there and counted it up. When we first went live, our reschedule rate was 68%. And I was like, 16% we need to fill these positions. Why are we rescheduling? But here's the cool thing. So you get what do we get it monthly, weekly, monthly. We get a report that shows ev it shows everything basically. So this is, again, as a TA leader, you'll find this really interesting. I like to tell stories with data in fact. And so we've been able to look at who's rescheduling? Is it the candidate or the interviewer? Who's the recruiter on that rack? Is the recruiter rescheduling a phone screen?

(33:44):

Is the candidate rescheduling a phone screen? Is the hiring manager is the interviewer? We could see by user. So what we've been able to do with that data is take it, drill it down, go out to our TA leaders and say, here you go. You have a little bit of a problem in XYZ space, let's go have a conversation. And so having that type of granular data has really been a game changer for us. So just in when did we go? Like January with interview scheduling. So in nine months we've been able to take our reschedule rate from 68% to about 35%, which has been pretty, it's pretty good. So our goal is to get down, you know, like single digits, but I'll take that reduction any day. Do you have any idea what it was? I'm gonna guess previously it was, it was probably 70, 75% if I had to guess.

Audience (34:38):

So Thank you Eileen. I'm with Pfizer and we have implemented interview scheduling and our phase two is looking at the chatbot on the career site, that conversational ui. So was curious about what that implementation looked like in terms of the content that you had to upload any aha moments? Did you do it globally and what the challenges were for that, including any translation tips? Thank you.

Eileen Kovalsky (35:08):

great question. So again, this has been something that's been incredibly impactful for us. And I will say, first of all, we play, we, we go big or we go home. So we went global big bang with our implementation for candidate care, which is the chat bot sitting on our career site. We started ev with I think 550 questions globally. And we made the decision to launch, I wanna say kind of generically, right? Our questions are not country specific because we, we, we wanna be able to see what types of questions EV can't answer and then build upon that. and so the questions are very much around culture, benefits, locations, et cetera, things that candidates might be interested in if they wanna understand more about gm. and I think we translated those questions into six different, so we have six, six standard languages that Workday is translated into. And those questions are all translated, but we started, I think it's about 550. And that was actually pretty seamless to be honest with you,

Audience (36:13):

Is Hi. Maybe a follow up question on translation. So for your candidate experience for the interview scheduling, is it supported in other languages in English? And if, if so, how does I or Olivia know that I need to reach out to this person in French and this person in English and in Spanish?

Eileen Kovalsky (36:32):

so I might, I might rely on one of my peers sitting in front of me to, to answer this question. Yeah. So when the candidate applies, so we do, so the candidate, I think EV-e's translates into like six, again, our four, six languages. when the candidate applies EV-e's, looking at what language was the preference on the application. But I'm gonna say something. So somebody at Paradox, if this isn't true, just tell me. I'm pretty sure like if you start typing with EV-e and then you start like in English and then you start chatting in Spanish, like she'll just start talking you in Spanish. So EV-e's pretty intuitive. She's pretty smart. and she will just, you know, go ahead on the fly and start talking, speaking in the, in the language that the candidate speaks in.

Audience (37:18):

All right, excellent. And second quick question. let's say most of your recruiting workforce is in apac globally to, to support with candidates in North America and everything. When you move candidates to automated interview, is there something that accounts for time zone and not sending a candidate a text message in the middle of the night if they are in North America? Yeah.

Eileen Kovalsky (37:44):

So in the paradox cem, you, is this where it would be done Tina, right? In the cem? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you, you could actually go in. So the user can go in and set the preference so that the candidates, like you could say, okay, I only wanna interact with these candidates Eastern time zone, or, you know, show me as Eastern time zone. So the, the candidate won't get texts in the middle of the night. All right,

Audience (38:06):

Thank you.

Eileen Kovalsky (38:06):

Yeah,

Aaron Matos (38:08):

We also won't wake up the recruiter in the middle of

Audience (38:10):

The night. <laugh>.

Audience (38:14):

Hi, this this has been a great session by the way, so thank you both. on the scheduling tool side, I'm curious if you're leveraging any other integrations like with Zoom or technical assessment tools to help, like, when you're automating that just to make sure that it's seamless for everyone.

Eileen Kovalsky (38:32):

yeah. So our journey with EV or with Paradox is going to be iterative. So there's things on our horizon, right? My vision is EV-e's gonna be the voice and the interaction from career site to day one, right? So we're, we're there in stages. we integrate with Microsoft Teams. So when the, the interview is scheduled, the candidate gets a link to a team's invite and they have the ability, you know, to turn on their video or not. The so yes, we do use different softwares for assessment. They're not integrated today with Paradox, but they may be in the future.

Audience (39:09):

Okay, great. Thank you. You're welcome. we have a lot of managers that'll do interviews back to back to back. So how does that work with technology like this? Yeah it actually works really well. So I will tell you, our organization does not do the back to back to back. However, the, the kind of gold standard was that when we first went live with ev, we do two panel interviews. So two interviewers for an hour, two interviewers for an hour, and ev schedules, two sequential interviews. So two one hour blocks. Now in our organization, it didn't work that well because it's really hard finding a manager with one hour, let alone, you know, finding another, you know, another group of two like at the exact same time. So we actually have two different options. We have sequential and non-sequential, meaning they will schedule two one hour blocks back to back, or they will schedule two one hour blocks across any two days. Could be the same day, could be one day on Monday, one day on Tuesday, et cetera. but those will all get scheduled at the same time. So it's pretty

(40:23):

Versatile. And then my second part question was how about the quality and the integrity of the candidates? What's the activity that has to go in to make sure that those 50,000 that, you know, we're scheduled automatically actually qualify for those roles?

Eileen Kovalsky (40:39):

So our candidates are screened by the recruiter before they get to the interview, right? So the recruiter is doing a visual screen of the, of the application. Okay. And then they're making that decision like, yep, I need to either phone screen this person or they're not qualified. So when they take that action in Workday to move the candidate from a review to phone screen automated, that's when, that's kind of when our, our funnel starts decreasing. Okay,

Aaron Matos (41:01):

Thank you. And there's different ways to handle that. We can, you can build that in a way where the technology's actually creating rules to say, yes, pass this person through. Like in certain use cases, you just wanna meet minimum qualifications and then do automatic scheduling with a specific manager. That's super simple. all the way up to the recruiters are, are actually triggering a yes decision. And then, you know, all the complexities you can get into a sequential or multi-party or like the, they can be staged, all that stuff.

Audience (41:29):

We do a lot of onsite hiring events. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> and candidates. And

Aaron Matos (41:33):

That's the pre register Yep. For

Eileen Kovalsky (41:35):

Them. Yep. So sometimes the, the robotics might help us with getting

Aaron Matos (41:38):

Those weed. Yeah, you can use it for group events. Just scheduling lots of people for an event is another way to do it. All right, thank you

Eileen Kovalsky (41:44):

Very much. You're welcome.

Audience (41:48):

I have two questions as well. First is a follow up to the reschedule comment you made earlier where the hiring manager is requesting the reschedule. What does the candidate experience look like when that happens?

Eileen Kovalsky (42:01):

so the candidate will receive if the hiring manager reschedules or cancels, it's essentially that's what's happening, right? The manager is saying like, they're either declining it or they're cancel declining it. After they've accepted, the candidate will get another interview request asking them to select new times. Okay. So I think there's some, there's a message in there, right? That says like, unfortunately we've had to reschedule your interview. Please click, you know, here's some times and dates that might work for you. Let us know what works for you.

Audience (42:29):

Okay. And the second one goes back to like the very beginning of your presentation. You were mentioning that your candidates can apply directly through the chat app. When you say they can apply through the chat app, you mean just they they get presented with an apply button that takes them to a separate application page? Or are they apply,

Aaron Matos (42:47):

Tell the future <laugh>.

Eileen Kovalsky (42:49):

So we're actually, we're actually in the middle of implementing a module called capture and screen right now. So what happens today is if EV presents the candidate with a job in the chat, you saw it brought up, right? And it said apply, it'll take that candidate right to the job description page, candidate can review the job description, click apply, go through the regular application. What's coming soon is that EV-e is actually going to be able to capture candidates information and start pre-screening them and you know, like, Hey, can you walk, talk and chew gum or whatever the questions might be and actually start the application for the candidate. So I'm excited about that one because I don't know the last time anybody here applied for a job, but there's a lot of information that you don't necessarily wanna have to go fill out. So if you can do that over a text message, I mean, it's super convenient. so that's kind of the future. That's what's coming. But right now it'll take, it'll direct the candidate to the job description page so they can apply directly.

Audience (43:48):

Okay. Thanks. Welcome.

Aaron Matos (43:51):

You have one minute left. Any other questions?

Audience (43:56):

Any, anybody at the process from a sound? Wonderful?

Eileen Kovalsky (44:06):

Yeah, so the question was, has anybody like balked at the process? And I'm gonna say yes, right? I, I was very transparent. Change management was it was a big challenge for us. Our hiring managers, not all of them, a lot of them were not bought in at first. We even had recruiters that weren't bought in candidates. the can actually, I have to be honest, our candidates have been like wild over this. They think it's incredible. I mean, cuz I mean, just imagine, right? You, you get a text message saying like, Hey, I'm the virtual recruiting assistant for General Motors. Here's three times we wanna talk to you. We'd be like, oh yeah, a or whatever, right? but it took a little bit longer with our hiring managers and our recruiters. We do a lot of education over and over and over again. We're live 10 months. We still reeducate all the time.

Aaron Matos (44:51):

Thank you all. That's our time. Appreciate it. Thank you.

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