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There’s a reason Workday Recruiting is the top ATS among Fortune 500 companies.
It works.
Specifically, Workday Recruiting does a good job at what it was built for: Manage candidates and employees, consolidate data and information at scale, and serve as a system of record. But it can’t do everything, because it wasn’t designed to. For instance, Workday Recruiting isn’t a hiring machine; it doesn’t provide a white-glove experience for frontline candidates.
That’s where we come in. Paradox, in many ways, was built to perfectly complement a Workday Recruiting foundation and make it better:
- Turning every job application into a simple text conversation, helping frontline candidates apply in minutes, all on their phone.
- Proactively engaging with candidates to help qualify them through various stages of the hiring process.
- Ensuring that managers can make quick hiring decisions without the need to sit down in front of a computer.
With four Workday certified products and solutions included in the Workday AI Marketplace, we’ve become uniquely situated to partner with — and power — Workday Recruiting to create the world’s best hiring experiences for candidates and recruiters alike.
Together, Paradox and Workday have nearly 200 mutual clients. Here are a few of our favorite success stories, from some of the world’s largest (and most recognizable) employers.
Ace Hardware
With 5,600 retail locations, Ace Hardware relies on Workday Recruiting to maintain consistency across their massive operation. But Workday Recruiting wasn’t designed for the frontline worker — those candidates want to get hired quickly and easily. Since Ace required each person to create a login and password just to apply, they saw many of their candidates start taking other job offers instead.
Ace implemented Paradox’s Conversational Apply on top of Workday Recruiting to turn their job applications into a simple text conversation. No logins. No passwords. And with Workday Recruiting still serving as the system of record, no new complex software for hiring managers to learn.
In less than 24 hours after implementation, Ace had already automatically scheduled 200+ interviews. And in one year, they converted 133,000+ candidates into applicants.
General Motors
General Motors receives nearly 2 million applications every year, which basically makes them the perfect Workday Recruiting use case. They need the best system of record to stay on top of that insane volume of candidates.
The next step — actually talking to those candidates — is where GM wanted to improve. In 2021, it was taking the manufacturing giant five days just to schedule interviews, despite the efforts of 50+ recruitment coordinators. For a company trying to reinvent transportation, that timeline was too slow. To fix their processes, GM started with what was working, Workday Recruiting, and automated the bottlenecks surrounding it. Namely: interview scheduling.
That automation came in the form of a Paradox integration with Workday Recruiting. Today, GM uses conversational AI through Paradox to automatically text qualified candidates open interview times based on recruiter availability. With this combined tech stack, GM is able to record, funnel, and convert their 2 million yearly applications into 50,000 interviews, seamlessly.
Speaking of 2 million, that’s the amount of dollars GM saved in the first year after integrating Paradox with Workday Recruiting. And that five day time-to-schedule? It immediately dropped to 29 minutes.
Essentia Health
Essentia Health, a midwestern integrated healthcare system, wanted to increase their chances of grabbing top talent. The only problem? That top talent typically works the same hours as Essentia’s recruiters. When they do apply to jobs, it’s at night — when said recruiters are asleep.
“In the healthcare industry, there’s everything but regular business hours,” said John Higgins, Essentia’s VP of talent management. “It’s a 24/7, 365 operation.”
So they turned to the only recruiter that never sleeps: an AI assistant named Olivia. Powered by Paradox, she automates candidate screening and scheduling around the clock, making Essentia’s hiring fast. Candidates can apply at midnight and be scheduled for an interview by 12:05 a.m. And every candidate that comes in after hours is stored within Workday Recruiting.
With newfound speed and flexibility, Essentia has seen a 100% increase in interviews scheduled. And their recruiters get to wake up to great news every morning.
Pfizer
In 2022, Pfizer transformed their HR structure to be more empathetic, starting with the nomenclature: All TA functions were renamed after “candidate experience." But the buck didn’t stop at their lexicon. Pfizer actively invested in more empathetic TA processes, too
Brought together by a shared, candidate-first mission, Pfizer teamed with Paradox to help create one of our first Workday integrations. They now use an AI assistant, Olivia, to schedule initial phone screens, before managing subsequent interview rounds through Workday’s HiredScore integration. But Olivia doesn’t go away after that first step — she’s always available to help answer any questions a candidate might have.
Adding Paradox into their tech stack has translated into real cost savings for Pfizer; they received a 142% ROI in their first year with Olivia. And candidates have noticed how the Workday and Paradox partnership has made the hiring experience more empathetic.
“I received an email last week from a candidate,” said Valerie Suschin, Pfizer's director of candidate experience. “It said, ‘That's the nicest decline notification I've ever received. Thank you so much, I am excited to pursue other opportunities at Pfizer.’"
I received an email last week from a candidate. It said, ‘That's the nicest decline notification I've ever received. Thank you so much, I am excited to pursue other opportunities at Pfizer.’"
Johnson Controls
Johnson Controls (JCI) is global. Like… 100,000 employees across 174 countries and territories global. Workday Recruiting is essential to maintaining that scale at a functional level — but localization was still proving to be a problem: JCI’s recruiters were spending too much time in Google Translate instead of chatting with their global candidates.
“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.
Like many things at a global scale, JCI’s integration wasn’t done all at once. Through a multi-phased rollout with Paradox, JCI methodically unveiled their AI assistant, Emma, to the world. Fluent in 37 languages, Emma breaks through any sort of language barrier by automatically speaking to candidates in the same language that they reach out in. Without any wasted seconds, those messages are translated back into the native tongue of the recruiter in Workday Recruiting. Since Emma’s introduction, JCI has seen the time it takes for candidates to respond drop from 10 hours to 10 minutes.
“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.
Multicare
Healthcare system MultiCare might run their hiring process on Workday, but their TA strategy has always depended on getting boots on the ground. The company saw most of their success via hiring events, a method that became unsustainable in 2020.
“We were scrambling without events,” said Leah Butters, recruitment marketing team leader. “We had to change the way we think, and fast.”
MultiCare needed to recreate their event magic in a new digital world. And they jumped in the deep end — signing up for Paradox’s new Conversational Events product as it was still being developed. A month later, they would see the results of their new integration: Event registration and scheduling was automated by AI, while candidate information was simultaneously inputted into Workday Recruiting.
Through Conversational Events, MultiCare was able to decrease their average cost per event from $4,000 to $1,000. And they didn’t sacrifice total hires. No, those actually increased by 25%.
“We can reach so many more candidates with the flexibility that Conversational Events provides,” said Butters. “Sometimes the most stressful situations show us what we should have been doing all along.”
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Plenty more organizations from small franchisors to Fortune 500 businesses have made Workday Recruiting work better with conversational AI. You can read some more of their stories below.
