Brent Ellis (00:00):

Thank you so much. Thanks for joining everybody. We've got a really, really interesting session on a great topic today talking about not only some actual use cases with one of our customers about AI and recruiting, but we're going to kind of introduce and talk a little bit about conversational recruiting. So we're going to have a little bit of discussion and then Claire Wildman, who will introduce herself here in a second is going to run through how Sobey is utilizing AI and recruiting. And then, pardon me, my allergies are terrible. You'll have to excuse me. And then Josh Seacrest is going to run us through some information about Paradox and then we're just going to have kind of a chat about ai. It's a big topic. It's been out there for about four or five years now. It kind of started in the filtering and sourcing area of recruiting to help recruiters with productivity and all sorts of things like that. And it's definitely progressed. It's been really, really interesting to watch, even though it has been around for quite some time. It feels like we're just kind of getting started. So without further ado, Claire, I'll give you the opportunity to introduce yourself.

Claire Wildman (01:16):

Sure, thanks Brent. And good morning or good afternoon everyone. My name is Claire Wildman. So I am here from Sobey and my role is to lead the talent acquisition process and technology piece for our company. So essentially I design and I optimize the way our recruiters do work, and then I partner with and layer in the different technologies needed to really bring that strategy to life. So very well versed with the partnership between SAP and Paradox and so thrilled to be able to be here today to talk through our journey and what's next and have some fun. So thank you for having me.

Brent Ellis (01:52):

Awesome. We're so happy to have you, Josh.

Josh Secrest (01:56):

Yeah, hi all. I'm Josh. I'm our vice president of marketing at Paradox and partner closely with all of our clients. Previously been a global TA practitioner, so was the head of global TA and talent strategy at McDonald's. Previous to joining Paradox, within that role was able to own corporate recruiting, so everything from university to executive as well as support. Our restaurant system of 37,000 restaurants across 120 countries do about 2 million hires per year. And so using AI and leveraging automation was a key part of our story. So I'll kind of share some of the anecdotes from McDonald's off of Claire's anecdotes and then also kind of share how Paradox was woven in there.

Brent Ellis (02:42):

Awesome. Thanks for that, Josh. It's funny, I've been in the recruiting space, gosh, longer than I care to admit, probably over 20 years. And there's always something, right? There's always a theme that hits recruiting probably every two or three years. But it's interesting because that innovation typically hits, if you think of all of the solution silos across hr, recruiting typically is the first one that gets the innovation, and I think that's directly related to basically the KPIs and recruiting that really never change, which is cost quality and speed and recruiters needing to be productive. And I don't think that that could be even more so with ai. AI definitely hit recruiting across HR solutions first, and I think it's because of those KPIs. Do you guys have any thoughts on that?

Claire Wildman (03:44):

Yeah, I mean I completely agree, but I'm going to layer one more in there. And that's experience. I think that is a newer topic I think that we've seen MTA over the last few years that now experience and brand and perception of company is all of a sudden at the forefront as well. And that's where we see AI coming into play, really supporting our recruiters and our hiring managers and driving that experience. But that's a piece of the puzzle that when I entered the TA space about eight, nine years ago was not one of those core KPIs, but now it certainly is.

Brent Ellis (04:15):

Yeah,

Josh Secrest (04:16):

I love that. Claire. I think a couple pieces that are leading to this rapid adoption too that feels unlike other stages that we've been through, Brent, is one, the AI has gotten so good that it's really intuitive and easy to use. So I think that's, see how SOBES is using it. I think it feeds into what Claire's saying, right? It's so easy that experience now gets, it's more seamless for candidates and then our companies are being able to go out and buy these things because your point KPIs, the ROI is there. It's never been before. You can save real money to buy these products on just cutting your job advertising in half by being able to make your recruiters 50% more efficient. Oh my gosh, that's saving that many hours. Within McDonald's, I was saving five hours per manager per location per week just by automating some of these tasks. So it's driving revenue, it's saving costs, and it's far easier in commercial grade than I think we've ever seen in HR technology before.

Brent Ellis (05:23):

Yeah, it's pretty amazing. And Josh is going to share some paradox stats as will Claire, and it's just phenomenal what the technologies been able to do to really transform recruiting strategies and I think most importantly, the outcomes to those KPIs. In the earlier days when AI was being introduced, I think there was a fear about the disintermediation between a recruiter and a human looking for a job. And recruiting is really, at the end of the day, it's all about people and being able to read body language and cultural fit and things like that, more subjective elements that ai, there was a fear that AI wasn't going to be able to cover that, but in my experience, I've seen that fear kind of dissipate. I don't know if that fear was warranted. I think we all understood it, but I don't know. Do you guys have any thoughts on that kind of maybe how AI maybe dehumanizes the recruiting experience or does it?

Claire Wildman (06:37):

I mean, I think it's all in how you use it, and I think that's kind of in the intention behind the design. If you design it to partner with your people, you are always going to have that human element as a part of your processes. It's so human to be fearful of the unknown. This is something new, this is something disruptive, this is something that's changing the way we work, but that's what technology does. Technology changes the way we work. iPhones changed flip phones, the internet changed how we learn things. We're always in this state of change and evolution with technology. So I think viewing it as a partner and as an asset is sort of the mindset shift that people need to really be able to use it to drive value.

Brent Ellis (07:19):

Yeah, I couldn't agree with

Josh Secrest (07:20):

That. I love that. I think it's so neat to see as you even break up the types of recruiting we all do because it's not kind of one size fits all. To your point, Claire, right? It's like within distribution centers or plants we may need to hire within 24 hours. What we're seeing from the FedExs and Amazons of the world that are doing that is it's actually a warmer experience because you're hiring, but then they're dedicating resources to the onboarding portion. In a service industry, if you're in retail or restaurant, what you're starting to see happen is you're automating. So candidates are hearing exactly where they stand in the process and then they're not automating the interviews. So you can get that face-to-face time. And then in corporate world, what you're seeing is yes, you're automating some of the application and scheduling components, but then you're able to leverage your recruiters more at those magical moments, those touches. So you're actually seeing this really interesting phase in all those types of recruiting where it's almost warming it up in ways that you wouldn't have anticipated automation doing that previously, which is really cool. Who doesn't want something to be easy and know where you stand in the process at all levels? Well,

Brent Ellis (08:31):

Great.

Claire Wildman (08:33):

And that's been what's in real time. Sorry, go ahead, Brent.

Brent Ellis (08:35):

I was just going to say, and in real time, in some ways it's superhuman because somebody who's interacting with paradox is conversational with technology is getting real time communication, whereas in the traditional sense, a recruiter might never get to that person and so it is a little superhuman what can go on there. Go ahead Claire. Sorry about that.

Claire Wildman (09:02):

Yeah, no, I was just going to echo Josh's sentiment with a company as complex and layered as Sobeys is, it's great to have a solution that we can plug and play to suit those different needs. Because you're right, Josh, recruitment is not a one size fits all approach or strategy. And that's where to bring us full circle, bringing your people into making those decisions on how can this make sense for you is what not only allows it to be effective, but also gets that buy-in into, because then they've helped inform this is how I want this to help me and we'll make it happen.

Brent Ellis (09:34):

Yeah, that's a great transition into conversational recruiting. So in the early days of ai, I think we saw definite efficiencies and search results and predictive outcomes and things like that that helped recruiters search through requisition pipelines and find better candidates than we've seen sort of a transition into skills. And paradox has kind of taken it one step further in that they've incorporated natural language processing and AI into what is called conversational recruiting. Hope I got that right, Josh. So Josh, I'm going to kind of tee you up a little bit. What is conversational recruiting? How is that different?

Josh Secrest (10:23):

Yeah, I mean a big, big piece to think about this is the easiest way to hire somebody is just having a conversation with them. The reason we stacked up all this technology in the first place over the last several decades is because we needed to do that at scale and had all these compliance components, but now with natural language processing, we're way past the age of maybe where conversational started, which was kind of like a chatbot on a career site. And we're now starting to see that these conversations we're capable of doing this on a career site or I think even better on a mobile device where you don't have to download technology, you don't have to have logins or passwords, you don't have to have all these different point solutions that you're jumping across. You're going to have one smooth conversation in that conversation.

(11:12):

Now is the application. It is your scheduling for an interview. It is your ability to get questions answered throughout the process. It's a way to actually get your offer. It's a way to get onboarding. And so what we found was when I was sitting in the chair at McDonald's and we kind of did this, the world's largest RFP on how do we kind of transform hiring, one of our big things was we need to move fast and we need to make it really easy. And just because we're going to automate doesn't mean we want it to be cold. We need to make sure that this is a really warm experience. What conversational has been, I think you'll see it and I think you'll hear it through what Claire and the Sobeys team have been doing to innovate. We saw something that was cool that ended up actually being a game changer from a business standpoint.

(12:02):

It wasn't just flashy, it was something where we saw more candidates make it through the process. We saw it being a lot easier for candidates. Our candidates preferred it, it was 24 7, it was mobile. It allowed for multilingual really easily. So we were getting a lot more candidates. And so we got to see just this significant change in transformation in terms of the ROI that was just light years ahead of what we saw from other AI technologies that felt like a point solution conversational truly as this layer on top of SuccessFactor. So excited to show that and talk through. But in my experience for frontline hiring, it's kind of changed the game. You've got companies, we went from 21 days to hire to about three days to hire, three days to schedule an interview down to three minutes. So I mean just way different with some of this. And then when you talk about a recruiting team with centralized recruiters, it's that ability to take some of that back and forth of scheduling and the administrative tasks off their plate so they can just be amazing recruiters for your company. So some really cool unlocks there.

Brent Ellis (13:08):

Yeah, that's great. Thanks for that. I think that the application of IT in desk-less work environments where people aren't running around it and with laptops and sitting in offices, it is huge. It is sort of a game changer and those types of positions are only growing, right? So Claire, are you ready to talk about Sobeys and the wonderful things you've done there? We're alright, let's jump in.

Claire Wildman (13:38):

Fantastic.

Brent Ellis (13:41):

Alright, there we go. There's a slight on my screen changes here.

Claire Wildman (13:50):

No worries. It adds to the drama around a little bit anticipation. It's all good. Yeah,

Brent Ellis (13:55):

There you go. Alright, awesome.

Claire Wildman (13:58):

To lay sort of just the scene, for those of you who are not familiar with Sobeys, we are the second largest grocery retailer here in Canada. So we operate about 1500 stores from coast to coast within Canada supported by 25 warehouses. We see roughly 30 billion in sales come in each year, and that is driven by our phenomenal customers of which we have about 6 million visit our stores each week on the backend. All of this is supported by about 135,000 teammates across all of these different banners that you see below through those different logos. And then on the talent acquisition side, we drive 57,000 hires per year. So all this to say we are a very busy company.

Brent Ellis (14:45):

I'd say so.

Claire Wildman (14:46):

Yes. Cut to the next slide there Brent. Are we? Yeah,

Brent Ellis (14:57):

There's a significant way.

Claire Wildman (15:01):

That's okay. I can fill a little bit. So given how busy we are and how complex we are, there was a lot of conversation behind the scenes about how do we support all of these TA activities differently to help all of things like our hires, our stores, our recruiters move better through the process while really supporting our brand image here. So when we came to sort of what we're calling here, the big vision, these were the core four things that we wanted to drill into. So we really wanted to leverage and champion automation to improve our overall hiring efficiency, which kind of circles back to what Brent brought up at the beginning regarding those KPIs. So how fast can we do it, how easy is it? And above all else, how simple is it? Because that at the end of the day is what the users care about the most.

(15:51):

We really wanted to return time and hours to our recruiters and our hiring managers. So freeing up time for them to work differently, partner differently together, bring more strategy into our TA processes was a really core objective that we had. And with that, we just wanted to be truthfully just a best in class experience for our candidates. TA is really that first touch point with someone that's going to make or break their relationship with the company. So how can we take all the amazing things we know are happening with our employees here and make it more a part of that experience as they're recruiting with us and increase those response times, ensure that they feel like they constantly have access to the team for support and just really pushing the boundaries. So how do we stay ahead of the game with recruitment technology? How can we look at all the different challenges that we face day to day? Retail is not stagnant every day, every month, every year feels different and our challenges are constantly changing. So how can we plug and play technology to help alleviate those pain points as we need to be sometimes in both proactive and then sometimes highly reactive scenarios.

Brent Ellis (17:00):

Terrific. And Claire, can I ask a question you using? Absolutely. Are you using this technology for all types of roles, literally butchers to people who are sitting in your corporate office?

Claire Wildman (17:12):

I'm going to say a not yet dot. So right now we're sort of fully implemented from a corporate standpoint. That was the first piece of the puzzle that we wanted to tackle. And now the next kind of phase of the journey that we're on here at SOBES is figuring out on the retail side, what does modernization need to look like? And with that you saw the volume of stores that we have, there's a lot of partnerships that we need to lean into to go back to that, making them a part of the decision making piece to say what is the right solution? What are the right pain points to solve for? What could it look like? What is the art of the possible here? And then pushing those boundaries and getting that change management moving, which for folks that are used to running their own shop is a heavy lift, but a very important one and one that we're very committed to.

Brent Ellis (17:58):

Yeah, that makes sense. I mean a lot of these projects go in phases where you take one type of population and kind of learn from that, maybe learn from your mistakes and then improve with phase two. So thanks

Claire Wildman (18:12):

For that. And we're still learning within incorporate. We've been implemented for a couple years here and we still are in that kind of buzzword, but continuous improvement mindset, you have to have to be constantly challenging every past decision you made to keep evolving and moving forward. So there's some stuff that we know we got right from the jump. There's some pieces where we're engaging our recruiters and having conversations with them and figuring out how to make things work better. So the work is never going to be done. That's what I always tell the team. We're never crossing a finish line, we're just always kind of chasing that carrot, which is if you've got the right mentality for it, a really exciting place to be.

Brent Ellis (18:49):

Yeah, job security, that's good

Claire Wildman (18:54):

For sure. So the solution that we landed on here when we built our partnership with Paradox, it was a few check the box items here that we needed. So we wanted to ensure that we had that 24 7 support available for folks who visited our career site. So not just to search and apply to jobs, which is a huge part of this and a very important win for us. But also to do things like ask about company culture, ask about locations, ask about how to apply to a job, just get that really handholding support that they may need to really navigate whether they're applying for their first job with a company or they haven't applied in a very long time. So just having that sort of safe space for them to partner with Sam, who's our AI assistant here, was very important to us. We really wanted to streamline and automate the interview scheduling process.

(19:45):

As someone who's been a recruiter for most of her career, that is always the bane of everyone's existence is coordinating interviews, sending out an email to 10 candidates with the same times, five of them choose the same time having to email them back. It's very, very clunky. And every time I onboard a recruiter to sobes, their first question is who coordinates our interviews? Who on the team does it? And I have to go. We don't have a designated person, but we do have Sam. And then I kind of segue Sam as being an extension of the team here.

(20:16):

Like I said, that simplification and modernization of that candidate recruiter hiring manager experience. So so important to us. And then we also created a new virtual events environment and a multi-use platform with paradox that we've used for hiring programs, career fairs, hiring events. We've really been able to push the boundaries. I think we drive them a bit nuts sometimes, but we're always coming up with new ideas to say, can we do this? Can we use this for that? And it's a lot of trial and error, but that's how you learn, which is the great thing about this partnership.

Brent Ellis (20:50):

It's such fun technology, there's so many things that you can do with it.

Claire Wildman (20:54):

I I'm like a kid in a candy store, honestly, you never know. You can ask and someone can go, that's impossible. Or you sometimes have great partners that go, well, maybe and then they take it away and sometimes you come back with a really cool solution. So it's a great, great position to be in for sure. Some of the big wins, and there's far more than this, believe me, but the ones that we really felt most powerful to share today is just when we see that conversion of candidates using that conversational job search to then go and complete an application for a role. So we're seeing one out of two candidates doing that. So we're getting over 10,000 every quarter, which is a great volume of candidates for us to then be able to dip into and source from. So it helps build out just this talent pool reservoir that we have behind the scenes, 35 to sometimes upwards of 40% of our candidates are engaging with Sam after hours.

(21:46):

So what I love about this is recruitment. Once upon a time, we always used to say recruitment isn't a nine to five job, you're sometimes 24 7, you're sometimes having to talk to candidates at 10 at night. That's just the way it is. And now with more of a focus on the importance of work-life balance and the importance of putting up boundaries, we now have a tool that really kind of allows us to walk the talk there and say, recruiters don't need to be available 24 7. We have Sam. Sam can help with rescheduling interviews. If a candidate emails you at 11 o'clock for an 8:00 AM interview, Sam can answer questions. If a candidate doesn't know what to expect on their first day or what the culture is, what they need to prepare for an interview, that's a huge, huge value add. And it just also thinking about candidates and they often have full-time jobs, they may not be able to communicate with Sam during their working hours.

(22:36):

So just creating that space to meet folks where they are when they are is really important. And then that interview piece, that to me again coming from a recruiter lens is really just the cherry on top of all this is just the wins we have with interview efficiencies and saving time. So we've scheduled over 6,000 interviews through Paradox, which we were estimating here is about 3000 hours saved from our recruiters. So back in their pocket, back in their calendar to be able to be more strategic partners to the business, grow their relationships differently, be seated at the table and have more capacity to help drive kind of those strategies. So it's a huge win for us and this is only the beginning, so can't wait to see where it goes from here.

Brent Ellis (23:19):

It's kind of mind blowing if you think about it. I mean how you can really force multiply maybe even a relatively small recruiting team so that they're not spending all of their time on the administrative tasks that are required in recruiting, like scheduling interviews or just having phone conversations and things like that. I think the thing that I like and I'm a big believer in kind of the mantras of KPIs and recruiting, there's a quality element there. Your recruiters are able to spend more time with filtered more qualified candidates and probably have more meaningful conversations so that you're putting people in the right jobs and finding the right people. Absolutely. I think that's fantastic. I'm going to pick on the first bullet here. Go back to that slide. So I think that's also pretty staggering and I just wanted to ask for a clarification. So you guys are obviously a very well-known brand. I would imagine probably site traffic is not an issue for you getting people to your jobs, but getting them to convert to apply probably is. So when you say capturing 10,000 candidates, does that mean that they've actually applied?

Claire Wildman (24:41):

That means they've at least started an application up to a certain, I forget what our threshold point is, but it's almost like they've gotten to, they've completed a certain percentage of the application, but we do have majority of them go through and kind of complete that application process.

Brent Ellis (24:56):

That's amazing. But the

Claire Wildman (24:57):

Good news is for those that maybe change their mind, maybe they're not fully ready to complete an application, they're still in our database, so then our recruiters can source them for other roles. So it still gets them, like I said, into that talent pool where we can then use that as a mechanism to fill those hard to fill roles to search through SAP to find them, to bring them to the forefront for a requisition.

Brent Ellis (25:19):

That's awesome. That's so important. I would imagine Sobey spends quite a bit of money on the brand, whether directly for recruiting purposes or just generally, and that's money lost if those candidates are going to your site and you're not capturing 'em. For

Claire Wildman (25:37):

Sure. And when we have so many jobs to search through too, it's just like where do you start sometimes, and I think that's how a lot of candidates find when they get to certain career sites is they're there, there's hundreds of opportunities, but you're giving me one box to type in a keyword and then I need to change it every single to how can this be made easier? And that's where this dynamic conversation with paradox can really help. I want to work in analytics, but I also want to be a leader, but I also need to work in this certain city. Helping inform that search criteria to help get to the jobs that they want faster, I think is so powerful for candidates respecting their time too, right? Yeah,

Brent Ellis (26:16):

It's a consumer grade experience. I think the recruiting solution space has always sort of lagged behind a little bit. When we go to Amazon and shop for something or Restoration Hardware to look for a couch or something, we can kind of get to it that fast and it kind of remembers what we've looked for and might even suggest something next time we visit that site. The technology's caught up. It's available to have that consumer grade experience on our career sites for sure. And that's what candidates expect when they're shopping for a couch and it's what they expect when they're looking for a job. So I think it's really important companies embrace the technology out there that's available to 'em.

Claire Wildman (26:58):

Agreed. Well, and we always say too, our candidates are our customers. So how they interact with our brand as a candidate could then have a downstream impact on how they interact with us as a customer going into our store. So the two are so much more closely linked sometimes than people may realize. So yeah, there's a really strong bond there.

Josh Secrest (27:18):

Terrific. Claire. It's a great point because for McDonald's similar, we had a hundred percent overlap with customers who are going to be our candidates, so it was really important for us to make sure that that was an amazing experience. So I thought this was really smart. One of our chief talent officers basically said, I only want you to report the metric of candidate satisfaction from those candidates who didn't end up getting offers from us. So that's how we're going to judge success here and what kind of a neat lens to be able to think through candidate experiences. I love that.

Claire Wildman (27:52):

Yeah.

Brent Ellis (27:54):

Terrific. So Josh, Claire, thank you so much for spending time with us. You're not only a great SAP client, but we love what you've done so far with Paradox and it sounds like your journey has just begun, which is kind of exciting. Sure.

Claire Wildman (28:14):

Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Brent Ellis (28:16):

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Josh is going to run us through some information and some stats on paradox, and we also thought it was really important that you guys kind of see what this looks like in a real world experience. What is the recruiter looking at? What is the candidate actually looking at it? It's one thing to look at our slides here, but if you haven't seen the technology, we wanted to give you just a slideshow of what that looks like kind of in a logical flow. So I'll hand it over to you Josh.

Josh Secrest (28:53):

Yeah, and maybe just another shout out there to Claire. I mean, I think what you all are doing at sobes is just a perfect example of what we love to do with clients. Here's the problem, how can we get together to solve it? And then the technology is both powerful but then also configurable. So as we go through this, what I'd want everybody on the call to kind of think about, because not all of you are in grocery, not all of you are in restaurants. We've got manufacturing on the call, we've got construction on the call, we've got energy, who else? Retail. There's so many different industries and we're hiring so many different ways. What AI is now providing and exciting that paradox is a big part of this is really powerful technology that's smart and easy to use that then is also really configurable, whether that's by industry or by profile.

(29:44):

And so just some of the really neat results that we're seeing on top of success factors right now that what I'd want to call out is it's almost this generation skip of the data that's starting to come back and that's driving so much ROI for our clients and it's making it easier to get this approval through your systems, massive amounts of interviews scheduled. Why is that important? Because you can get to candidates faster. It relieves the amount of work that's on your plate. We have some of our co clients that have a centralized recruiting team doing high volume, so specifically some really cool work coming out of Compass Group that's one of the largest employers and they're doing 5,000 hires to every one recruiter. And so that power of being able to magnify and supercharge your recruiters is really interesting. And then when we talk about time to hire and why that's important, it's really important on the frontline side, I think Claire and I would both say, Hey, in the corporate side it's important, it's a number we want to track, but ultimately we want the best possible quality candidate for a role.

(30:54):

If it takes me 43 days to hire a marketing director, I'm okay with that versus 39 days, I just want the right person. But in frontline, there's actually a correlation to quality. If I can hire faster because they see more candidates, they're going to match up with my jobs better and the values better, their schedule's going to match better. And ultimately I see a question in the chat from Kelly. We actually have started to see correlation. That's essentially causation from if you're hiring faster and seeing more candidates, you're actually seeing an uptick in your retention because you're getting these better matches. I want to show you just how that tech works. Please look at this through kind of the lens of how do you layer on top of success factors. I think there are a lot of success factors, clients on the calls or considering success factors, and it's really a key part of our partnership is being an endorse staff that can really sit on top and layer on top of the success factors just to make your hiring easy and the places that you want it to be easy.

(31:58):

You can see here just all the different ways that we get to play and collaborate together. All of these are your choice in terms of, hey, I'd like to automate here. I'd like to add this into the stack, but I think the overarching piece that we'd like you to take away from this is there's a lot of flexibility on what you can automate and what problems can be solved. And you don't have to take all of these, right? These are things that you can configure for your business, but this is kind of through the full process. Where do you need a mobile experience or a conversational or automated experience, whether that's apply or scheduling, screening, video interviews, referrals, onboarding, follow up. So there's a lot of really cool capabilities that we've been able to partner with the SAP team to make this work. I'm going to show you what that actually looks like in this way. You can see as you're maybe on your mobile device or candidates going through. Again, this is going to be kind of tweaking or changing throughout.

Brent Ellis (33:05):

It's coming, it's loading, it's

Josh Secrest (33:07):

Coming. Well, and as that goes through, I mean what you'll start to see is these phones and we can kind move through quick. I want to keep chatting about ai, but what you're seeing here is the capabilities of being able to capture and screen. Again, this is on a mobile device. You could do this on your career site, but I want you to see how easy and streamlined all this is, right? You're being able to make your application really turn into this conversation. What's important is what's not here. What you're not seeing are things like logins or passwords or getting bounced around to different sites or having to go and dig. Why is that important? It's important because you're not going to see drop off from all of those points of friction. It's going to give you more candidates. If you have more candidates, you're spending less money on job advertising, you're spending less time as you go through the scheduling capabilities, being able to automatically get someone scheduled for an interview exactly at the time when they're screened.

(34:10):

So we've got, I said at McDonald's we're doing this in about three minutes, screening a candidate through their process and then they're instantly getting a time back to be able to schedule their interview. But then there's also just the sophistication of the warmth that we're, Claire I think called out really well in this experience is being able to nudge a candidate we haven't been able to do before to send reminders, to send them interview tips to allow them to reschedule without any shame to be able to answer questions. Claire's going to have different questions than I'm going to have for our new role. Someone's going to have certain questions that are very specific on benefits, being able to answer those, whether it's with video or your own content. And this is only getting more sophisticated and more robust. So there's some really exciting capabilities that are here. It's powerful technology. It's powered by natural language processing, which means that the conversations don't get sticky. We can interpret and know what the candidate is trying to say and that intent and be able to serve up something back to them. And so it is a lot more sophisticated than that back and forth, even though we're really trying to make this field really easy.

(35:33):

So as we keep just showing you a few other capabilities here, one of the things that was great for us is we kind of look across, especially within the us, clear for you and Canada, you've got a lot of populations where you've got a lot of languages that you need to serve, but it can really open up talent pools or legislatively, legally. You need to actually be able to provide the ability to change languages on a dime and have that really be sophisticated. So conversational AI is leading to being able to do that. We were able to really increase our Spanish speaking populations in the US by being able to do that. Referrals have always been sort of a clunky process. We all know the value of referrals and getting our people to bring their friends in, but it's always kind of been a process where you have to sign in and get all of your friends' information.

(36:27):

Now it's just what's the straightest line? Text the word refer, give the person's email or phone number. We reach out and do the rest 24 7 for candidate management. You can send offers for making this really easy for potentially frontline, even just things like video interviews. You're getting to a place now where you have success factors as your brain, and now you can layer on paradox really throughout the full experience of the process and you don't need too many other point solutions, which is really nice. You can come to us and create together and not have to go out and have all these different integrated things. At one point I'd run teams where we had seven or nine TA technologies and it was hard when you had those all communicating together and it was even harder for our candidates. Now having something that feels really easy and streamlined has been nice.

(37:21):

So I think just some neat visuals. Brent, I think we can stop from a slide perspective there, but I think some kind of cool ways to be able to show this, your recruiting teams, this is maybe a good last one, your recruiting teams, then you're not juggling between paradox and success factors, and I think this is really neat. Within one screen, you're within success factors easily. You can send text messages, search your inbox, look at candidates all through this seamless browser extension. So again, whether it's paradox or as you're leveraging AI across the board, what I'd say is if you haven't been in the market for AI over the last even three years, get back in there and start talking to a lot of us in the space, a lot of these vendors. Because I think what you'll see is just that sophistication. The ease of use has just kind of done this hockey stick. It's way more commercial grade, it's just easier to use. And then you're starting to see clients and practitioners like Claire who are really being innovative, pushing what that looks like and are open to sharing those stories. So I think it's this perfect generational skip that's happened. That's a fun time to get back out in the market and push where you can gain a competitive advantage using some of this technology.

Brent Ellis (38:47):

Well, and I think another interesting point there is it's kind of expected from the candidates and applicants having this kind of consumer grade experience. I know we mentioned that before and talked about it before, but it just aligns to a lot of really strong KPIs for the applicants being able to make sure that they don't attribute during the application process. And I think it also cements the brand. It says that your brand is current, for lack of a better word, and that's attractive to a lot of people. So we've got a couple of minutes left, Claire, maybe any general comments about AI's future? Are you seeing AI maybe creep into other areas of the recruiting process, maybe new use person? Yeah,

Claire Wildman (39:55):

I mean, I think my philosophy around AI and new technology in general as it can be as big or as small as you want it to be or as you need it to be. So it doesn't need to be this big sweeping disruptor that implodes all the other stuff that you've built over the years, but start small, figure out a few pain points like we did to say everyone agrees that this could be better. Everyone agrees that they don't want to do this task. How can we layer in technology to do that? And where I hope to see us evolve in the future is we've got a stronger presence with our external audiences, but I see a lot in empowering our internal audiences as well through the use of AI technology. So helping them search for jobs, map out their career journey. Do they just have day-to-day HR questions we can support?

(40:42):

So I think the technology can really operate well on both sides of the fence. And then just how wonderful to have that consistent candidate journey regardless of person, because when we think about our hiring managers, they're hiring from both populations, so we just want everything to kind of have that same feel because then you get adoption, then you get strong feedback, then you have your real successes come through. So I think it's a lot of noise around it and I think for good reason, because a great, great thing, but it doesn't need to be this really devastating change that your company goes through. It's a huge lift to implement. It's a huge lift to monitor and kind of change and evolve over time. I think it's a great tool and I would just encourage everyone to kind of, like I said, take a look at those few things that this could be better if, and think about how technology and AI specifically could help with that and bring your people along for the journey. That's the way to really make it work.

Brent Ellis (41:38):

That's really, really sound advice, super insightful and you've got the experience doing it. I think oftentimes we who are in technology sometimes don't think about, but think about everything that technology can do, but then we don't think about really the downstream impact and how difficult it is for an organization to really adopt it and putting more emphasis into the cultural change and the transformation and being just aware of how this could be somewhat disruptive. When you're rolling this out, we could probably do another 45 minutes just talking about best practices and managing those changes because for even a frontline hiring manager, this might introduce something new that's sometimes change is scary for people. It's any last minute tips on, I know we're not going to be able to cover it in a minute and a half here, but any tips on your peers on approaching projects like this and that change management that might be required in an implementation?

Claire Wildman (42:51):

Yeah, I mean for me, I would say, and Josh, I'd love your thoughts on this too, but it's get all the right people at the table from the get go. Acknowledge that you might not have all the answers from the get go and kind of go into it with that project mindset to say, we're going to try something different. We're going to work together on it. Everyone's going to have input on it, and we're going to assess and decide if this is working and if it's not, we're going to change. Just go into it not acting as if you have all the answers, right? Because we don't. And technology is constantly changing and your needs are going to constantly change. I referenced earlier, so the right people and the right mindset I think is kind of the two key ingredients that you need

Brent Ellis (43:28):

Words to live

Josh Secrest (43:29):

On. Yeah, I love that, Claire. I think that's spot on. Some of the highest impact we had was having our DEI team at the table as well as our technology team at the table. And then I think you nailed it earlier where we took some small, small chunks. Let's start with 50 restaurants and let's go to a hundred restaurants. And then we were able to scale quick, but because we were able to refine and get it right in something that was manageable, we just kind of built confidence and we got internal stakeholders that were kind of singing so that we didn't have to do it. And I think that's really powerful.

Brent Ellis (44:03):

Awesome. Guys, at time I knew that this would be a fast,

Claire Wildman (44:05):

We knew it was going to happen. Yeah,

Brent Ellis (44:07):

I knew it was going to be a fast 45 minutes. Claire, thank you so much, Josh.

Claire Wildman (44:12):

Of course, anytime

Brent Ellis (44:13):

For joining. Love the conversation and let's keep it going. For those of you who are watching this either recorded or if you were with us live, thank you for giving us 45 minutes. And if you have any questions about paradox or this presentation or discussion, feel free to reach me. It's brentEllis@sap.com. Thank you.

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