Advantage Solutions is the biggest brand you don’t know. The organization acts as a marketing and sales engine for massive retailers, providing in-store team members that keep commerce moving. Because its entire business revolves around people, Advantage’s success hinges on an efficient hiring process.
In order to meet all of our business objectives, we need to talk with about 1,000,000 candidates per year to hire 60,000 people.
Vice President of Talent Acquisition Operations
To engage one million annual candidates, Advantage needs to ensure that its hiring process is optimized at every step, starting with the top-of-funnel application. But previously, Advantage was asking frontline candidates to create a login and fill out lengthy forms just to apply to open roles. This clunky process crippled their candidate experience, increased drop-off, and hurt their bottom line. Recruiters didn’t fare much better. Burdened by all this administrative work, they didn’t have time to do what they did best: identify top talent.
To solve their hiring challenges, Advantage partnered with Workday Paradox to create an end-to-end solution powered by AI. The goal? Automate key aspects of the hiring process to maximize candidate attraction while freeing up Advantage's recruiters to get the right people in the doors.
Automating the hiring journey with conversational AI.
“Using automation at scale is a really critical part of our frontline recruitment strategy,” said Advantage VP of TA Operations Katy Shaddock. “It’s honestly easier to tell you what we don’t automate than what we do.”
Advantage now uses Workday Paradox Conversational ATS as an end-to-end platform that simplifies both the application experience and the subsequent candidate management. Built for frontline recruiting, the Conversational ATS utilizes AI across the entire hiring process, allowing Advantage to build a customized workflow that leverages automation at each bottleneck.
The Conversational ATS is the best. It supports our frontline hiring and works with our legacy technology.
Vice President of Talent Acquisition Operations
The candidate-facing touchpoint of the Conversational ATS is Alix, Advantage’s AI agent. Available 24/7 through a career site widget or QR code scan, Alix gives candidates more control over the hiring process and guides them through every step of their journey. Plus, it’s all done through a conversational interface. No forms. No logins. No friction. Just a few simple chat or text messages—creating the seamless experience frontline candidates expect.
If candidates have questions, Alix answers them. If they don’t know which job to pursue, Alix can match them with relevant open roles based on preferences and location. And if the candidate wants to work at Advantage, Alix guides them through an application in minutes. Alix sends candidates a few screening questions, and if the candidate meets minimum qualifications, Alix then sends them available interview times based on recruiter availability.
Being able to offer an experience that's intuitive, speedy, and meets candidates where they are is a really critical part of making your company culture resonate.
Vice President of Talent Acquisition Operations
Faster hiring, better engagement, and smoother onboarding.
Advantage's use of automation doesn't end at the interview. Post-offer, Alix texts new hires the necessary documentation to complete the pre-hire onboarding process. That means I-9 and E-Verify processes, background checks, payroll forms, tax selections, and more are all handled without the need for recruiter intervention. And if candidates have questions, they just ask Alix.
With this workflow, Advantage has trimmed its pre-hire onboarding process from a long, clunky timeline to one that takes three calendar days, including days when recruiters aren’t working.
“A candidate who accepts an offer on Friday night can still move forward and complete all the required steps,” said Shaddock. “They’re not waiting for someone else to give them a new form to complete.”
Continuously optimizing with data and standardization.
Advantage’s partnership with Paradox has transformed its hiring process, enabling it to build a larger candidate pipeline while empowering recruiters to focus on high-value interactions. With the Conversational ATS and Alix, they are guiding more candidates through the funnel faster than ever. And with recruiters no longer bogged down with administrative work, they can spend their time forming valuable connections with candidates.
But Advantage believes it’s just scratching the surface. The team consistently analyzes every step of its process, searching for areas of improvement and new ways to leverage AI.
“We benchmark our different dwell times and conversion rates to identify where we need to tighten different things up or where we have more opportunity,” said Shaddock. “We try to find where people are getting stuck so that we can either automate our way through the problem or identify that pain point as a place to insert an impactful human interaction.”