Scaling a global mission.
In just 15 years, BeOne Medicines has grown from a start-up to a global oncology leader with over 11,000 employees across 40 countries, including major operations in North America, Europe, and Asia. Its mission—to transform how the world fights cancer—demands a constant stream of highly skilled and engaged talent. This rapid expansion, bringing in hundreds of new hires each week, presented BeOne’s HR team with a critical challenge: how to efficiently recruit and integrate a growing workforce while keeping engagement high in a fast-paced, high-stakes industry.
Graham Hardiman, head of HR Globally, oversees the scale of BeOne’s hiring needs. “We hire a couple of thousand people a year, and we interview six to seven times that,” Hardiman says. “In recent years, we have had as many as 100 new people join every Monday.”
In-house research and clinical trials demand highly specialized staff—critical to delivering the future medicines that BeOne expects to deliver in the next 20 or 30 years. To maintain this ambitious growth, Hardiman’s team needed a smarter, more adaptive talent acquisition process. “Our biggest priority is hiring the right people, creating an engaged workforce, and giving them every reason to stay,”Hardiman says.
“We hire a couple of thousand people a year, and we interview six to seven times that. In recent years, we have had as many as one hundred new people join every Monday.”
Head of HR Globally
Overcoming the deluge of applications.
BeOne’s HR team has grown but not at the same rate as the company. Recruiters faced growing workloads and manual bottlenecks, especially for roles that attracted a large number of applicants. Blair Dugan, who leads talent acquisition for the Americas and Europe, has seen this evolution firsthand. “When I first joined BeOne, we were only 40 employees in the United States, and only 250 people globally. We didn’t have many applicants,” Dugan explained. Over the past eight years, however, the volume of applicants has steadily increased. While highly specialized roles might receive fewer applications, administrative, finance, or HR positions often attract thousands. In the last year alone, BeOne received 95,000 applications—prompting the urgent need for a flexible, intelligent system that could adapt to various recruitment demands.
Smarter hiring with HiredScore and Workday.
BeOne’s search for a scalable solution led it to HiredScore, which transforms recruiting outcomes by automating and orchestrating critical talent processes with responsible AI—seamlessly integrated into everyday tools such as Workday and MS Teams.
Hardiman was impressed with the initial use case of AI-powered candidate screening. The AI analyzed new job openings and identified relevant candidates. “They gave us their list of candidates that they thought would be the best fit. We had hired the second person on the list. This gave us confidence that HiredScore recognized the same quality applicants that we did,” Hardiman noted.
Anne Webster, who manages global HR operations, finds the AI-powered candidate grading Spotlight tool valuable. “I was hiring a director level for the Americas region operations. I had approximately 3,300 applicants for that role. There was no way that we could have sorted those without HiredScore. It was terrific.” This has reduced manual recruiter reviews by nearly 70%.
Dugan agrees that the advantage of HiredScore became increasingly clear as applicant numbers surged, especially for administrative and support roles. “It’s made our hiring process for these roles much faster,” Dugan says. In the last year, by using HiredScore, the team is saving an average of 10.4 days—a 46% reduction—for screening new candidates compared to if they were just using Workday alone.
An additional capability is AI-powered talent rediscovery, which surfaces relevant leads from BeOne’s Workday database.
“The Fetch tool pulls resumes from our Workday database, which adds the most value. It takes a lot of time to go through those candidates.”
Lead, Talent Acquisition, Americas and Europe
Improving hiring manager collaboration.
As adoption grew, HiredScore began to reshape day-to-day hiring collaboration. Dugan highlighted how recruiters now use candidate grading not only to quickly identify strong matches but also to improve alignment with hiring managers early on in the process. “The top candidates we get from HiredScore are based on the job descriptions we create. So if they’re not the closest match, we work with the hiring managers to revise the descriptions. Adding more details in certain areas or rearranging things helps us make better matches. The more we use it, the better we get,” Dugan said.
HiredScore also simplifies how recruiters communicate with hiring managers. Instead of bulky attachments and scattered emails, they can send batched candidate profiles in a single, streamlined message. “When we send them resumes, they can click on candidates, and it prepopulates one email with all of the different candidate names and the link to their HiredScore resume,” says Webster. “Our managers love this.”
Workday and HiredScore together provide a unified solution that enables the BeOne HR team to meet evolving hiring demands with greater efficiency, agility, and strategic foresight—supporting the company’s continued global growth. HiredScore’s AI ensures every recommendation is explainable and auditable—critical in a regulated industry such as oncology, where talent decisions must be both fast and defensible.
The future of HR at BeOne.
Dugan is eager to explore additional AI functionalities to reduce manual work, pointing to recent successes such as automated candidate scheduling, which has already saved recruiters a lot of time. “I wanted to get rid of that, and we have now done so. So what else can we do from an AI perspective to improve our efficiency?”
As BeOne continues its growth, Hardiman is leading an initiative called “HR for 2030 and beyond,” which challenges the team to envision the future of HR: more automation, intuitive workflows, and elevated strategy. This will allow them to focus on life-changing oncology solutions, transforming cancer treatment and supporting the teams that make it possible.