ESF unifies HR to shape the future of education.

English Schools Foundation (ESF), Hong Kong’s largest provider of English-medium international education, operates 22 schools serving more than 18,000 students from over 75 nationalities, supported by 3,000 employees. Its vision for 2030 centers on three strategic behaviors: Agile, Aligned, and Accountable.

For Kunal Mulchandani, Director of Human Resources at English Schools Foundation, realizing that vision meant moving beyond fragmented, unintuitive legacy systems. Manual, duplicate processes consumed the time of HR teams and business managers, while decentralized, unreliable data made it hard to see workforce trends, plan ahead, and forecast with confidence. ESF needed to spend less time reacting to daily demands and more time on strategic, high-value work.

Unifying HR around a shared way of working.

ESF selected Workday Human Capital Management (Workday HCM) to bring its people processes and data together in one system available on desktop and mobile. The platform streamlines key processes, creates one source of people data and gives employees more control over their information. Just as importantly, it supports ESF’s ambition to become more agile, aligned, and accountable.

The deployment reinforced that decision. ESF's central HR team worked closely with all 22 schools to understand their distinct contexts, arriving at solutions that were practical on the ground and aligned with best practice across the Foundation. Parallel-run trials gave the team confidence in the platform's ease of use, and the process of building consensus across 22 unique school environments proved to be one of the most meaningful outcomes of the journey — an opportunity, as Mulchandani notes, for the organization to know itself better.

Making recruitment simpler and more responsive.

Alongside Workday HCM and Workday Recruiting, ESF adopted Workday Paradox to simplify recruitment. Its previous bespoke video interviewing platform created operational problems, even with basic tasks. When the ESF team first saw Workday Paradox in action, the improvement in integration and candidate experience was immediately clear.

"The first demo was the moment — watching how easily integratable it was with Workday, and seeing the overall candidate experience, which was a massive step up from what we had. That's when I knew this would truly transform our hiring experience," says Mulchandani.

Candidates can use Workday Paradox to apply, ask questions and schedule interviews at any time through chat or text, without waiting or navigating cumbersome systems. For ESF’s talent team, Workday Paradox takes on scheduling, reminders, and routine questions, giving recruiters more time to build relationships and find the right people for ESF’s schools.

Workday Paradox also supports ESF’s wider AI strategy: to embed AI across the employee lifecycle, from a candidate’s first interaction with ESF through to offboarding. By taking on high-volume, routine tasks, Workday Paradox reduces friction and gives recruiters more time for relationships, coaching and hiring decisions.

Extending AI across the employee lifecycle.

With a unified HR foundation in place, ESF is turning its attention to what comes next. Embedded capabilities such as Workday Skills Cloud, Workday Talent Insights and real-time analytics give its teams live workforce data instead of retrospective spreadsheets. By reducing manual processing and making it easier to identify errors, anomalies, and skills gaps, Workday gives HR teams more time to act as coaches rather than administrators.

ESF plans to deepen its use of predictive analytics to anticipate workforce shortages, succession needs and skills gaps before they become problems. It also intends to extend AI across more stages of the employee lifecycle, from smarter recruiting to personalized development at scale. The goal is to give leaders across all 22 schools real-time visibility into their teams’ health, skills and risks while giving HR teams more time to focus on coaching, culture, and trust.