Saying that Johnson Controls (JCI) has a global reach would be an understatement. The manufacturer is the worldwide leader in smart buildings and sustainable spaces—a position maintained by a team of more than 100,000 employees working across 150 countries. Because of their size, JCI’s success is largely dependent on their ability to scale and localize processes to individual regions.
And that all starts with how they hire.
JCI sought a global hiring solution.
Despite operating in a majority of all countries, Johnson Controls’ recruiting team was struggling to localize their hiring efforts. Tasked with manually speaking to engineering, operations, manufacturing, and other frontline candidates around the globe, recruiters were forced to manually jump between candidate correspondence and Google Translate all too often. The segmented process prevented a smooth candidate journey, putting stress on recruiters to prevent drop-off by manually translating correspondence at scale.
Johnson Controls sought a solution: a way to optimize their tech stack within Workday to reduce time-to-hire across all regions. Moreover, they wanted technology that would create a seamless experience for both candidates and hiring managers.
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.
Global Talent Acquisition Operations Manager
How JCI leverages AI to meet their hiring needs.
Johnson Controls partnered with Workday Paradox to revamp their hiring with Workday Paradox Candidate Experience Agent. Now, they leverage an AI agent named Emma to automate early phases of their application process while taking the burden of globalization off their recruiters’ shoulders. And with a seamless integration into Workday Recruiting, recruiters don’t have to go through the hassle of learning new software to gain the benefits of automation.
When candidates are interested in working for JCI, they begin an application through Workday Recruiting, and Emma will instantly reach out to screen them for qualifications through a series of simple text messages. If they’re deemed qualified, she will automatically offer interview times based off of recruiter availability. Should someone need to reschedule the interview, they just shoot Emma a text, and she handles the rest without any more manual input.
You can’t put a value on how this experience has been a game changer for our candidates and recruiters.
Global Talent Acquisition Operations Manager
Multilingual functionality that makes hiring easier at scale.
With Emma, JCI is able to globalize their recruiting efforts with ease. If a plant manager in London needs to quickly hire 50 manufacturers, they can open a requisition and let Emma handle all the administrative work. But hiring for one plant in one language is easy—what about hiring for an executive role with a global candidate pool?
Well, that’s where Emma really shines. Fluent in 18 languages, Emma meets each candidate where they are, and interacts in their language. So if a candidate starts speaking in Spanish, Emma will change her communication on a dime. And if the recruiter filling the role is based in America, Emma will translate back the candidate profile information and give updates in English, seamlessly. No wasted seconds, no friction. Just candidates getting screened faster, scheduled faster, and having their questions answered faster.
Speaking of questions, JCI gets around 190,000 of them across 17 different languages every year. And Emma answers every single one of them in seconds.
If we can speak to people, we can hire faster. That speaks volumes for our ROI.
Global Talent Acquisition Operations Manager
How Emma lends flexibility to JCI’s hiring.
Emma’s connection with candidates spans entire hemispheres, but her impact is equally felt by individual recruiters. In large part, this is because Emma has added a new element to JCI’s hiring process: flexibility. When JCI wants to open up their candidate pool globally to truly find the best person for a corporate job, Emma can do that. And when they want to hire en masse for a hyper-specific location, Emma can do that too.
Despite their size, Emma makes JCI nimble; they can hire whomever they need, wherever they need, in any language, seamlessly. And recruiters never have to spend time worrying about translation, or missing out on top talent because they couldn’t screen fast enough.
“Being able to not have to think about scheduling and to know that it will happen,” said Shah. “It's a huge cost and time saver.” These aren’t just empty words. Since Emma’s implementation, she’s scheduled over 10,000 interviews for JCI, with the average candidate getting scheduled in under 15 minutes.