Nestlé’s global recruiting teams were spending over 8,000 hours per month scheduling and rescheduling interviews. That’s a lot of time spent doing some pretty monotonous work—and Nestlé wondered what else their recruiting teams could accomplish with those 8,000 hours. What work could they get done? Who could they form connections with? And how much happier would they be? The sort of all encompassing answer: a lot. This is the story of how Nestlé partnered with Workday Paradox to save thousands of administrative hours, and the cost savings that followed.
A highly manual scheduling process
Nestlé was committed to providing a personal touch in their hiring process. After all, their products—KitKats, Butterfingers, and San Pellegrino, to name a few—are approachable and reliable. They give you that warm fuzzy feeling. And Nestlé wanted their hiring process to feel the same. But in practice, that “personal touch” ended up amounting to 8,000 annual hours of administrative interview scheduling work. Calling candidates. Leaving voicemails. Rescheduling canceled interviews.
The CPG giant sought a way to remove the administrative burden from their hiring process. The challenge, of course, was figuring out how to offload that much work, and that many conversations, for a massive amount of candidates (we’re talking close to 9,000,000 career site visits annually), without sacrificing the quality standards people have come to expect from a globally beloved brand.
Recruiters need to be talent advisors. They should be focused on organizational design and shaping the organization going forward. But they don’t have the time to do that if they’re doing admin tasks.
Head of UK Talent Acquisition
Automated interview scheduling.
To solve their hiring challenges, Nestlé partnered with Paradox to implement Workday Paradox Candidate Experience Agent into their hiring process. They now leverage an AI agent named Olivia to answer candidate questions and automatically schedule interviews with qualified applicants.
Here’s how it works: Once recruiters initiate the process in their ATS, Olivia will text candidates open interview times based on recruiter availability. Since she’s synced with each of their calendars, she’s always up to date on when everyone is available. Once a candidate selects a time, Olivia places a calendar hold and notifies the recruiter. And if someone needs to reschedule, Olivia handles that too—the candidate or recruiter simply needs to text her and she’ll automate the process in minutes.
With Olivia, there are frictionless conversations going on while recruiters are doing valuable work.
Head of UK Talent Acquisition
Frictionless across languages.Nestlé hires in countries around the world, which makes it critical that their hiring process is accessible across a wide variety of languages. Fluent in 18 languages, Olivia meets candidates where they are, and interacts in their language. So if a candidate starts speaking in Mandarin, Olivia will change her communication on a dime. And if the recruiter filling the role only speaks English, Olivia will translate the messages back into English. No wasted seconds, no friction. Just candidates getting scheduled and having their questions answered faster.
Speaking of questions, Nestlé gets 1,500,000 of them every year. Olivia answered them in seconds. That type of functionality would be impossible to do manually. But for a company the size of Nestlé, it’s necessary to maintain staffing levels.
Our ability to engage candidates 24/7 across 47 countries in 18 languages has been critical.
Global Talent Acquisition Sourcing & Solutions Manager
Better candidate experiences.Since Olivia responds immediately, 24/7, 365, she gets to candidates first, creating a respectable white glove experience at scale. No more ghosting or black hole—in fact, the reception to Olivia has been so positive that Nestlé’s net promoter score (a measure used to gauge customer loyalty, satisfaction, and enthusiasm) has increased over five points since implementing Olivia.
We’ve gotten to a place that I would consider ‘frictionless recruitment.
Head of UK Talent Acquisition
Automation that brings results.Let’s start here: those 8,000 hours that Nestlé was spending scheduling interviews before implementing Paradox? That’s down to zero. And all that newfound time has allowed Nestlé to be much more strategic with both their budget and their workforce. Since implementation, Nestlé has saved over $3,000,000 annually (the equivalent bandwidth of 32 FTE), and has been able to funnel those savings right back into their hiring process.
Without the need to schedule and reschedule interviews, Nestlé’s recruiters have been able to act as talent advisors—using their time to have valuable conversations with candidates and hiring managers.