Decreasing time-to-hire by 60% with Workday Paradox

Sodexo provides food services and facilities management to more than 100 million consumers every day. To make that magic happen, Sodexo has to ensure they have enough people to staff their entire organization—they typically hire over 60,000 frontline workers every year. In other words, Sodexo’s continued success is reliant on a highly optimized recruitment process. But manual workflows dramatically slowed Sodexo’s hiring, leading to candidate drop-off and understaffing.

Sodexo set out to find a modern hiring solution that could help reduce their time-to-hire at scale.

Transforming hiring with a frontline-focused ATS.

Sodexo partnered with Paradox and implemented Workday Paradox Conversational ATS to overcome their hiring challenges. This AI-powered platform, embodied by Sodexo’s AI agent "Dexi," automates crucial administrative work, including candidate screening, interview scheduling, and onboarding. With monotonous hiring work handled by AI, Sodexo’s recruiters and operators can shift their focus from getting candidates’ information into the system to getting to know them on a deeper level.

From a candidate perspective, applying for open roles has never been easier. Dexi screens for qualifications and schedules interviews all over text, turning the application process into a simple three-minute conversation. And with Dexi’s ability to detect over 100+ languages and switch their communication on a dime, Sodexo never loses a global candidate to the language barrier. 

Conversational AI delivers key results.

The implementation of Workday Paradox Conversational ATS has delivered significant, quantifiable outcomes for Sodexo. 

By rapidly moving frontline candidates through the hiring process, Sodexo has reduced their average time-to-hire by 60%. This efficiency directly translated into results on the ground—in the first 10 days after implementation, Sodexo hired 10,000 candidates.

“This shift has greatly shortened our time-to-fill,” said Sodexo Senior Director of HR Systems Cassie Vasco. “It makes Sodexo more marketable in the industry."

Beyond the core speed improvements, the solution has transformed internal processes and external reach. Recruiters and operators are now freed from administrative work, allowing them to focus on high-value candidate engagement. The result is a better-scaled talent acquisition system, a huge time saver for the hiring team, and a faster, more comfortable experience for candidates.