In 2005, Workday was founded with a clear mission: build enterprise software that puts people at the center. Two decades later, that mission has propelled the company from tech startup to one of the world’s leading enterprise AI platforms for managing people, money, and agents. Workday’s trajectory has been defined by a relentless push to innovate—first by anchoring in cloud-based systems, and more recently by pioneering agentic workflows that help organizations operate with greater intelligence and agility.
As Workday’s technology vision evolved, so did its commitment to embedding AI into every corner of the enterprise experience. The company has spent the last half-decade building AI capacity internally and through strategic partnerships, becoming an early investor in Paradox and deepening the integration over time. By the time Workday turned its attention inward to modernize its own talent acquisition process, the Workday and Paradox teams were already well aligned—and poised to bring the same AI-powered experience Workday delivers to customers into its internal recruiting operations.
“We had a conversation with our recruiters, and they expressed the very real need for automated scheduling for phone screens and interviews,” said Workday TA Technology Program Manager Abby LaLiberty.
The message was clear: recruiters were committed to meeting the company’s hiring needs, but the manual processes were holding them back. It was taking more than three days just to get a meeting on the calendar.
It was kind of a no-brainer once we got started to give our recruiters an automated step.
TA Technology Program Manager
Workday uses AI-powered interview scheduling to hire faster.
Workday approached the implementation of Candidate Experience Agent with a deliberate, phased strategy designed to “tackle what we could in chunks,” as LaLiberty explained. In Phase 1, the team introduced an AI agent named Sunny to automate recruiter phone screen scheduling. Once a recruiter verifies a qualified candidate in Workday, Sunny reaches out via text with available time slots, then notifies the recruiter and places a calendar hold in Outlook when the candidate picks a time. If a candidate needs to reschedule, they simply text Sunny, who manages the change without human intervention.
“Up to that point, recruiters had been doing all their phone screen scheduling manually,” said LaLiberty. “With Paradox, we introduced them to something exciting that gave them time back to increase their efficiency.”
Building on that success, Workday expanded Sunny’s responsibilities in Phase 2 to automate hiring manager interview scheduling, using similar self-service scheduling workflows for candidates. By Phase 3, the team adopted a “human in the loop” model for later-stage interviews: TA Coordinators enter key details like room bookings and URLs into a Paradox browser extension inside Workday, and Sunny takes over the candidate-facing coordination and scheduling. With Sunny managing the communication and logistics, Workday dramatically reduced time-to-schedule: What previously took more than three days is now completed in under six hours, while simultaneously removing a significant amount of manual work from recruiters and coordinators.
Workday Paradox Candidate Experience Agent accelerated our process in a way that we couldn't have done before. The future is so bright.
TA Technology Program Manager
Faster Scheduling means recruiters are more efficient and can upskill.
Since implementing Sunny, Workday’s TA team is saving thousands of hours every year. With all that time saved, recruiters have been able to focus more on actually connecting with candidates and identifying top talent for Workday. But more than that, they’ve been able to level up their own abilities.
“Our interviewers are being upskilled,” said LaLiberty. “They now have time to take a certification and learn how to be the best interview they can be, meet candidates where they are and make new hires successful from day one.”
The impact of faster, automated scheduling has cascaded across the entire hiring journey. Instead of waiting up to ten days to get an interview on the books, candidates are now interviewing in four days, giving Workday a better chance at engaging top talent before competitors do and enabling teams to be more selective in their decisions.
“This time savings encompass the entire organization,” said LaLiberty. “It isn’t just TA. It impacts everybody at Workday.”
The future: More AI automation and more moments for a human touch.
With Paradox atop Workday Recruiting, Workday gives their recruiters the speed to meet the demands of the market while also maintaining the high-impact work their TA team lends to the hiring process. Ultimately, it’s the balance of both that helps Workday recruit top talent.
“We really kind of hone in on a human-centric approach to hiring and recruiting,” said LaLiberty. “Even with automation, it's a side-by-side journey, and we make sure that recruiters are empowered.”
As for the future of Workday’s hiring, the team is looking to expand its AI capabilities across their process. Up first: AI-powered chat-to-apply functionality and post-offer candidate surveys. And with Workday completing its acquisition of Paradox in late 2025, the organization now has an end-to-end AI-powered talent acquisition suite that helps companies hire faster, improve recruiter efficiency, and deliver a better candidate experience. So as Workday's internal team develops the future of their hiring process, collaboration will be easier than ever.
"We're currently working on building one elevated product experience between Paradox, HiredScore, and Workday Recruiting," said LaLiberty. "I was so excited that we acquired Paradox. I just cannot wait to see the great things that we create together."