7 Companies Successfully Using AI in Their Recruiting Strategies
Using artificial intelligence technology in the recruitment process is essential for companies to stay competitive — especially in the current labor market.
AI can help recruit top talent, streamline and personalize the application process for candidates, enhance the employee experience through skills matching and job alerts, save recruiters time to focus on other important tasks, and more.
Our CEO and co-founder, Mahe Bayireddi often says AI is like oxygen. “It’s everywhere, and it’s essential to filling open roles with incredible talent and retaining them for the long haul.”
However, many Fortune 500 companies are lacking when it comes to their use of AI in attracting, engaging, and converting talent. In fact, 89% scored poorly in this area according to the 2023 State of Candidate Experience Report.
Adopting AI to help reduce time to fill and connect TA teams with quality talent shouldn’t be difficult — and with the right technology, it isn’t.
Check out the following seven companies that are successfully using an AI recruiting platform, and learn just how they’re doing it.
In This Article
1. Mastercard
With the overarching goal to transform to a more seamless experience for both candidates and internal team members, Mastercard partnered with Phenom to bring their vision to life with advanced automations, ethical AI, and actionable real-time data.
“We knew we needed a partner that was focused on creating a great user experience, while also providing consistency and efficiency for our internal processes. This meant connecting the career site to the application process and the CRM, giving us the data to understand the end-to-end candidate experience,” said Kerry Royer, SVP, Head of Global Talent Acquisition, at Mastercard.
Mastercard implemented various solutions in collaboration with Phenom including a new Career Site, Talent CRM, Campaigns, Talent Analytics, and Automated Interview Scheduling — and established dedicated recruitment marketing and direct sourcing teams to identify viable leads at high volume and create a compelling, personalized candidate journey.
Mastercard’s “always on” hiring model engages job seekers who opt to be part of the Mastercard talent community, both for current and future opportunities, via targeted, multi-touchpoint recruitment marketing campaigns. This helps them maintain an engaged pipeline of qualified talent to quickly meet their business needs. This proactive approach is aiding their high-volume hiring efforts, especially now that they’ve rolled out Phenom Automated Interview Scheduling to expedite this previously time-consuming, mostly manual task.
The team has been better able to attract, engage, and convert more talent, reaping both short- and long-term benefits. Before where they were seeing two-thirds of visitors to their jobs search page drop off, job seekers are now interacting on Mastercard’s career site longer and applying at greater frequency with help from the new, globally-relevant career site.
“From a talent scouting perspective, generating more leads puts us in a better position to build a better team. And with better engagement with our candidates, we’re able to keep connected with these leads in the future, building a strong pipeline of interested candidates. It’s been a robust way for us to extend our investment into longer-term wins,” said Matthias Leitzmann, Head of Global Talent Discovery at Mastercard.
Automated interview scheduling has also proven to be a significant improvement for both the prospective hires and the internal team at Mastercard. In addition to scheduling well over 5,000 interviews, 88% of them were scheduled within 24 hours of the request. “We’ve reduced the time it takes to schedule an interview by more than 85%,” shared Leitzmann. “This efficiency not only improves the candidate experience but is streamlining internal processes, reducing administrative burden, and helps us more efficiently land great talent.”
One year into the partnership, Mastercard grew their talent community from less than 100K lifetime profiles to over 1M. This has contributed to increasing influenced hires (from recruitment marketing and sourcing campaigns) from less than 200 hires in 2021 to nearly 2,000 in 2023. They have also streamlined and consolidated 75+ local career sites into one, which has significantly improved website visitor retention (~60%) and loyalty rates (~27%).
Additional results include:
900% more candidate profiles
11% higher apply conversion rates compared to industry average
141,000 more leads compared to industry average
Read the full story: Transforming Mastercard’s Talent Acquisition
2. Electrolux
Multinational home appliance manufacturer Electrolux Group faced a talent shortage last year — and “in times of labor shortage, it’s essential to stay ahead of talent market trends,” said Anja Ullrich, their Global Talent Acquisition Director. To keep a competitive edge, the TA team recognized the need to digitize processes to elevate their candidate, employee, recruiter, and hiring manager experiences. At the same time, they wanted to boost internal mobility and reduce both time and cost to hire.
To overhaul almost their entire recruiting process, they needed an AI-powered platform that could keep up.
The powerful combination of a hyper-personalized external career site, internal talent marketplace, active talent community, talent CRM, and automated campaigns functionality empowers their recruiters to nurture leads by sending relevant content targeted to a candidate’s expressed preferences, career goals, and interests.
With the help of the platform’s AI-driven fit scoring, candidate matching, and one-way interviews, recruiters and hiring managers can improve the screening and selection process for better fits, faster. If candidates do apply and qualify for an interview, automated AI scheduling removes the time-consuming back-and-forth — expediting the process and elevating the overall experience.
Since implementing this comprehensive AI-powered platform, Electrolux has seen:
84% increase in application conversation rate
51% decrease in incomplete applications
9% decrease in time to hire
20% recruitment time saved using one-way interviews
78% time saved through AI scheduling
This “is the right [technology] for proactive talent pipelining, both inside and outside the company,” said Ullrich. “It’s critical in the HR technology landscape and allows us to evolve.”
Read the full story: Electrolux Group Digitalizes Key HR Processes for Distinct Hiring Edge
3. Kuehne+Nagel
For far too long, the employee experience has been often overlooked by companies. Global logistics leader Kuehne+Nagel, however, knows that an incredible employee experience is a major factor that drives retention and increases ROI.
To ensure their employees were satisfied with their work and given opportunities to evolve, Kuehne+Nagel turned to AI for their internal recruitment strategy to help cultivate career growth and internal mobility options for their people.
Leveraging an intelligent talent marketplace — AI-powered technology that’s built to connect employees with learning and development opportunities — they were able to market open jobs to employees, personalize job recommendations, and provide recruiters with a smart tool to find quality talent within their own organization first.
Through a talent marketplace, “our own recruiters turn into internal head-hunters and proactively search for, pre-screen, and reach out to employees with job opportunities that could be of interest to them, before searching for external candidates,” revealed Claudia Harms, Global Talent Acquisition Expert at Kuehne+Nagel.
"Like this, we are able to build a strong talent pipeline, offer hiring managers the best available candidates, reduce time to hire, and create an all-around better — even unique — employee experience.”
After just 2.5 months of implementing this AI technology, Kuehne+Nagel:
Increased their conversion rate for internal candidates 22% overall
Decreased their time to fill for internal requisitions by 20%
Achieved a 74% employee satisfaction rate with the experience
Their talent marketplace is also making it easy for employees to refer their professional networks to open roles, accelerating recruiting efforts while contributing to long-term retention.
In less than a year, 11,000 referrals were made, 6,000 referrals applied, and 500 referrals were hired. “This is a conversion rate of 10%, which is ten times higher than a normal conversion rate when you have just an external offer,” shared their CHRO.
Read the full story: How Kuehne+Nagel Empowers Employees To Own and Grow Their Careers
4. Bon Secours Mercy Health
As a major U.S. Catholic health system and the largest not-for-profit healthcare provider in Ireland, Bon Secours Mercy Health (BSMH) is a preeminent employer in the communities it serves, handling about 20,000 external hires a year.
But it isn’t immune to the factors impacting the healthcare industry for years, which only worsened during the pandemic — including staffing shortages, unsustainable cost of labor, unstable supply of people to fill high-demand roles, and climbing turnover rates.
They wanted to provide a frictionless talent experience, establish healthy candidate pipelines with high-quality candidates, and improve team productivity.
By utilizing a range of Phenom products including Career Site, Chatbot, Talent CRM, and High-Volume Hiring, BSMH transformed their recruitment process into a personalized, efficient, and seamless experience for job seekers.
Candidates can now easily find and apply for tailored opportunities, receive customized job alerts, and access 24/7 assistance through the chatbot. On the backend, talent teams can engage with leads effectively by segmenting them based on real-time data, ensuring the right message is delivered at the right time.
With the AI, automations, and experience they were looking for, BSMH is differentiating itself in a crowded market, especially among sought-after candidates like registered nurses and other priority clinical pathways. Since implementing Phenom, YOY data shows:
Total external hires are up 28%
External nursing hires are up 31%
Early graduate hires are up 37%
Related Reading: Greasing the Gears for a Frictionless Talent Experience
5. Brother International Corporation
Brother International Corporation — a premier provider of home office and business products — needed a better way to market their brand and attract talent. So they set out to use AI to promote their brand and in turn, attract quality candidates.
What they needed — and fast — was a career site that could showcase their authentic employer brand, personalize job recommendations to candidates, and host a conversational chatbot that would serve as site visitors’ first introduction to the company.
After their new and improved career site was up and running, they adopted a new CRM to help screen passive candidates and capture qualified leads, and they relied on artificially intelligent talent analytics that automatically applied data insights to optimize apply options for candidates.
Without this AI recruiting platform, Brother’s recruiters “wouldn’t be capturing any leads from the chatbot, similar job subscriptions, or partial applications. This type of efficiency is extremely helpful, especially for our higher volume positions in sales and marketing,” said Darius Smith, Director of Talent Marketing and Employee Engagement at Brother.
After just three weeks of their career site rebrand and launch of new AI recruiting tools, Brother achieved:
140% increase in completed applications
45% increase in total page views
40% increase in job seekers
15% increase in returning job seekers
25% decrease in time to fill
“The truth is that when you’re hiring for one position, 99% of people will walk away without the job,” Smith said. But by using an AI recruiting platform to create an amazing candidate experience, “they won’t forget your company or their desire to work for you if a future opportunity arises.”
Read the full story: How Brother International Corporation Increased Completed Applications 140% with Rebrand
6. Stanford Health Care
It’s hard to visit a website without being greeted by a conversational chatbot these days. But, successful chatbots are those that can help employers provide a stand-out experience for candidates and give TA teams the ability to deliver personalization at scale by automating sourcing, screening, scheduling, and answering FAQs.
This is exactly what Stanford Health Care set out to achieve with their artificially intelligent chatbot, which has streamlined and simplified the candidate journey to allow candidates to complete the application process at their convenience — and right from their cell phones if need be!
What else does their chatbot do?
Provides relevant job matches. The chatbot takes candidates through a few questions, then suggests positions that best fit their skills and experience.
Makes applying easy. If a job candidate can’t complete the application process in one go, the bot allows them to pick up where they left off at any time.
Communicates through the CRM. When the bot captures candidate details and the position they’re interested in, that information gets passed along to the CRM where recruiters can pick up communication from there.
Answers and forwards FAQs. Any question asked by a candidate also gets sent to recruiters so they can follow up with that candidate personally.
Not only does the chatbot save recruiters hours of time, but in only six months, it garnered a quarter of a million interactions. It also drove 35,000 unique visits, 11,000+ candidate leads, and 12,000 apply clicks.
By using insight from the chatbot, the team was able to proactively address issues that typically would have resulted in calls and emails to HR from confused candidates. As a result, support tickets in the recruiter queue have dropped from an average of 50 per week down to one or two.
Last year alone, using an AI recruiting platform to reduce administrative burden and facilitate communication enabled the team to:
Conduct 2,856 meaningful career conversations with candidates
Reduce days to offer by 41 days
Re-engage with former applicants to fuel immediate pipeline increases
Host engaging internal mobility career events
Review the ROI on each recruitment vendor partnership, make adjustments, and redirect funds toward their candidate care engagement program
Read the full story: It’s All About the Bot: How Stanford Health Care Connects with Candidates
7. Thermo Fisher Scientific
Many organizations meet talent demands by buying talent. Pressed to fill critical roles or fill skills gaps, employers pay a premium to acquire employees — many of whom turn over quickly, leaving the organization back to square one.
But not Thermo Fisher Scientific. They set a goal to fill 40% of their open roles with internal talent by 2024 — which they exceeded, closing the year with a 46% internal hiring rate in December.
How are they doing it? Through:
Internal talent marketplace with content showcasing business units and respective opportunities, including open job roles and learning courses
Peer-to-peer networking
Connectivity to Business Resource Groups (DEI affinity groups)
Automated campaigns to generate excitement and engagement with the platform
Talent CRM to source internally as well as externally
All this technology lives in a centralized platform — the same platform they’re using for their external recruiting. This technology is built on a foundational AI model using an ontology of roles and skills to rapidly create career progressions. The effect of the unified platform is a constantly learning system that updates not only as employees move, but also as new talent is brought into the organization.
“When you show employees that using the platform helps them grow and develop, that’s the best mechanism to keep enthusiasm going,” said Amy Ritter, Senior Director of Talent Acquisition at Thermo Fisher.
Read the full story: How Thermo Fisher Scientific is Filling 40% of Roles Internally
Let AI do the heavy lifting when it comes to your recruitment strategy. AI-powered technology can save recruiters hours of time they would have otherwise spent on administrative tasks, attract quality candidates to your talent pool, and boost employee retention.
If you’re looking for more ways AI can work for you, download The Definitive Guide to Artificial Intelligence for Recruiting.
Maggie is a writer at Phenom, bringing you information on all things talent experience. In addition to writing, she enjoys traveling, painting, cooking, and spending time with her family and friends.
Get the latest talent experience insights delivered to your inbox.
Sign up to the Phenom email list for weekly updates!