The rapid evolution of AI is reshaping talent acquisition, but many TA teams are struggling to keep pace. While AI offers the potential to revolutionize processes, reduce friction, and improve candidate experiences, adoption rates remain low. At the same time, businesses are under pressure to boost productivity and efficiency, leaving TA teams vulnerable to being left behind—or worse, having changes imposed on them without their input.
So, how can talent acquisition leaders embrace AI and use it to align themselves with broader corporate objectives?
My guest this week is Adam Godson, CEO of Paradox, a pioneer in conversational AI for talent acquisition. Adam shares valuable insights from working with industry leaders like McDonald’s and Chipotle, exploring how AI is transforming recruitment at scale. He discusses how TA leaders can harness AI to future-proof their organizations, deliver tangible ROI, and create hiring systems that prioritize speed, efficiency, and better candidate experiences.
In the interview, we discuss:
• Developments over the last 12 months
• What are employers who use conversational AI for hiring achieving?
• How McDonalds reduce time to hire from 21 days to 3 days
• How AI is massively improving the candidate experience
• The use of AI in high-volume hiring gives us a glimpse into the future.
• AI adoption is being driven by its impact on the bottom line.
• The importance of good system and experience design
• What will TA teams of the future look like?
• The challenge of challenging recruiting norms
• The opportunity for TA Leaders
• What is going to happen in 2025
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Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
You know, I’ve recently heard some crazy success stories when it comes to hiring with AI. FedEx is sending offers to candidates within 10 minutes. General Motors saved $2 million in recruiting costs in a year. Chipotle reduced time to hire by 75%, and Nestle’s global recruiting team is saving 8,000 hours annually. The craziest thing, all of these companies did it by leveraging the same technology. Paradox. Paradox is the leader in conversational hiring. Powered by conversational AI, Paradox can be your ats, CRM and careers site or can help automate parts of the hiring process on top of workday. UKG and SAP. Their product suite is driven by a 24/7 AI assistant who can handle up to 95% of the hiring process for deskless hiring teams. Or just automate specific time consuming tasks like screening, interview scheduling and onboarding to allow recruiters to focus on recruiting. Paradox has helped hundreds of the world’s top employers simplify hiring and save money while creating great candidate experiences in the process. Spend more time with people, not software. With Paradox, you can find out more by going to Paradox AI.
Matt Alder [00:01:40]:
Hi Adam, and welcome back to the podcast.
Adam Godson [00:01:43]:
Hey Matt, great to be with you.
Matt Alder [00:01:45]:
Always great to have you on the show. For people who may not have seen you on the show before or may not have come across your great work, could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Adam Godson [00:01:55]:
Sure will. I’m Adam Godson. I’m CEO of Paradox and Paradox does conversational AI for talent acquisition.
Matt Alder [00:02:01]:
Fantastic. So I checked back through the archives and it’s pretty much a year to the day since you were last on the podcast and we were talking about everything that was going on with generative AI, how it was moving forward, all those kind of things. So I suppose the perfect way to sort of set the scene is to. Is to ask you what’s happened in the last 12 months? What have you seen in Talent acquisition? What have you seen with AI? How are things evolving?
Adam Godson [00:02:27]:
Yeah, absolutely. I think lots of things have changed in the last year and it’s been a great year. I think maybe number one of the things that have changed is the appetite people have to talk about AI and a maturing attitude about AI in talent acquisition. And I think there was maybe some fear and confusion that has moved to curiosity and early execution stages in using AI and talent acquisition. And some of that’s come from external pressure, not necessarily the genuine Like I really love change in that way. And so I think we’ve seen the market move to some degree that way and then more solution providers. Paradox, of course, using AI in different parts of the product and using multiple language models and finding all the right solutions to the challenge. And so it was maybe seemed simple at one point, but then figuring out the complexities of how it all works, how AI can benefit us ultimately trying to get. Get work done.
Matt Alder [00:03:29]:
There are some fundamental shifts potentially going on here, aren’t there? Because I’ve heard you talk before about conversations being the new. The new interface to work. What’s this making is possible? How are things going to kind of shift fundamentally from where we are right now?
Adam Godson [00:03:44]:
Yeah, I think the introduction of large language models and new voice models and to some degree video models as well has just led to an accessibility of data and information that was different than before, where we can simply talk. Talk to a computer. Every day of my working life I’ve gone to log into a machine and using a username and password, then used a graphical user interface and used a mouse or a trackpad to click on things to get information. I used a keyboard to type and search. And that’s beginning to change. Where I have a question now I just hold the button on my phone and talk into it with my voice and it gives me an answer back with its voice and we can have a conversation back and forth to get to the next level depth of a question. We use copilots and other things to assist our work because we understand that they can potentially understand the context of a page or internal information of our company. And that modality has changed and it’s not scary. Modalities have often changed in how we use computers and how we interface with different products. But it is new and there’s lots of discovery and iteration that comes along with that. And I think the way that human beings fundamentally will use computers is beginning to change.
Matt Alder [00:05:00]:
I think that’s really interesting and I was going to agree with you about every day of my working life I’ve logged on with a username and password and I remembered in my first job I didn’t actually have a computer. So I’m kind of like I’m that old that we didn’t actually have them, but that was only for the first six months of my career. I think it’s really interesting what you’re saying there about voice actually, because just watching I have a 9 year old son and just watching the way he interfaces with iPads and laptops and all that kind of stuff. It’s changed in the last 12 months. He’s using his voice all the time as his first default thing to go to, probably because he doesn’t like spelling. But it’s funny watching that kind of just natural, you know, that natural shift and watching someone do something that I’m not personally doing, but you can kind of see how that works.
Adam Godson [00:05:45]:
Yeah, because he doesn’t remember when it was terrible. He doesn’t have, have those memories of times where, you know, you shouted representative, representative into the, into the phone. And so it’s always worked. And as the technology gets better, we overcome the barriers that once existed, I think about trying to get customer support for an airline or something else. It’s interesting to hear how people want to interface. Many people want to talk to a person. Other people say, I definitely don’t want to talk to a person, I just want to get the job done. And as the chat has gotten better, we see significantly more use of that. And I think that leads into our. You can say what you want about how people maybe have preferences, but ultimately people want to get work done and they want to achieve their goal. If they’re a candidate, they want to figure out how to get to the decision as fast as possible. If they’re a recruiter, they want to find the right people. If they’re a coordinator, they want to get the interview scheduled. And so modalities will change and preferences will change but ultimately people want to get stuff done.
Matt Alder [00:06:44]:
Yeah, no, absolutely. It’s funny you saying about the, you know, Syrian, that used to be quite rubbish. It also didn’t used to understand Scottish accents and my son has a Scottish accent so he doesn’t have that trauma to live with either. So I going to talk about the, where things are going and the kind of the bigger picture business wise in a second. But before we do, it’s probably worth contextualizing this a bit for. People tell us some of the things that your sort of clients are achieving with conversational AI. You know, doing things differently because you work with, you know, some really big companies doing who have really big hiring needs, they have to hire very fast. You know, what’s changed for them? What are they, you know, what are they doing, what are they, what are they achieving?
Adam Godson [00:07:26]:
Yeah, we see companies apply AI differently based on the type of roles they hire for and what they’re looking to achieve. So I’ll give you a couple of examples. We see tremendous success in volume roles. So we’re looking to do some sort of fact based screening around, do you have this certification? Do you have this skill? Do you have this eligibility to work? Can you work these hours and be able to get through sort of that sifting process quite quickly and get people connected and be able to take time to hire from 21 days to three days for McDonald’s, one of our clients. But also being able to, some have gone all the way to lights out hiring and saying we’re going to hire in 10 minutes and say we’re going to do a background check, get you a conditional offer the very first time we interact for, for some roles. And so we see some clients going all the way that way as well. But then I think one thing that’s really important about this era is not trying to generalize. One way of hiring is looking at the roles and doing some real design work on what the process should be for this type of hire. And it’s funny, we all did that before applicant tracking system existed. Did our executive hiring different than our shop floor hiring different than our corporate hiring? And then when some of the early ATS’s forced us into one workflow, it all kind of became homogenous again. So designing that, so redesigning that back out and saying for our corporate roles or our executive roles, we’re going to have a more personal or hiring process. And for those, we see a great use case on interview scheduling. So we’ll schedule over 25 million interviews this year using AI. And that includes not just the one to one interview, but those, those gnarly seven part interviews over two days in five locations, three languages, conference room booking, all the things that, you know, have been difficult for a long time about that. But being able to use AI, it’s a really good problem and that AI can solve. And so I think there’s a few kind of core use cases that have really coalesced around both high volume and interview scheduling for professional roles. That made a ton of sense and a huge difference for our clients. Roi?
Matt Alder [00:09:34]:
Yeah, and I think it’s always interesting because when I’m talking to people about AI and what’s possible, I always think that that high volume hiring, it’s kind of like the future’s already here, it’s sort of over there because I think that’s where so much of the innovation has been. Just because of the pressures those businesses are under and the scale of it and all that kind of stuff.
Adam Godson [00:09:53]:
Yeah, no question. And I think Covid brought the ROI of that to life. Restaurants that were, you walk in and say great, there’s lots of tables here and people saying, oh, that section is closed because we don’t have staff and being able to really understand the bottom line of that. And we’ve had clients that have, I think for the first time in my career saying, not only did talent acquisition drive us cost savings, it actually drove revenue because we were able to have more people out doing jobs that produce revenue for us, whether that’s plumbers or electricians or people doing samples in a store or being able to have real staffing that drives revenue. And I think that’s been an interesting case. But you’re absolutely right that at the front line, where speed is equivalent to candid experience, that’s been a really impactful use case and is already here.
Matt Alder [00:10:41]:
One of the things that has also struck me is I think that in a lot of ways we’re kind of having the wrong conversation about AI in talent acquisition and HR are at the moment. And I suppose to illustrate that, I was really struck by the European fintech company Klarna, who earlier in the year said they were replacing 700 customer service roles with AI. Now, I don’t know whether they were people they already employed or people they didn’t employ or how that kind of worked out, but it seems to have worked out very well for them. They’re all over the kind of business and financial press. The CEO said they’re saving billions of dollar millions of dollars. They’re looking at how they can bring this to other parts of their business. And ultimately he said that he thinks they can half the amount of people who work there. It strikes me that that’s the kind of conversation CEOs are having at the moment about productivity and efficiency and all that sort of stuff. But in ta, we seem to be kind of sort of stuck talking about what are the use cases for AI, should we do this, all this sort of stuff. Do you kind of see that, that kind of mismatch? And do you think that sort of puts TA in a. In a. In a vulnerable and dangerous position?
Adam Godson [00:11:49]:
I do. I see that, that mismatch. I see businesses projecting company growth and staff decay for the, really the first time in my career, large businesses saying, we plan to grow, you know, 10% per year for the next five years, but our staff is going to be flat or down 10%. And I think in the past you’d say, well, how’s that going to happen? That doesn’t make sense. And the use of AI is in the plans of companies to really drive margin, to be frank. And in many ways it’s just in time, given birth rates and labor shortages around the world, I think there are ways that we can talk about the macro of how that will shape out. But I think from a talent acquisition perspective, this is the era where progressive teams have a chance to get things done. Teams that wait three years, five years are going to have things done not on their request, it’s going to be done for them. So I think there is an urgency of action and thinking about where do I get started, where can I think about what the ways are that we can begin to automate this? The future is somewhat inevitable in this case, but it’s also about good design. And so people that have heard me talk about it say, I think there are two types of recruiters in the future. There are people that are going to design systems of how things get done. They’re going to design the delivery, they’re going to design the experience, but AI will do most of the actual work and the delivery in that system. People will be inserted at certain points in the process. So this is the like, convince them to join step. But then I also think there’s going to be some back to basics for recruiters as well, from some of the people that really can convince people to join, where AI can’t have that emotional connection with someone. I’m not going to uproot my life, move across the world, you know, those types of huge decisions without having a connection with someone about having that, that emotional part. And so I think there will, there will be a great place for recruiters in the world. And as long as there’s competition for talent, there will be talent acquisition teams. Is how those teams look is going to be vastly different than it does today. And I think that’s a good thing. I think there’s a lot of people that wish they were spending time convincing candidates to join and making emotional connections. And they’re actually just clicking in their systems and they’re doing administrative work. And we hope to really bifurcate those things to say, let’s design great systems that give us flow and let’s really spend time talking to people.
Matt Alder [00:14:21]:
No, absolutely. And I suppose it’s in terms of kind of how we get there and how teams get there. I suppose the first part of it is really redefining the conversation. And rather than talking about AI, it’s talking about where does AI get us to? What’s the outcome of it? Is that the right way to think, do you think?
Adam Godson [00:14:37]:
Yeah, I think it’s really about how do we just change the way that we work. In all the ways and think about how do we be sure that we’re good partners to the business as talent acquisition, getting it the talent that it needs in the most efficient way possible. And I think recruiting has to start to function, look more like a business function in itself. And it needs to use AI to power the things that it does. And the teams that realized that early are going to be the teams that are have an edge in being most successful.
Matt Alder [00:15:04]:
You’ve seen a number of companies kind of go through this process at almost kind of the speed of light in the last few years. What would your advice be to everyone else? You know, there are lots of people out there who are, they’re not sure what’s going on. You know, TA teams are under pressure from everywhere at the moment in terms of finding talent, in terms of budgets, in terms of all those. In all those, in terms of all those, all those kind of things. And obviously there’s a nervousness around things like regulation and ethics and all that kind of stuff. How do people get moving? What should they focus on? What’s the way forward?
Adam Godson [00:15:36]:
Yeah, I think certainly having a point of view is really important. So I think understanding how they want their organization to use AI and what their talent acquisition team’s point of view is important. I think the second is finding the spot to start and to start today. People ask me all the time, where should I start? I think there’s a couple. The two proven use cases make a lot of sense. Find a spot in your organization where you’ve got volume recruiting, automate the heck out of it and show tremendous wins. The second would be interview scheduling. Especially if you’re on workday or SAP or some other core system, being able to go on top of that in a deeply integrated way or two. Just winning use cases to get started and then from there you typically do not have to ask for adoption. People will beat down the doors to say, I saw what you did in that, that department. How do I do that with my team? And starting getting that to spread in different geography, different parts of the business and finding the ways that you can be more, more productive. And I think focusing on how to make the talent acquisition team a star in that way and to make it effective. And it doesn’t have to be all about AI, AI, AI. It’s really about productivity and how did you make your team so much better in a relatively short period of time? People will come, knock and they’ll ask for more.
Matt Alder [00:16:58]:
The candid experience is a big part of this as well, isn’t it?
Adam Godson [00:17:01]:
Absolutely, absolutely. That’s one of the interesting parts is I think there was a time where automation and candidate experience people thought were different ends of a spectrum. And what we find is it’s not is that the experience is actually better. There’s significantly higher satisfaction using AI than not using AI, partially because of speed. Able to schedule an interview in 12 minutes versus five days. No one was getting self actualization from that interview scheduling process that they wanted to wait five days for it. They wanted it to be right and they wanted to be fast. And so getting that done right and fast it leads to higher satisfaction and the same with a volume process. Our friends at Chipotle for example said we want someone to get an interview as fast as they can get a burrito. And being able to say accomplish that led to some wow moments and be able to say great. This actually is a way better experience than waiting around for someone to get back to me.
Matt Alder [00:17:53]:
Yeah, I think it’s interesting because it’s just in terms of like how we’ve all moved on in terms of our expectations which is, which has always kind of happened with technology. But you know I’m just thinking of I recently opened a bank, a new bank account which I could do on my phone in less than 5 minutes and scan my ID and all that kind of stuff as opposed to probably 10 years ago having to go into a bank with some forms and it in lots of ways recruitment hasn’t kind of moved on from that. Going into the bank with lots of forms and people’s expectations have if I can set up a bank account in two minutes why can’t I apply for a job and get an interview in the same kind of way.
Adam Godson [00:18:28]:
Yeah, it’s interesting like I, I was reflecting the other day about like even the E commerce resolution, a revolution and I, I don’t know if there’s really anyone that I that is super satisfied with the talent acquisition process today. Recruiters, candidates, companies, we’ve put sort of this nicer interfaces in some ways in the last generation of E commerce on things but you know Amazon can, I can pick out something and ship to my house in that same day recruiting. It took 45 days to get hired 20 years ago, it takes 45 days to get hired now. And so I think that’s the promise of AI to actually make the back end changes and be able to really run processes in a way that’s frictionless and to run as fast as organizations can run. And I think the decision making still in this era can be assisted by AI, but should be done by humans. And so being sure that humans are still in the loop of decisions today. And so it won’t run same day all the time in that case. But I think getting all the friction out of the process to get to the essence and the core of the decision is something we absolutely can accomplish. And to be sure that we take friction out of labor markets, which will ultimately impact economies, and economies will be able to move faster, people will be able to get food on their table faster and be able to get products and services faster. And what we do really can improve the way that economies function.
Matt Alder [00:19:51]:
I suppose with recruitment, it’s almost like there’s this kind of overstory in recruitment about how recruitment works. You have a cv, you have an interview, and the Internet never actually changed that. It kind of made it quicker in some ways, slower in other ways, but it didn’t change that kind of fundamental mechanic of how people think and apply for jobs. And I think what’s interesting about this AI revolution is it does change that. And for lots of people, that’s really, you know, that’s kind of really disconcerting because it’s kind of rethinking something that has always been, you know, has always been the same.
Adam Godson [00:20:26]:
Yeah, it’s interesting. There’s a. There’s a concept we, we talk about internally called skeomorphism, sort of like making things seem familiar of like a past generation. It started with my. My son actually came to me with a. With a. A floppy disk, like an old 3 1/2 inch floppy disk. He said, why do you have the save icon? I had to think about that for a moment and then I was like, oh. Because to him, this has never appeared in a physical form, but we made the icon look like save because that’s what save meant in a certain generation. And so I think there will be, as AI takes hold, there will be things that give us familiarity and give us the social expectation of what things look like in the recruiting process. But I also think that a lot of it makes no sense in an AI era. Like, why is a CV produced of what I want to tell you about me, not what maybe objectively actually happened, or why do you get to edit these things? And then I go do a background check later and check to see if what you said was true. And so there’s some things that are incongruous there based on the legacy of technology that I think we’ll sort out and ultimately reduce friction in the next phase.
Matt Alder [00:21:34]:
I think I’ve asked you this question before, but I’m going to ask it to you again. All the rapid change that’s been going on in the last sort of, well, since the pandemic, basically things have sort of moved quicker than any of us thought they probably could. What surprised you most in the last sort of 12 months in terms of what’s possible or in terms of what’s happened?
Adam Godson [00:21:53]:
You know, one of the things that actually has surprised me a little bit is I thought things would be moving even faster of and part of that is just underestimating the ability of like both people and organizations to digest change. And things are moving very. Are moving quickly in some ways. But I think if you’d asked me in 2022 what I thought 2025 looked like, I would have thought we would be an existential crisis mode for anyone that doesn’t use isn’t using AI actively in their processes. I think people who aren’t using AI today are falling behind, but I don’t think it’s reached sort of crisis level for them. It still is an opportunity to be early and to gain competitive advantage where maybe I thought two years ago we might be even further along than we are.
Matt Alder [00:22:43]:
And I guess it’s actually an opportunity for TA leaders to set the direction to put a vision out there and go towards it rather than having that kind of forced upon them, isn’t it?
Adam Godson [00:22:52]:
It is. We did a Harvard Business Review piece a couple maybe last year And I think 97% of organizations that use AI in the process got value from it and thought it was a great good investment. But like 11% of surveys thought their participants were using it. And so this just tells me that it is working and that there’s time yet to get competitive advantage in that. And we’re starting to see some of the laggard industries or traditionally laggard industries like mining and banking and other things that are compliance heavy come along now as well. Which, which tells me that like the ROI stories are really powerful and even some maybe not as traditional innovative industries are saying, yes, we can get advantage and we want it.
Matt Alder [00:23:33]:
And you’ve kind of already anticipated my final question, which is, you know, I always like to ask questions about the future, but how much change do you think we are going to see in the next 12 months? So if we were talking again in December 2025, what are we going to be talking about? What will have happened in the next 12 months? It’s a very difficult question, actually more difficult to answer than if I’d said five years. I think I agree with you.
Adam Godson [00:23:57]:
It is it’s the old place of you. We underestimate change in the in the long term, underestimate, overestimate in the short term. First of all, let’s do it. Let’s make it an annual thing. Let’s talk every December so let’s be sure we connect next December. We can see how I how I did but but I think we see a year full of adoption of AI in some of the core pieces. I think a lot of companies will choose to get started and getting started in a spot that is simple or a spot that is a significant pain point. And so I think there will be companies that choose to get started. I also think that this year is going to be a year of some chaos where companies or job seekers will write their resume with AI. Companies will begin to read resumes with AI and then try to find ways to get signal and that’ll lead to more assessments and and in person interviewing and other things that this game of whack a mole of trying to figure out how we get signal. And so I think the next year is going to be fairly chaotic. But I do think lots of companies will get started with AI in some way to take the first step and then begin to develop their longer vision for how we think talent acquisition looks in a fully AI driven future.
Matt Alder [00:25:04]:
Adam, thank you very much for talking to me, Matt.
Adam Godson [00:25:07]:
Always great to talk to you.
Matt Alder [00:25:09]:
My thanks to Adam. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast and get the inside track on everything that’s coming up on the show.
Matt Alder [00:25:31]:
Thanks very much for listening.
Matt Alder [00:25:33]:
I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
