Frontline hiring is more competitive than ever, with speed and efficiency now critical for success. However, the challenge doesn’t stop at making the hiring process faster; employers also need to stand out from their competition by offering a high-quality candidate experience and having a recruiting process that allows them to showcase what makes their organization unique.
It’s clear that AI-powered recruiting is already driving speed and efficiency in frontline hiring for many large organizations, but what’s the right balance between technology and humans to deliver an exceptional candidate experience and highlight an organization’s unique culture?
My guests this week are Sonja Breuer, Senior Vice President of Human Resources, and Aaron Einhorn, Senior HR Business Partner at Hamra Enterprises. In our conversation, they share how Hamra has successfully leveraged AI-powered recruiting technology to reduce their time-to-hire from 13 days to just 4. They also discuss how this has enabled them to better highlight the values, benefits, and culture that make Hamra Enterprises a uniquely attractive employer.
In the interview, we discuss:
• Hamra’s unique culture and employee programs
• Using AI to radically reduce time to hire
• Maintaining a consistent and engaging candidate experience
• Combining conversational AI with purposeful human connections
• Why speed, experimentation, and agility are critical in AI-powered recruiting.
• What happens if the AI makes a mistake?
• Building a true partnership with their technology vendor to drive innovation.
• What does the future look like
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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 is the leader in conversational hiring. Powered by conversational AI, Paradox can be your ATS, CRM and career 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 there. Welcome to episode 671 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. Frontline hiring is more competitive than ever, with speed and efficiency now critical for success. However, the challenge doesn’t stop at making the hiring process faster. Employers also need to stand out from their competition by offering a high value candidate experience and having a recruiting process that allows them to showcase what makes their organization unique. It’s clear that AI powered recruiting is already driving speed and efficiency in frontline hiring for many large organizations. But what’s the right balance between technology and humans to deliver an exceptional candidate experience and highlight an organization’s unique culture? My guests this week are Sonja Breuer, Senior Vice President of Human Resources, and Aaron Einhorn, Senior HR Business Partner at Hamra Enterprises. In our conversation, they share how Hamra has successfully leveraged AI powered recruiting technology to reduce their time to hire from 13 days to just four. They also discuss how this has enabled them to better highlight the values, benefits and culture that make Hamra Enterprises a uniquely attractive employer. Hi Sonja. Hi Aaron, and welcome to the podcast. It’s an absolute pleasure to have both of you on the show. Please, could you start off by just introducing yourselves and telling everyone what you do?
Sonja Breuer [00:03:18]:
Absolutely. So, I’m Sonja Breuer. I’m the Senior Vice President of Human Resources for Hamra Enterprises. We’re based in Springfield, Missouri, United States, but we actually operate in 11 different states. And we are a franchise of Wendy’s Panera Noodles & Co. And Caribou Coffee. And that’s what we do. We have approximately 7,500 employees. And so I get to work with all those peoples.
Matt Alder [00:03:45]:
Fantastic.
Aaron Einhorn [00:03:46]:
Hi, my name is Aaron Einhorn. I’m a senior HR business partner and I’ve been with Hamra for just over 14 years. I actually started as an hourly associate in a Panera that’s owned by Hamra, and I kind of unexpectedly took a left turn into human resources. I’ve been in HR for the last 11 years and on our team. In addition to supporting our Chicago Panera Bread market, I am also the. They call me the resident tech enthusiast. And I was highly involved in the implementation of Paradox when we started that partnership. And I’m still involved heavily day to day in managing Paradox and everything that has to do with our candid experience.
Matt Alder [00:04:28]:
Fantastic stuff. So I’m sure that most people listening will be familiar with your restaurants and your brands and all that kind of stuff, but tell us a little bit about Hammer itself. What’s the experience that you offer your employees like?
Sonja Breuer [00:04:40]:
Yeah, absolutely. So Hamra, the best way to say it is that we’re family owned and we feel family owned. We want people to succeed. If you think about a family, a family supports each other. A family wants their family members to rise and to, to, to make more money and to have a better life. And, you know, we want them to thrive. And we have many different programs through Hamra, such as the HERO Fund. And HERO is an acronym for Hamra Employees Reaching out and what that is. It’s a non for profit organization we started almost 13 years ago for our employees in times of need. So we pay for, you know, things like emergency travel. Mom has entered hospice. Mom won’t be around much longer, but you don’t have the money to go see Mom. Whether it in the States or even out of the states, we’ve sent people back to their home countries to actually see mom before mom passes. But we, you know, we pay for medical equipment that’s not covered under insurance. We pay for things like, you know, domestic abuse situations where, you know, typically the abuser is holding the money, you know, for the bank accounts. And so the person can’t get out of their abusive relationship. And so we actually give our employee the money to get their own place and to start a new life. And in many cases there’s kids involved and so it’s kind of like, you know, having that rich uncle that, you know, you can always go to to support you. And that’s really what Hamra feels like. You know, we don’t call them employees. We call them family members. So everything is very much about family. And we have programs for our people in school, whether that be high school or college. We have school programs such as the home program, where we allow them to work up to an hour of time getting paid, but studying. So they’re sitting in our dining room studying. We’ve actually even had some of our managers help them with their studies. You know, some of these locations are in rural locations where there’s no Internet at home, or maybe their family can’t afford Internet, so they have the ability to actually get onto our Internet and study. And so we’re carving out time that’s precious for these kids to study, whether it be high school or college. College. And get paid for it. On top of that, we also have good grades program. So I call this the side hustle. So not only can you come to work and get paid to study, but you can also come to work. And if you’re getting all A’s, we’re going to give you $300 a semester. If you get A’s and B’s, we’re going to give you $200 a semester. If you get, you know, all B’s, then we’re going to give you a hundred dollars a semester. So, one, you can come to work, study while you’re working, and then also get paid for great grades. And so that’s how we support our people through, you know, different programs like that. And we also give. If someone wants to buy a house, you know, new home buying is. Is daunting. If you’ve ever gone through it. You don’t know what you need, you don’t know what you should do and how much should I put down? So we’ll actually send you through classes for free so you can learn what you need and, you know, how to prepare to buy a home. And then we also will help you with the down payment of getting your first home, because just like a family member, we want you to live a life you love. And that’s actually in our charter. And, you know, the way to do that is through better education, you know, obviously paying you well, and then also helping you get, you know, home stability. So that’s how Hamra is different, is very much. We are the family that many of these people never had.
Matt Alder [00:08:24]:
That’s absolutely amazing. Some of those things are just fantastic. And does that. Do you kind of see that in things like engagement and tenure and all those kind of things back from the employees?
Sonja Breuer [00:08:34]:
Absolutely. We have a funny little saying that once you’ve received a grant, you’re hammerified. And what that means is that you’re a lifer. And, you know, you have seen the benefit, and you then praise the benefit and you go out and tell others about the benefit. And those managers, those employees that have received benefits, you know, from Hamra, such as those programs will tell their friends, and then their friends want to come work for us. And then managers that are conducting interviews will tell about their personal stories about how they’ve received. And so, you know, everyone wants to be a part of something bigger, right? You know, and maybe financially, you know, people can’t give to an organization or give to people that they want to support. But through the Hero Fund, we allow our employees to donate if they wish. They don’t have to if they don’t want to. But they can donate up to a doll every two weeks out of their paychecks goes directly to the Hero Fund, the Hamra family. So the owners of the company match dollar for dollar what our own employees put into the fund. Then 100% of that goes back to our own employees in times of need. If you’re in the Hero Fund, you get a T shirt that you can wear at work showing that you’re part of the Hero Fund. You get a pin. And people wear that proudly because they know that they’ve actually helped pay well over $2 million out to our employees in times of need. And that’s what brings a community. And we all want to be a part of a community that actually does good. Like that’s what we all want in life.
Matt Alder [00:10:06]:
No, absolutely. So I suppose in that context, what recruiting challenges do you have getting people.
Sonja Breuer [00:10:11]:
In front of us? You know, once they’re in front of us and they feel the hammer love, usually we can hook them. You know, usually they walk out of that interview saying, please hire me. But the problem is, is that when people. People see, you know, a Wendy’s, a Panera, a Noodles and company, you know, Caribou, they don’t understand the company behind it because we are a franchisee of those brands, and maybe they worked for a Wendy’s in a different state, and that Wendy’s didn’t have these programs. So it’s really, you know, educating the public who we are and what we offer and that we’re not just Wendy’s. Or Panera or Noodles and company or Caribou. We’re so much more behind the scenes. And so it’s really just getting that message out. And that’s where Paradox really helps us, because it screens through, you know, those people that may not fit what we need. And it allows us to have very, very purposeful, very, you know, dedicated conversations with the people that get in front of you, in front of us about who we are, and again, just about everyone that we sit down with and we tell our story. We have a really neat interview guide that is very interactive. There’s QR codes, You can download this, there’s pictures. We explain who we are. At the end of those interviews, they say, how can I work for you? And I want to work for you. But Paradox is the reason why they get to us in the first place.
Matt Alder [00:11:43]:
So let’s dive into that a little bit here. So in terms of the, you know, the technology that you use, I mean, how has that improved the hiring manager experience, the candidate experience? You know, what does technology deliver before you?
Aaron Einhorn [00:11:54]:
Technology is that first thing is it saves our managers time. Right. If you think about all the time the managers would spend before Paradox, reviewing resumes, contacting candidates, setting up telephone screens, you know, scheduling candidates for an interview, rescheduling interviews when the candidates can’t make it. Now, you know, in present day, all that is done by our, our Paradox automated assistant. His name is Sam. You’ll hear me use the word Sam a lot. So his name is Sam. Sam does all of that for our managers. Of the 10,000 plus people that Hamra hires a year, you’re talking tens or thousands or tens of thousands of hours that Sam has saved our managers. Additionally, you know, if we talk about candidates. Right. Works 24, 7, 365. He’s a robot in Panera. He’s a cute little loaf of bread in Wendy’s, he’s a little frosty in noodles. He’s a little pasta noodle. He’s always available. Our candidates can schedule an interview any day, anytime. They never have to wait for one of our managers, a human being. They can reschedule their interview when they want to if they can’t make it. And they never have to worry about the lag time between contacting a person at any point in the process.
Matt Alder [00:13:19]:
Tell us a little bit more about how the process works. So you still have a kind of a human interview within that. Is that what they’re scheduling?
Aaron Einhorn [00:13:27]:
Yeah. So our typical process would be, you know, you see our job. Right. Whether that’s on. Indeed. Or on a job board or on Panera’s website. And you know, pretty quickly we connect you with Sam. Right? Sam would do just a basic screening. Where do you want to work? Do you meet our basic qualifications? And using, you know, artificial intelligence, he’s going to determine if you’re qualified to get scheduled for an interview. Once he schedules you for an interview, he lets you know the day, the time, the location, managers get a notification of the day, the time, the location, and then from there it switches over to a very, like Sonja was talking about a very human experience where we now have you in front of us and it’s our opportunity to really sell you on why we are the place that you want to work.
Matt Alder [00:14:23]:
Technology is moving incredibly quickly at the moment and I know for many organizations they’re kind of struggling to keep up. They’re struggling to adapt their processes quickly enough perhaps to get some of the gains that are out there. How important important is speed, experimentation, agility in this age of AI recruiting to kind of get the, the kind of results that you’re getting.
Aaron Einhorn [00:14:46]:
Yes, speed. It’s funny when we, so Sonja and I go to like, you know, Paradox conferences, technology conferences at least once a year. And even though Hamra has 7,000 plus employees, I still find myself feeling like we’re a small company. When I’m sitting at the table with other HR and talent acquisition departments from companies with 20,000, 50,000, 100,000 employees, I still feel really small. You know, the cool thing about our size and our scope at Hamra is that when Paradox releases something new, I usually have less quote, unquote, red tape to cut through to get approval to use some of these new progressive features that Paradox is offering. You know, oftentimes when, when they bring us a new feature, I just, I just call Sonja. She’s, you know, she’s my boss and I say, hey, can we try this? And from there we, we usually go right into implementation. While Hamra will probably never be Paradox’s largest client, we strive to be a client that is utilizing as much of that cutting edge technology that Paradox offers as possible.
Sonja Breuer [00:15:54]:
Can I add here, is that in, in our industry, right, you know, quick service people can go to any quick service restaurant, you know, on any block, just about. And so the competition is so fierce that we have to be fast, it has to be easy, it has to be fast. And I will say it has to be fun. Okay? And so that’s why if we have those three things going for us, we know that we will get that person in front of us before our competitors will get them in front of us. And if we get them in front of us, we will win them over. And so speed is the name of the game for us. We went from, just to give you an example, we went from about 13 days from the date of the application to the date of hire before Paradox. Right now, date of application to date of hire is sitting right about four days. So you talk about speed. We are getting these people fast. We’re getting them engaged. You know, if you get an interview and you’re thinking, okay, I got an interview over here, I may not set up another interview to, this one’s done, and we can get that person hired within four days. That’s why we’re getting staffed and that’s how it’s happening, is because of the speed.
Aaron Einhorn [00:17:08]:
If I can just add. So speed and experimentation was really like this. The core of your question. You know, one thing I wanted to say for all the listeners is, you know, when we go to these conferences, people have asked me, well, well, what if. What if the AI makes a mistake? Right. Doesn’t that put your company at risk? Or aren’t you concerned about the risk of a lawsuit or litigation? And our philosophy is pretty much, I mean, that’s true, right? The AI can, has, and will make mistakes. Part of the experimentation is helping it learn, helping the AI get better. The same mistakes could happen with a human recruiter, right?
Matt Alder [00:17:46]:
Exactly. Yeah.
Aaron Einhorn [00:17:47]:
Realistically, our response is exactly the same. We’re going to contact the person, we’re going to clean it up. Whether it was AI, whether it was a human being, we’re going to do everything we can to make it right.
Matt Alder [00:17:57]:
It’s kind of interesting because in lots of ways, AI gets held to a higher level of accountability than humans do, which in some ways makes sense because it can do things quicker. But when you kind of take a step back, that’s an interesting way of thinking about the risk, isn’t it?
Aaron Einhorn [00:18:12]:
It’s programmed by humans, it’s overseen by humans. Isn’t human, has so much human influence, it could make a very human mistake? That’s what we’re here for. That’s why I feel that in this space, AI will never really replace our managers doing an interview. It’s to, like Sonja said, it’s to expedite the process. It’s to streamline the process. I don’t know that I ever see it fully replacing the. The onboarding process, at least at Hamra, because we want that human touch and we want that Human oversight to make sure that. That Sam is. Is doing what he’s supposed to do when he’s supposed to do it.
Sonja Breuer [00:18:53]:
Let me add this, too, because I think this is important because I’m the legal side of hr, right? So I look at consistency, and I look at, you know, I don’t know what humans are saying, you know, to. To an applicant. The cool thing is, is that in Paradox, I actually can see the conversation. I know exactly what AI has told that, you know, candidate. I know exactly what they’re going to tell the candidate. So the consistency for me, from a legal standpoint is beautiful because it is controlled, and I know exactly what was said, and I know that going forward, that is exactly what he will say again. And I can’t say that about humans.
Matt Alder [00:19:39]:
Yeah, no, exactly. I think that’s kind of a great example, I think, of what we’re talking about. It’s obviously very clear that you’ve got a great partnership with Paradox. And one of the things that I’ve seen from companies who are fully embracing AI and really getting the benefits from it is they do tend to have kind of great partnership relationships with the vendors that they work with. What makes for a good vendor partnership in. In this kind of AI era?
Sonja Breuer [00:20:04]:
Yeah, I think the word partnership is key. There’s some vendors out there that want to sell you a product, you know, and you. You get onto the demo and the salesperson will tell you anything they want to. To tell you that, you know, we’ll. We’ll hook you. That wasn’t the case with Paradox. You know, we. We have been, you know, with Paradox for many, many years. I think 20, 21, I think, is when we actually started. You know, one of the things that was very clear is that they were very honest at that time. They said, we can do this, but we can’t do this, and we can do this, but we can’t do this. And our group, Aaron and I, are notorious for asking for the world. Right? We want the world because we know that if we keep asking for more, Paradox keeps delivering more. You know, we say, well, this would make a big difference with us. And Paradox reacts. And there’s been updates within Paradox that we have actually requested, and they react faster than most partnerships have ever reacted. You know, we have a weekly call with our account manager, but guess what? I also have cell phone numbers of his boss’s boss. I can reach out at any time. You know, we tell each other merry Christmas. You know, it’s. It’s a true partnership. They love hamra they’ve all been hammerified, by the way. They love Hamra just as much as we love Hamra. And it’s not an act like they truly want us to succeed. And they know us by name. They know exactly what we need, and they know why we’re asking. And we’ve never been afraid to ask. There was, you know, one little thing that, you know, I had a complaint about about a year ago, and guess what? It got fixed, and it’s getting fixed. And that’s what I love, is that it truly is a partnership that, you know, we have a large payroll platform. And I don’t have that relationship with them. You know, I can’t go to them and say, hey, can you tweak this? Or what about this? Paradox is that way they want to make themselves better. And one of the important things that I think for people to know about Paradox is that it was designed by someone in the HR world. So Aaron, who actually was the founder of Paradox, did HR forever. It’s designed for hr. It makes sense for hr, and it handles the legal. It handles all of those, you know, little details that we need it to handle, as opposed to a tech person designing it. So the person in charge is hr, and he’s telling tech people how to design it. And it has been designed beautifully to meet exactly what we need it to meet. And I think that’s what makes Paradox stand out, is that they hear us, they react, and I feel comfortable going to any of them. Shoot. When you give me some big boss’s cell phone number and you don’t think I’m going to use it, try again, I’m going to use it. So. And. And they keep inviting us back, so I guess we’re okay.
Matt Alder [00:23:08]:
Brilliant. So as a final question, what’s next? What does the future look like?
Aaron Einhorn [00:23:13]:
I mean, our future at Hamra is going to involve more testing, using more features, being involved in more Paradox releases. You know, to tie back to what we were just talking about, we strive to be highly involved in the feedback process with Paradox. Right. Something we didn’t just talk about a minute ago is the power of influence. You know, we are partnered with a company that we get as a benefit. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship. They get a client that is willing to try out new features, take them for a spin, see how they work, and give feedback. We get to shape the future of a partner vendor that we’re really happy with. Right. So it’s this mutually beneficial relationship. Example, right. In 2024, we spent a lot of the year testing and giving feedback about a product that Paradox offers called Contextual AI. That’s, you know, every year whatever they offer us to test will be, you know, I’m going to go to Sonja, can we implement it, can we try it? And then, you know, work with my account manager at Paradox and give them feedback as, just to summarize it, as technology and AI becomes more and more prevalent in our day to day lives, we want to ensure that we’re advancing that technology within our own business. And I personally believe that if we integrate AI at higher levels, we’re not only going to save our candidates time, we’re going to save our management time and we’re going to, we’re going to save ourselves time.
Sonja Breuer [00:24:51]:
Ultimately, yeah, it’s a weird thing to say, but technology is helping us be more human with our humans because we’re not doing as much admin, we’re not on our computers as much, we’re not making phone calls, we’re not doing those things that’s taking us out of being with our people. And you know, I know that, you know, I’m, I’m a Gen Xer and so I know that people in my, you know, my age group think that technology takes the human side out of it. It actually puts it back in even more because you have more time for the human interactions.
Matt Alder [00:25:30]:
Sonja, Aaron, thank you very much for talking to me.
Sonja Breuer [00:25:33]:
Thank you, thank you.
Matt Alder [00:25:37]:
My thanks to Sonja and Aaron. 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 about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
