GM streamlines the recruitment process to hire the best talent

As part of an overall strategy to transition to an all-electric future by 2035, General Motors (GM) is shifting its focus from being solely an automotive manufacturer to a full-fledged technology organisation. To attract top talent to achieve this transformation, GM partnered with Paradox in Jun 2021 to automate its interview scheduling process.

Before partnering with Paradox, GM had to process one to two million applications annually, which required a team of 55 recruitment coordinators to manage the interview scheduling process. However, the scheduling stage was a significant bottleneck, taking five to seven days to schedule just one interview. Certain positions also required multiple panel interviews, which meant coordinating the schedules of several managers across different time zones or countries. To address this issue, GM sought an automation solution.

Meet EV-e, GM’s AI-powered assistant

According to Eileen Kovalsky, Head of Candidate Experience at GM, the organisation’s talent acquisition (TA) strategy has evolved to focus on attracting and retaining a diverse and agile workforce, and to empower employees to be more efficient in achieving better, safer, and more sustainable results.

GM’s TA leadership identified the need for interview automation and conversational software for their career site and wanted a solution that would work with the new system of people data record. After a careful consideration, Paradox was chosen as the vendor due to its ability to integrate with GM’s Workday infrastructure. In December 2021, GM and Paradox launched EV-e (which represent GM’s ambition for electric vehicles), a conversational artificial intelligence (AI) assistant that could automate tasks via text or chat conversations. It looks like this:

An AI-powered solution, EV-e interacts with candidates and provides job recommendations based on chat messages and answer to questions about GM’s business, culture, and teams. Candidates can receive immediate feedback through their preferred communication channel before applying, enabling them to confirm their interview times and move on to the next stage of the hiring process.

Kovalsky elaborated, “Rather than waiting days for an update after submitting a resume or completing a phone screen, candidates immediately get a message from EV-e through their preferred communication channel that will offer up times and confirm their next interview. One of the things that we know about TA is that constant communication is a huge benefit.”

By automating its interview scheduling process with EV-e, GM has experienced several benefits. For instance, time-to-hire has been significantly reduced, and the candidate experience has improved. The automation has also enabled GM to offer a more transparent hiring process, which helps differentiate the organisation’s candidate experience from its competitors. Furthermore, by automating these time-consuming and repetitive tasks, GM’s recruiters, hiring managers, and other stakeholders can now focus on more value-added tasks, thereby improving their productivity and overall efficiency.

Revolutionising the hiring process

EV-e has helped GM reduce time-to-schedule phone screens and interviews from five days to just 29 minutes, resulting in over 47,000 interviews conducted in under a year. This shift has been highly beneficial to GM, saving them over US$2 million and making it possible for recruitment coordinators to make hires weeks faster than manual scheduling would have allowed.

“Our coordinators are much more involved with rehire validation, and they completely own our background-checking process,” Kovalsky explained. “We are actively looking at other things they can do, such as conducting phone screens in high-volume recruitment areas and getting them involved in sourcing. We want to be open to what we can do differently to help develop our coordinators.”

Building upon this success, GM and Paradox plan to implement an enhanced automation module for the automaker’s career site. This module will allow EV-e to pull up relevant jobs and open applications in response to conversations with prospective applicants, as well as ask questions about basic candidate information and attach resumes to quicken the application process.

“Long-term, my vision is that EV-e will be the voice of TA from the time the candidates land on our career site to their first day,” Kovalsky added.

Read more about the results for GM candidates, employees, and the business in a report by The Josh Bersin Company: