Blog: What Happens When You Layer Two AI Recruiting Tools on Top of Workday

Last year, John Bruce posted an entry-level Workday role on his team. Within 24 hours, 500 candidates had applied. He had to take the posting down. Zoom out across his company’s entire hiring operation and the numbers get even more striking: 98,000 distinct candidates for 850 open reqs in 2025. More than 100 applicants per position on average. The question stopped being whether they were missing good candidates. It became: how many are we missing, and what are we doing for everyone who applied six months ago for a role that didn’t fit but would be perfect for the one we just opened?

 

John Bruce, VP of People Innovation and Technology at One Digital, joined me on Workday Gold to walk through exactly how his team tackled this, and the answer involved two tools most Workday shops haven’t fully explored: Paradox and HiredScore. What he found surprised even him.

 

The Paradox story started somewhere much simpler than AI: interview scheduling. One Digital ran an internal analysis and calculated they were spending roughly $120,000 a year in salary expense just managing the back-and-forth of scheduling interviews. JB’s logic was straightforward: buying a platform wasn’t going to eliminate headcount, but it could redirect those hours toward something that actually matters. More time for recruiters to understand what hiring managers actually need in a candidate. More time to screen. More time to be a real business partner instead of a calendar coordinator.

 

But Paradox turned out to be a lot more than scheduling. Their conversational career site, powered by an AI assistant named Olivia, sits directly on a Workday careers page and turns what is essentially a fancy job search report into a two-way conversation. Candidates can ask questions, explore openings, and complete an entire application through a text-based chat. JB’s team even renamed their assistant Olivia because they liked the name. The referral workflow was another standout: employees can text a short code, the system kicks off a conversation with the referred candidate entirely over text, and the whole application flows through to Workday automatically. JB told me that for the first time, he can actually enforce his referral policy, because the process is finally smooth enough to hold people to it.

 

That’s where HiredScore entered the picture. With nearly 100,000 candidates in the pipeline, something had to help the recruiting team actually get through them. JB was deliberate about how he deployed it. When the Mobley v. Workday lawsuit became public midway through their implementation, most companies would have paused. JB called legal, then made a decision: disclose the use of AI to every candidate in every state, not just California and New York where it’s legally required, and give everyone the option to opt out of both candidate grading and talent rediscovery. His opt-out rates were telling: about 12% for grading and 5% for talent rediscovery. Eighty-eight percent of candidates chose to stay in. JB’s framework was simple: don’t get sued, and don’t give people the creeps.

 

HiredScore also does something JB said he didn’t fully appreciate until he was deep in the deployment: it reformats every resume into a consistent layout. Summary, experience, education, skills, every single candidate. He spent time looking through 400 resumes trying to find a parsing error. He gave up. Beyond the recruiter efficiency gains, the consistent format quietly reduces hiring manager bias. A hiring manager who hires twice a year and sees wildly different resume formats brings a lot of noise into the decision. Standardization removes some of that.

 

What JB said he genuinely did not anticipate was how well Paradox and HiredScore work together. Paradox frees up recruiter time by automating scheduling and follow-up. HiredScore makes that freed time more productive by surfacing the right candidates faster and presenting them consistently. Each tool amplifies the other. JB called it a flywheel. His numbers back it up: time-to-hire has dropped, and the percentage of candidates who actually get reviewed has increased by about 20 percent. That matters for everyone in the process, including the candidates sitting in the pipeline wondering if anyone will ever look at their application.

 

If you’re using Workday recruiting and wondering where to start, JB’s advice is pragmatic. Match the tool to your biggest pain. Scheduling chaos and recruiter capacity? Start with Paradox. Drowning in candidates and losing good people in the pile? Start with HiredScore. And don’t assume either one is only for high-volume hiring operations. Seventy percent of One Digital’s hires are professional roles, not call center or hourly. JB bought these tools for professional hiring. They work.

 

JB will be at DevCon and Rising this year if you want to catch up in person. Otherwise, connect with him on LinkedIn. And if you want the full conversation, including his candid take on the legal landscape around AI in hiring, the latest Workday Gold episode is ready for you.

Listen to the full conversation on Workday Gold to go deeper.