Episode Details

What do you do when 1.5 million job applications are flooding in every year — and your best candidates are going dark before anyone reaches them? JLL, the world's largest commercial real estate firm, faced exactly that problem. Their recruiters were buried in manual CV screening, handling just 10 open roles each, and watching top talent slip away because response times lagged weeks behind candidate expectations. JLL deployed HiredScore AI — now part of the Workday platform — starting with a 20-person pilot in India in 2021 and rolling out globally in 2022. Two tools changed everything: Spotlight, which scores and ranks every applicant against job requirements instantly, and Fetch, which mines existing applicant databases to surface overlooked candidates who match new openings. The results were structural, not incremental. Recruiter capacity jumped from 10 open roles to 50 per person — a genuine 5× increase. Screening time dropped 70%. Quarterly hires climbed from 3,500 to 5,500, a 64% increase. And candidate response rates went from heavy ghosting to near 100%, because when recruiters reach out in hours instead of weeks, people actually hear back. But the real lesson from JLL isn't the technology — it's the prerequisite. HR leader Jane Curran framed it directly: robust processes create better data, and better data creates better AI. JLL didn't deploy AI onto a broken system. They standardized workflows and cleaned up data first, then turned the AI on. Combined with a top-down cultural expectation — leaders actively asking their teams how they used AI today — JLL achieved 70% recruiter adoption. The machine does the sorting. The human makes the call. And that division of labor is exactly what makes 5× capacity sustainable.