Multi-Agent AI For Talent Acquisition Arrives: Eightfold, Paradox, Maki, Radancy, And More

Today Eightfold introduced its AI powered Candidate Agent, which fits together with its AI Interview agent. Not only is this an important announcement for Eightfold as it goes after the red-hot high volume hiring market, it’s emblematic of the whole new Multi-Agent AI solutions coming in the world of HR 2030. (I explain more in this podcast.)

Let me explain. The AI Candidate Agent is designed to handle job candidate inquiries and candidate questions about a job, the company, or topics like pay, hours, required credentials, flexibility, benefits, and more. This agent, similar to agents available from Paradox, Maki, Smartrecruiters, and others, speeds and simplifies the candidate inquiry process, building a strong and positive relationship between employer and job seeker.

As I explain in the podcast, chatbots for job candidates have been around for a decade but now, with advanced AI, they can interact directly and in depth with a candidate, speeding and simplifying the process of applying for a job. Not only do they help job seekers understand the opportunity, they speed the process and help the employer deal with the massive floods of job candidates coming from job-apply tools.

This agent, shown above, is designed to handle thousands of candidates inquiring about thousands of jobs, and it works via mobile, web, Slack, and other channels. So for companies with lots of high volume hiring, it makes it easier than ever to qualify, inform, and source people.

But that’s only a small part of talent acquisition. Our HR 2030 blueprint explains 24 different agent workflows we will eventually need, and in Eightfold’s case this system can directly take a candidate to an Eightfold powered career site, to an apply process, and then to the company’s AI interviewer. Data is stored in Eightfold’s ATS and could be used later for other parts of the process.

While this is new for Eightfold, who is the pioneer vendor in talent intelligence, this type of functionality is also available from Paradox (Workday), Maki People, Phenom, SmartRecruiters, UKG, and many other vendors. So as you look at amazing tools it’s important to look at how the multi-agents work together and how much industry knowledge and experience these vendors have.

Paradox, for example, leads the market in high-volume frontline work hiring (Chipotle, McDonalds), while Maki has been staking out a large presence among companies that want a sophisticated assessment system coupled to its agentic recruiting (H&M, Delta Airlines), and the other vendors have other differentiators. UKG, for example, and automatically open job requisitions based on frontline-worker demand from its workforce management platform, creating a dynamic real-time candidate hiring solution.

Remember also that agents aren’t that useful without access to deep pools of data. So if you deploy these tools in a multi-vendor environment you’re going to want to think about your HR 2030 data architecture and make sure you have a team and infrastructure to store the policies and candidate data you collect. A candidate who is chatting with the agent may be an alumni, someone who applied before, or even an internal candidate. So as I explain in the podcast, you want to think through these use-cases in an architectural way.

Eightfold also recently introduced a set of tools called Talent Forge to encourage and help companies build their own agents as well. In many cases the vendor-provided agents are functional and powerful but you’ll want to extend them over time. The 20+ agents we’ve identified in HR 2030 are only the beginning: imagine an agent that pre-screens candidates based on a candidate’s language or level of education, or an agent that is customized for internal applicants and is directly invoked when a company goes through downsizing. We have more than 200 business uses-cases for agentic HR you may want to consider.

The frontline worker HR market is explosive as more and more companies shift their focus on optimizing this important part of their workforce. If you want to dig into this space more read our new research on “The Five Types Of Frontline Workers” which shows you how to build frontline hiring and managerial programs in detail. Eightfold, as a pioneer in AI-powered HR, is now moving into this space and these tools will be very successful with their existing and new clients.

One thing we’ve learned, as we’ve studied AI-powered recruiting in detail, is how important it is to “rethink your talent acquisition process” as these agentic solutions come your way. Companies like ISS Facility Services and Fontainebleau Las Vegas, who use AI to hire thousands of people at scale, told us how important it was to bring HR and IT together and look at the process as a whole.

These tools are so highly scalable and dynamic that they radically change the roles you need. Many companies that use products like Eightfold, Paradox, Maki, and others for agentic recruiting find they can reduce time-to-hire from two weeks to three days; they can eliminate hundreds of roles in a call center to schedule interviews, and increase quality of hire as well. H&M, for example, found that its agentic recruiting solution improved retention by 30% in many locations, simply because it deploys in-depth assessment at a scale never before possible.

Note also that the ROI of these tools is far bigger than savings in HR. Chipotle has promoted its implementation of Paradox on CNBC as one of their most valuable AI projects in the company. Faster and higher quality hiring enables the company to sell more burritos and expand locations more quickly. In the high-volume world of hiring, these types of systems are truly revolutionary.

Right now there are more than a million employers around the world who have some type of frontline workforce (distribution, hospitality, retail, transportation, hair cutters, cleaning, contractors, and of course healthcare). My guess is that fewer than 5% of them use agentic recruitment tools today. So this market is massive and the multi-agent solutions are barely even here yet.

I recommend you talk with Eightfold and see what they’ve done, and check out the others as well. And if you want to see the big picture of how this all fits together, give us a call and we’ll show you the HR 2030 blueprint. AI in talent acquisition is the most mature, proven market for AI in general. We’re excited to see products like this in the market, and I look forward to showing you more as the Fall conference season is just around the corner.

Read through our HR 2030 Vision or consult Galileo to learn more.

Additional Information

The Talent Acquisition Revolution: How AI is Transforming Recruiting

Interview with Ashutosh Garg, Co-Founder & CEO of Eightfold.ai and Viven.ai

HR 2030, The Josh Bersin Institute, And Galileo