- Cisco is a digital communications and networking provider with 85,000 employees worldwide.
- The company has begun using AI to help improve its recruiting efforts and the hiring process overall.
- This article is “CXO AI Playbook“Business leaders speak openly about how they're testing and using AI.”
In “CXO AI Playbook,” Business Insider presents mini-case studies of AI adoption across industries, company sizes, and technology DNA. Each company talks about the problem they're trying to solve with AI, who is making those decisions within their company, and their vision for the future of AI.
Cisco is a digital communications and networking provider based in San Jose, California. It offers software-defined networking, cloud, and security solutions to businesses. Founded in 1984, Cisco has approximately 85,000 employees worldwide.
Situation analysis: What problem were they trying to solve?
Francine Catzoudas, Cisco's executive vice president and chief people officer, told Business Insider that the company's success is down to its people. But hiring the best talent is easier said than done. Sometimes you have to convince the best candidates to apply. Catzoudas said connecting with so-called quiet candidates was an early use of artificial intelligence at Cisco.
“How you approach quiet candidates has always been a bit of an art,” Katsuodas says. “Over the years, I've heard stories from candidates saying, 'I've never responded to an email, but I had to respond to this recruiter's email.'”
Katsodas said a good recruiter can find the right combination of words to grab a candidate's attention. Good recruiters personalize their emails, but it takes time to hone the right message. AI can help speed up the process, she added. “We're finding that with AI, we can customize more than ever before,” Katsodas said.
Key Staff and Partners
Zohra Yafai, vice president of global talent acquisition at Cisco, worked with Katsudas on integrating AI into the recruiting process.
Randstad, a global recruiting firm, is one of Cisco's recruitment partners. Katsuodas said experimenting with AI in recruiting has given the company “a little more confidence and boldness.”
Use of AI
Cisco is using generative AI to gather information about potential recruits and customize the emails it sends to them. By customizing its recruiting messages, Cisco can increase the number of emails it sends to quiet candidates who might resist connecting in other ways. “If we can increase the return on these emails that recruiters send, that's meaningful,” Katsuodas said. The company started the initiative slowly and then ramped up its efforts, she added.
“Anything we do will probably start with an experiment or a pilot, run the analysis and understand the risks, and then go ahead and decide to scale,” she said.
Cisco is also using AI to schedule interviews and follow-up meetings. “Previously, we would schedule things manually,” Katsuodas told BI. “When you can do it all with AI, it speeds things up.”
Did it work, and how did the leaders know?
Speed is important in the hiring process: “If companies are chasing you and moving quickly, there's a real upside to that momentum,” she said.
“If a company contacts you and then you don't hear back for three to four weeks, and then an interview is scheduled two weeks later, that means they're not very interested,” she added.
Cisco said it's still early days for its AI rollout and it hasn't yet identified any quantitative metrics for success, but the company will continue to monitor progress and evaluate areas for improvement.
What's next?
Katsuodas said the company plans to roll out more pilot projects to test generative AI: “As a company, we have always believed there is a better way to do things or something we can learn to better serve our customer community.”
We'd love to hear from you, so if you have any thoughts about your company's AI journey, please email us. jhood@businessinsider.com.
