1000+ Hires, 6 Weeks: Alight's High-Volume Automation Story

"Let's work smarter, not harder." That's the motto Julie Eagy, Head of Talent Acquisition Operations at Alight, instills in her recruiting team. In a recent conversation with us, Eagy shared how this philosophy would be put to the ultimate test when faced with what seemed like an impossible hiring challenge.

Check out Alight’s entire story here or grab the highlights below!

The Challenge: Compressed Timeline, Massive Scale

For Alight, a cloud-based human capital management company providing health, wealth, and wellbeing solutions, their typical hiring process was already complex. It involved posting roles, building candidate pipelines, conducting live interviews, completing background checks, and coordinating with hiring managers – all usually requiring 8-10 weeks minimum.

Then came the request that would force them to reimagine everything: "Our hiring managers came to us and said 'We know you typically need 8-10 weeks to get people started, but we've only got six weeks. And we need a thousand people to start all on the same day.'" Eagy recalled.

The traditional approach wasn't just impractical – it was impossible. Live interviews alone would consume an estimated 8,000 hours of hiring manager time. They would also need to hire additional recruiters just to handle the scheduling coordination. Something had to change.

Reimagining Interviews

Working with Phenom and using its X+ Screening solution, Eagy's team developed a streamlined approach that eliminated live interviews without sacrificing a great candidate experience. The new process was elegantly efficient: candidates automatically received screening invitations upon applying, with knockout questions filtering unqualified candidates immediately.

"We set up automations to help us be more efficient," Eagy explained. "If candidates didn't pass the knockout questions, they automatically got an email saying 'thanks for coming, visit our website for other career opportunities.' So again, eliminating someone having to manually go in and do that piece of it, but also providing that candidate a good experience."

The team made a strategic choice to use audio rather than video responses for many screening questions. This approach increased candidate participation rates – people could record easily without worrying about appearance or lighting – while reducing potential bias in the evaluation process. For customer care roles where verbal communication is key, audio responses provided all the insights needed. And with the tool's summary and transcription feature, teams could focus on decision-making rather than administrative tasks.

Keeping the Human Touch

While automation streamlined the process, human judgment remained central. Recruiters received notifications of completed interviews, reviewed responses, and did initial shortlisting before passing qualified candidates to hiring managers for final decisions.

The process wasn't just about efficiency — it was designed with the candidate experience in mind. "Part of that process is an invitation that you can customize," said Eagy. "We provided tips on what to expect, what we're going to expect from them during this interview. The tool itself is really good about walking them through. It gives them an option to practice before they do it."

Another benefit according to Eagy? "One other thing about the one-way interview that's integrated within Phenom is that you can brand it with your company. It's not taking your candidate out of the system to some third-party site — it's all branded. It looks like it's coming from you, which makes candidates much more comfortable when they're going through that process."

Exceeding Expectations

The results speak for themselves. "The whole project was so successful, we ended up hiring more than a thousand people and saved an estimated 8,000 hours on the hiring manager side," Eagy shared. Most importantly, quality didn't suffer — their 90-day retention rate held steady at 60%, matching their historical benchmark for call center roles.

The standardized approach even brought unexpected benefits. "From a compliance perspective, it's much more in line because everyone's getting the same question and evaluation," Eagy noted. Initial skepticism from hiring managers quickly turned to enthusiasm: "We didn't have a choice in this situation, but at the end of it, the hiring managers were pleasantly surprised by how well it did work."

A New Standard for High-Volume Hiring

The project's success has prompted Alight to expand this approach. For seasonal roles, they've now eliminated hiring manager reviews entirely, with recruiting teams making direct hiring decisions based on audio and video interviews.

The transformation proves that with the right technology and process design, companies can dramatically accelerate high-volume hiring while maintaining quality and improving the experience for everyone involved. For Alight, what started as a response to an impossible timeline has evolved into a new standard for efficient, effective recruiting at scale.