Change Management Mastery: How Thales Achieved 95% Adoption of Recruiting Automation

Implementing new talent acquisition technology across a global organization presents significant challenges — conflicting regional priorities, entrenched workflows, and resistance to change make adoption a constant uphill battle. Traditional change management approaches often fall short, leading to low user adoption, unrealized ROI, and frustrated stakeholders.

Jim Shultman, Head of Talent Acquisition - Americas at Thales, recently shared how his team transformed their talent acquisition strategy through a comprehensive change management approach paired with AI-driven automation, making their recruiting process more efficient, strategic, and candidate-focused.

In This Article

Inside Thales' Global Talent Operation

With 80,000 employees across 68 countries, France-based Thales is a €20 billion global technology leader serving aerospace, defense, cybersecurity, and transportation. But their recruiting operation wasn't built for the scale or speed that modern hiring demanded.

"When I joined Thales and met with my Americas team, if we had a magic wand, the one thing they asked for was ‘Remove the [manual] interview process from me,’" said Shultman. "I cannot schedule any more interviews!"

Recruiters were tied up in administrative tasks, with little room left for strategic hiring. The team was struggling with several key challenges:

• Manual Workflows: Recruiters were spending 10-15 hours a week on interview scheduling, 5 hours weekly updating their applicant tracking system, and countless hours on resume screening — time lost to repetitive tasks instead of high-impact work.

• Passive Talent Attraction: Thales lacked the tools and strategy to proactively source or build pipelines, relying on what Shultman described as a "post and pray" approach instead of a marketer mindset.

• Clunky Candidate Experience: A static career site and lengthy application process created unnecessary friction. With no personalization and limited engagement, top candidates dropped off before reaching a recruiter.

The Solution

To modernize its recruiting operations, Thales implemented the Phenom Intelligent Talent Experience platform to address their specific challenges — from reducing manual effort to improving candidate engagement and recruiter efficiency.

"AI sourcing and scheduling was a huge priority, especially the scheduling” explained Shultman. “We had to get AI interview scheduling set up because that's where our biggest waste was.”

During the presentation, Faina D'Angelo, Senior Director & Manager of Solutions Consulting at Phenom, provided demonstrations of the key components Thales implemented:

Personalized Career Site

Thales launched a dynamic Phenom Career Site that delivers a more relevant and responsive candidate experience, with job recommendations tailored to visitor behavior, location, and preferences.

D'Angelo demonstrated how the platform builds "a digital fingerprint for every single person that comes in contact within the career site" and provides "seven plus different ways to become a lead," capturing partial applications and potential candidates that previously would have been lost.

Bi-Directional Integration with Workday

A critical requirement for Shultman was ensuring recruiters wouldn't need to constantly switch between systems. "One of my big business outcomes that was absolutely mandatory for Go Live was the recruiters cannot be swivel-chairing in and out of Phenom and Workday," he explained.

The implementation established a real-time sync between their Phenom Talent CRM and Workday ATS. Job requisitions originate in Workday, and once posted, Phenom takes over. Recruiters complete all their work in Phenom until the offer stage, when the process returns to Workday.

AI-Powered Candidate Matching

As D'Angelo showed, the platform automatically analyzes job descriptions to identify key skills and competencies, then matches these against past applicants, CRM leads, silver medalists, and internal employees open to new roles. "The minute a requisition is open, his team gets a list of candidates, of leads, of silver medalists, of current employees and also cold source individuals to automatically be able to nurture," she explained during her demonstration.

This capability led to one of the first breakthrough successes. Shultman shared a story from a recruiter who had been searching for a quantum cryptography engineer: "He searched on LinkedIn, couldn't find anybody, went in, put in the ideal candidates, filled it out. Wouldn't you know it, somebody had applied years ago to a job with these skills. He reached out to them, and they got the job."

X+ Screening for High-Volume Hiring

For early career hiring where teams were overwhelmed by thousands of applications, Thales deployed Phenom X+ Screening to bring structure and automation to their candidate evaluation workflow. "For our early careers, we hire thousands and thousands of people," noted Shultman. "The X+ Screening solution helped reduce the number of resumes needing review by 46%."

Automated Interview Scheduling

Perhaps the most impactful solution addressed the team's biggest pain point: Phenom Automated Interview Scheduling. As D'Angelo highlighted, "On average, most recruiters spend 10 hours a week just scheduling interviews. And that's not even for complex interview use cases."

The platform now handles scheduling, rescheduling, canceling one-to-one interviews, panel interviews, sequential interviews, and even interview events. Plus, the system sends automated reminders to interviewers and provides analytics on which hiring managers are rescheduling the most interviews, which hiring managers are canceling the most interviews, and how that is impacted in the time to hire data.

The Results

By automating manual tasks and creating a culture of tech-enabled recruiting, Thales unlocked outstanding global adoption, saved time, and elevated hiring quality:

• 24% improvement in time to hire

• 15 hours saved per week, per recruiter globally

• $1M ROI in 1 year

• 150,000+ automations used

• 4,500+ hires from AI-driven candidate matching
  
  

​​"We started at 20% usage. We're now at 95% usage. Once the team saw the ROI and that the technology worked, they became obsessed with it. We're projecting in the next three years, we'll be at about seven million ROI just on the [Phenom] investments we have alone," Shultman shared.

And the success is apparent across numerous teams. One of Thales' largest groups that initially resisted the change reduced their time to offer by 25%. "Their feedback I love…their team is spending more time with qualified candidates than they ever have before, having quality conversations because both sides are more prepared," shared Shultman.

Change Management Lessons for Success

Despite having the right technology in place, adoption was initially a struggle. The journey from implementation to full adoption took nearly two years of a three-year contract. The breakthrough, however, came when Shultman's team revamped their approach to change management, offering valuable lessons for any organization undertaking a similar transformation:

1. Define Clear Business Outcomes

The first lesson learned was the importance of clearly defining business outcomes and communicating them to both executives and the talent acquisition team. "You have to define your business outcomes. They need to be high level to where you can tell an executive this is why and what we are doing. And you have to tell your team why around those business outcomes," Shultman emphasized.

Takeaway: Start by defining measurable business outcomes and ensure everyone understands not just what is changing, but why the change matters.

2. Map Processes End-to-End

Before implementing new technology, Thales needed to map not just high-level process steps but all sub-processes, documents, and interactions with candidates and hiring managers — both functionally and technically. "We did not have that initially. We did not share that with Phenom. So why do you think we're getting error messages? Phenom's talking German, Workday's talking Spanish, and we're speaking English," Shultman joked.

Takeaway: Document your current workflows in detail, including both user interactions and technical integrations, before attempting to transform them.

3. Align Technology with Business Goals

Once business outcomes and processes were clearly mapped, aligning them with the technology capabilities became crucial. "The third takeaway here is you gotta align your business outcomes, your business processes, all of that mapped directly with Phenom, so you're all speaking the same language," said Shultman.

Takeaway: Ensure your technology provider fully understands your specific objectives and processes so the implementation meets your actual needs.

4. Appoint Regional Change Champions

With operations in 68 countries, centralized change management wasn't effective. "Who likes a boss telling them what to do from another country? Nobody," noted Shultman. Instead, they established change champions at the recruiter level in each region who received specialized training and participated in weekly problem-solving calls.

Takeaway: Localize your change management approach by appointing champions who understand regional nuances and can drive adoption from within their teams.

5. Communicate Consistently and Transparently

Whenever a success story emerged, Shultman shared it with the entire TA organization. When issues arose, he communicated those, too — making clear when something was a bug rather than a fundamental product flaw.

Takeaway: Build trust through transparent communication about both successes and challenges throughout the implementation process.

6. Create Engagement Through Competition

In partnership with Phenom, Thales created a global competition tied to their business outcomes, with regional and global winners. "We had monthly reporting, KPIs, all built around it to get the adoption, because I knew if we could get the team in the system, they would stay in the system," Shultman explained.

Takeaway: Use gamification and healthy competition to drive initial adoption and engagement with new technology.

7. Establish Metrics and Accountability

Finally, Thales established clear KPIs and metrics tied to their business outcomes. They worked with regional leaders to show the ROI and eventually made usage mandatory. "It had to come down to a weekly, here are the KPIs, here are the metrics," said Shultman.

Takeaway: Set clear performance metrics aligned with business outcomes and hold teams accountable for meeting them.

By following these principles, organizations can avoid the lengthy adoption curve Thales experienced and more quickly realize the benefits of AI-driven recruiting automation.

What's Next

With global adoption in place, Thales has shifted focus from building the foundation to expanding impact. "I don't know how to keep up with the scale of innovation," Shultman admitted. "I get request after request after request from the team about more AI, more automation. How do we do more? Because the team is now obsessed."

The experience has also changed how Thales thinks about candidate engagement. "For the first time in my life, I looked at the hires we made for the year, which was around 9,000. And then I saw we had a million people touch our jobs," Shultman reflected. "What are we doing with the other 990,900 candidates? What are we doing with all this? It's almost a million people that are interested in Thales."

This has prompted a reimagining of the talent experience beyond the traditional focus on successful hires alone. From struggling with adoption to managing an avalanche of innovation requests, it's the kind of challenge every talent leader dreams of facing — the journey from 'Why change?' to 'What's next?'"

Learn how recruiting automation can help your team build a more agile, data-driven hiring strategy.