The Adecco Group connects 1:1 with each job seeker with Agentforce.

The Adecco Group is one of the world’s largest talent solutions companies. They process 300 million applications per year and place 1 million people daily for some of the world’s largest companies.

Hiring millions of people every year requires personal connection at scale.

The Adecco Group, a global recruitment powerhouse with clients like Amazon, Uber, and Procter & Gamble, is on a mission: It wants to personalize and scale its services for both job seekers and the companies it recruits for. With its purpose, "Making the future work for everyone," the company aims to bring humanity back to the recruiting process. Each year, 300 million people apply for their roles and hope they’ll receive a call telling them their lives are about to change. 

With their current tooling and staff, the Adecco Group’s recruiters can respond to just a fraction of those applications, leaving many candidates waiting — and wondering. 

There’s a limit to the number of candidates even the most skilled recruiter can connect with each day, and with around 10 billion resumes circulating globally, many candidates miss opportunities simply because their resumes aren’t seen at the right moment. The Adecco Group strives to be a trusted, long-term career partner for all applicants, so creating a way to quickly make connections with more of the people who apply for their jobs is a priority for them.

Speed is everything in the recruiting industry. Companies expect a shortlist of qualified candidates within two hours, and even a 48-hour delay can mean losing business to faster competitors. For the Adecco Group, staying ahead means finding top talent quickly.

To accomplish their goal of becoming a lifelong career partner for their applicants and stay competitive in a fast-moving industry, they knew they needed to build a way to engage with 100% of applicants at scale.

Agentforce will empower recruiters to provide 1:1 support for 100% of applicants.

The key to building relationships at this scale isn’t more recruiters. It’s Agentforce. 

Agentforce — the new agentic layer on the Salesforce Platform — will augment the Adecco Group’s existing staff by autonomously handling administrative work, freeing recruiters to focus on candidates. Using preset criteria like skills, experience, and location, Agentforce will sift through resumes automatically, pulling together a shortlist for recruiters to review. This will unlock the data in the resumes and make it instantly available to recruiters. Instead of getting bogged down in resume screening, recruiters will have access to an expert who can identify the best candidates right away.

Agentforce won’t just support those candidates who make it to the top of the list. The Adecco Group wants to keep all applicants engaged, even if they aren’t selected for a particular role. “Looking for a job is one of the most emotional, stressful times of anyone's life, right?” said Greg Shewmaker, Senior Vice President of Global Operations and AI for the Adecco Group. “When you submit a resume to a job that you think you're qualified for, and then you never hear back from anyone, you start to question your self-worth and whether you're qualified to do what you think you're qualified to do.”

Agentforce will notify candidates who didn’t make the shortlist and suggest alternative roles that might suit their profile. This proactive approach will help candidates feel connected and valued by the Adecco Group, which is critical to their goal of providing 1:1 support to every applicant.

A key part of Agentforce’s appeal to the Adecco Group is its ability to create a safe, comfortable channel for applicants, especially for individuals in crisis. The Adecco Group is committed to its Jobs for Refugees campaign, with plans to help 85,000 refugees regain their footing with good jobs and provide training to re-skill 17,000 refugees by 2027. The Adecco Group sees Agentforce as a way to build trust with these applicants. “Traditional chatbots are too impersonal,” said Shewmaker. “Agentforce feels human, so people aren’t intimidated by the interface.”

They’re also excited about how Agentforce will handle job postings. Currently, recruiters have to manually publish listings on multiple job boards and platforms, which takes up valuable time. Once implemented, Agentforce will automate this process, determining the most effective platforms based on data like success rates and regional needs. This will help the Adecco Group’s job postings reach the widest possible audience without additional work for recruiters.

The Adecco Group anticipates that Agentforce will immediately boost candidate engagement when fully rolled out. Their goal is to reach a 100% engagement rate for all applicants, which would have been impossible before. They’re already exploring ways to make it possible for recruiters to personalize Agentforce’s settings to allow each office to customize their approach to better serve specific clients and applicants. Recruiters will be able to use natural language in Agent Builder to specify the tasks they’d like agents to help them with, then modify the instructions to fine-tune the results. For example, they’ll be able to refine their agents to assess soft skills or other attributes that will make candidates more successful in their roles.

 “I was amazed because, without a technical background, I built an agent really easily and quickly,” said Shewmaker. “I was super impressed with the user experience – and my agent actually worked!”

For the Adecco Group, Agentforce isn’t just about efficiency. It’s about creating a hiring experience that’s as personal as it is powerful. “I love what I’ve seen of Agentforce,” said Denis Machuel, CEO of the Adecco Group. “We can move from a one-to-one relationship with candidates to connecting with millions while maintaining the human touch. It’s incredibly powerful and promising for the future.”

MuleSoft and Data Cloud will help the Adecco Group deliver fast, consistent service.

One of the things the Adecco Group is addressing to help them move faster is a fragmented tech setup. 

Although they have an integrated Salesforce front office in many countries, their client and candidate data is scattered across more than 40 Salesforce instances in 5,000 local agencies across more than 60 countries. This makes it difficult to monitor recruitment efforts and performance on a global scale. For example, if Amazon requests help hiring 100 roles across multiple regions, the Adecco Group needs to coordinate postings and manage the application process across all locations. Without a unified view, global account managers can’t easily track key performance indicators (KPIs) like fill rates and might miss analytics that could optimize service speed and cost.

Connecting their Salesforce instances into one cohesive view of their candidate and operations data will help them deliver fast, high-quality service on a global scale.

MuleSoft will serve as the integration layer, linking Data Cloud to essential third-party systems like enterprise resource planning (ERP), payroll, and middle-office systems for contracts. This setup will allow the team to unify the data from all of their Salesforce instances and other data sources, creating an enterprise-wide view of customers and candidates and comprehensive profiles for each.

Data Cloud will play a critical role by enriching candidate profiles with sub-second real-time information like assignment end dates and availability. This data will be processed and delivered in less than one second, which will help recruiters and account managers instantly access up-to-date profiles and quickly match candidates to the right roles. Additionally, this visibility will make it possible to prioritize recruitment efforts and adjust focus based on KPIs like fill rates and margins. “Data Cloud is instrumental,” said Shewmaker. “Without it, we couldn’t serve our largest customers.”

Connecting data from multiple Salesforce instances used to be a daunting challenge, but the Adecco Group is making it happen with Data Cloud One. With a no-code, point-and-click setup process, they’ve created a unified view of their Salesforce data and activated it across every instance. This innovative approach allows every Salesforce org in their ecosystem to access Data Cloud-powered features through a single Data Cloud home org, unifying information across departments, regions, and business units into a single source of truth. This provides a 360-degree view of customers and candidates, enabling capabilities like calculated insights, segmentation, and automation in every org. In just six weeks, they successfully connected data from ten countries, and they’re on track to link the rest by the end of 2024.

The Adecco Group will use this new system to create a global talent supply chain — a single view of every open position across its largest customers and regions. When a client needs to fill roles urgently, like staffing up for Black Friday across multiple regions, global account managers will be able to easily monitor fill rates in sub-second real time and adjust strategies as needed. This will enable them to anticipate client needs and offer more cross-selling and upselling opportunities.

Einstein AI automates order intake, capturing job requirements quickly and accurately.

Another crucial step toward filling open roles faster was to overhaul their order intake process. Previously, recruiters had to manually take notes, create reports, and add order details into Sales Cloud, where they manage all of their hiring client needs.

AI was the logical solution to this problem, and the Adecco Group knew that Einstein was the perfect tool for this job. With all their data already centralized in Data Cloud, Einstein had everything it needed to automate this repetitive process and begin adding value immediately. “Data Cloud connects global data and unlocks end-to-end visibility,” said Luc Paradis, Vice President of IT and Front Office Technology for the Adecco Group. “That visibility and harmonization of data is key to our success today and positions us very well for generative AI.” 

With all of their front- and middle-office systems already in Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud, Einstein now handles the order generation process automatically, capturing hiring requirements quickly and accurately. When a customer calls about their hiring needs, their conversation with the recruiter about role scope, pay range, and desired qualifications is recorded. Einstein can create a transcript of the call, extract all the essential details, and use those details to create an order within Service Cloud. This shift allows the Adecco Group to capture every order quickly and accurately without the risk of human error that comes from retyping or note-taking.

Similarly, if a client submits an order via email, automation makes it easy to turn those emails into orders. Instead of recruiters manually sifting through email exchanges to create orders, Einstein scans the content of each conversation, finds the necessary information, and generates an order directly in Sales Cloud. This process ensures nothing is missed, even when recruiters are managing multiple clients and email threads simultaneously.

Einstein also streamlines a recruiter’s tasks following interviews with candidates. It analyzes call transcripts to generate interview summaries, highlighting candidate strengths, skills, certifications, and experiences in a clear, bullet-point format. Candidate records are updated automatically, and Einstein even provides shortlists that are ranked based on the strength of each candidate for the specific role. These reports not only save time but make the Adecco Group’s recruitment process more persuasive and responsive to client needs.

With their AI-powered order process capturing every opportunity, the Adecco Group has accelerated recruitment and enabled their recruiters to focus on building relationships with customers and candidates rather than administrative tasks. “Account executives were handling orders manually, but since automating it with generative AI, we’ve made a significant time-saving,” said Paradis.

With Agentforce, the Adecco Group will build an agent-first recruiting system that automates candidate shortlisting and initial outreach, allowing them to reach more candidates with tailored communication while maintaining a human touch. This intelligent assistance will help recruiters quickly find the right talent for their roles and maintain their advantage in the competitive staffing industry.

By connecting data from 40+ systems with Data Cloud and activating an agentic layer to take action on data insights at scale, the Adecco Group gains visibility and speed. They can now manage key metrics like fill rates and order intakes in real time and act quickly to optimize talent delivery globally. Salesforce’s ongoing innovation aligns seamlessly with their mission of providing 1:1 support for 100% of applicants and making the future work for everyone.