Cisco's AI-powered approach to hiring top talent is attracting 'quiet candidates' and making recruitment faster

• Cisco is a digital-communications and -networking provider with 85,000 employees worldwide.

• It has started using AI to help improve recruitment outreach and the broader hiring process.

• This article is part of "CXO AI Playbook" — straight talk from business leaders on how they're testing and using AI.

For "CXO AI Playbook," Business Insider takes a look at mini case studies about AI adoption across industries, company sizes, and technology DNA. We've asked each of the featured companies to tell us about the problems they're trying to solve with AI, who's making these decisions internally, and their vision for using AI in the future.

Cisco is a digital-communications and -networking provider based in San Jose, California. It provides companies with software-defined networking, cloud, and security solutions. Founded in 1984, Cisco has nearly 85,000 employees worldwide.

Situation analysis: What problem were they trying to solve?

Francine Katsoudas, a Cisco executive vice president and its chief people officer, told Business Insider that the company's success was due to its people. But ensuring the company is recruiting the best can be easier said than done. Sometimes, the best candidates need to be persuaded to apply. Connecting with these so-called quiet candidates was an early use case for artificial intelligence at Cisco, Katsoudas said.

"How you reach out to a quiet candidate has always been a little bit of an art," Katsoudas said. "Over the years, I hear from candidates who say, 'I never responded to an email. But I had to respond to this email from this recruiter.'"

Katsoudas said a skilled recruiter could find the right combination of words to persuade candidates to pay attention. Good recruiters personalize emails, but honing the right message can take time. AI can help speed up the process, she added. "What we have learned is that you can be so much more customized via AI than ever before," Katsoudas said.

Key staff and partners

Alongside Katsoudas, Zohra Yafai, the vice president of global talent acquisition at Cisco, worked to integrate AI into the recruitment process.

Randstad, a global human-resources firm, is one of the companies that Cisco works with for staffing. Their experimentations with AI in recruitment helped make Cisco feel "a little bit more confident and bold," Katsoudas said.

AI in action

Cisco uses generative AI to help gather information about a hiring target and to customize the emails it sends them. By tailoring its recruiting messages, Cisco can increase the number of emails it sends to quiet candidates who might resist other forms of connection. "When you can increase the return on these emails that your recruiters send out, that is meaningful," Katsoudas said. The company started slowly before ramping up its efforts, she added.

"Everything we're doing, we probably start with an experiment or a pilot where we're running analytics and understanding any risks before we move forward and set our scale," she said.

Cisco is also using AI to schedule the interviews and meetings that follow. "In the past, we would manually schedule," Katsoudas told BI. "When you can do all that via AI, it's speed."

Did it work, and how did leaders know?

Speed is important in the hiring process. "If a company is coming after you, and they're moving quickly, there's something really positive in that momentum," she said.

"When a company reaches out, and then you don't hear for, like, three or four weeks, and then the meeting gets scheduled two weeks later, there isn't a lot of interest that you're demonstrating," she added.

Cisco said its adoption of AI was still in the early stages, so it hadn't identified quantitative markers of success. But the company plans to continue to monitor progress and evaluate areas of improvement.

What's next?

Katsoudas said more pilot projects would be rolled out to test generative AI. "As a company, we've always believed that there are better ways to do things or that there's learning that will make us better in service of the communities of our customers."

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