AI creates the greatest value not when it makes individual tasks faster, but when it removes the friction between them, turning saved time into real recruiter capacity, stronger candidate experiences and better hiring outcomes.
That opportunity shaped the recent webinar, “How to Scale AI Across the Full Hiring Journey.” The session brought together Wanda Cole-Frieman, SVP of Talent Acquisition at CommonSpirit Health, Josh Bersin, Global Industry Analyst, CEO and Founder of The Josh Bersin Company, and Jahkedda Akbar, SVP of Strategy, Insights & Innovation and Head of Radancy Labs. Chris Rainey, CEO and Co-Founder of HR Leaders, moderated the discussion.
The panel looked at how organizations can move beyond isolated tools and apply AI responsibly across attraction, engagement, screening, scheduling and hiring. The discussion reinforced Radancy’s approach: Scaling AI means connecting decisions, data and actions across hiring, reducing the friction between tasks and keeping human judgment firmly in control.
Growth Is Changing How Organizations Think About Hiring
Business growth and workforce planning have traditionally moved together. When an organization identified a new market or commercial opportunity, the next question was often how many people it needed to hire.
AI is beginning to change that relationship by giving organizations new ways to increase capacity and productivity before adding headcount.
Josh described this as a move from “hire to grow” toward “grow to hire.” Organizations can first use technology, automation and AI to support growth, then hire as demand becomes clearer. People remain essential, but hiring becomes more responsive to current business needs, with less pressure to recruit ahead of proven demand.
Speed still matters, especially in industries with high turnover or urgent staffing needs. But quality, timing and workforce readiness matter just as much. Hiring teams need to understand where talent is needed, which capabilities will support growth and how quickly the organization can respond.
Wanda explained that healthcare faces many of these same pressures. Organizations need to fill critical clinical and high-volume roles quickly while maintaining hiring quality and ensuring each person can succeed in a demanding environment.
Faster Tasks Do Not Always Give Recruiters More Capacity
Many AI business cases begin with efficiency. Organizations measure how much time a tool saves on sourcing, screening, scheduling or administrative work.
Those gains matter, but Jahkedda drew an important distinction between completing an individual task faster and creating genuine capacity across a recruiter’s day.
Radancy’s recruiter capacity research found that more than 99% of recruiters use AI
in some form and approximately 77% say their workflow has become at least
somewhat more efficient. Yet much of that saved time is absorbed by verifying AI
output, coordinating with stakeholders or completing administrative work elsewhere
in the process.
The research pointed to friction as the larger scaling challenge. Delays and repeated work tend to appear in the dependencies between tasks, particularly when recruiters are waiting for hiring manager feedback, coordinating calendars or restarting searches because expectations were unclear at intake.
Jahkedda noted that 70% of recruiters reported restarting a search because a requisition required further alignment with the hiring manager.
“The friction wasn’t inside of the task, where we often point AI or the solutions, but it was actually in the dependencies between the tasks,” she explained.
Connected AI Can Reduce Friction Across the Hiring Journey
Jahkedda shared how Radancy is applying this thinking through agentic orchestration.
During intake, AI can use the job description to help build a scorecard that captures recruiter and hiring manager judgment from the beginning. As candidates move through the process, AI can engage hiring managers through Microsoft Teams, prompt interview scheduling or provide feedback and keep recruiters informed about pipeline activity.
None of these capabilities is about making a single step faster. Each one closes a
point where information, decisions or momentum are typically lost, dissolving the
dependencies between tasks rather than simply optimizing the tasks themselves.
Recruiters spend less time chasing updates or piecing together earlier
conversations. That creates more room to engage candidates, advise hiring
managers and focus on hiring quality.
The connection between process design and business value extends beyond talent acquisition. McKinsey’s State of AI research found that AI high performers were nearly three times as likely as other organizations to have fundamentally redesigned workflows. Workflow redesign was also one of the factors most strongly associated with meaningful business impact. Josh emphasized that hiring managers need to be part of this connected approach. Most managers hire periodically rather than every day, so they may be less familiar with the process, the questions they should ask or the actions needed to keep candidates moving.
AI can offer timely guidance and make it easier for managers to participate
effectively, without leaving recruiters responsible for every reminder and coordination
task. Their involvement can also help uncover issues beyond recruiting. Early
employee turnover, for example, may stem from unclear role expectations,
assessment criteria, management practices or a poor understanding of the behaviors
that lead to success.
Human Judgment Must Remain in Control
The panel repeatedly returned to the role of people.
AI can create capacity, surface information and support more consistent processes. Recruiters and hiring managers remain responsible for understanding context, assessing the evidence and making informed decisions.
Wanda described the continuing importance of “old-school” human connection. Recruiters need enough time to speak with candidates, understand what motivates them and communicate why the work matters.
In healthcare, these conversations can reveal whether someone connects with the organization’s purpose, working environment and expectations in ways that a job description alone cannot capture.
Skills such as critical thinking, learning agility, communication and complex problem-solving are becoming even more valuable as AI adoption grows. Josh also emphasized that writing is part of the thinking process. Employees need to communicate clearly with AI, question its output and recognize when a response is simply reflecting their existing assumptions.
PwC’s 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer supports that view. New tasks added to AI-exposed roles were 2.5 times more likely to depend on empathy, judgment and creativity as AI absorbed more routine work.
Chris shared that Radancy Labs encourages employees to use AI as a source of challenge by asking difficult questions and presenting alternative viewpoints. Curiosity can help teams move beyond confirmation and use AI to uncover gaps in their own thinking.
The right balance between AI and human ownership will vary by organization and use case. Radancy research with talent acquisition leaders found that comfort with AI-led activity often depends on data quality, technology maturity and the organization’s operating model.
Organizations with trusted data and established CRM processes may be comfortable allowing AI to take a greater role in candidate search. Teams working with limited or unreliable data may need more human involvement.
As Wanda summarized at the end of the session: “Human judgment needs to stay in charge, and AI serves.”
Continuous Learning Builds Trust and Adoption
Recruiters, hiring managers and candidates all need to trust the way AI is used. That trust grows through transparency, participation and continual improvement.
Formal measurement remains a major gap. SHRM’s 2026 State of AI in HR report found that 56% of HR professionals did not formally measure the success of AI investments and only 16% used their own ROI metric.
CommonSpirit Health introduced its AI Hiring Assistant through a controlled pilot involving two vendors and a human comparison group. Other organizations discussed by the panel have used extended calibration periods, allowing recruiters to work alongside AI before expanding its responsibilities.
These approaches give teams time to test results, identify potential bias and understand how the technology performs within their own operating environment. Adoption also depends on communication. Wanda described the need to take AI on a “roadshow” across the organization so that people understand how it supports their work, why the change matters and where human expertise remains essential.
The work continues after launch. Candidate behavior, organizational priorities and AI capabilities will keep changing. Leaders need a clear direction and meaningful success measures, along with the flexibility to adjust when the evidence shows that an approach is not working as intended.
Shared Intelligence Can Bring Recruiting and Recruitment Marketing Closer Together
Jahkedda compared the opportunity with the evolution of marketing and sales. Shared automation, data and performance measures helped those functions develop a more connected revenue process. Talent acquisition has a similar opportunity to build one integrated talent pipeline, with a shared definition of quality and intelligence that moves in both directions.
Recruiters hear valuable information from candidates every day, including how people perceive the employer brand, what they expect from employers and why they accept or reject opportunities.
Radancy research found that 80% of recruiters see themselves as brand ambassadors and 58% regularly hear candidate insights that could benefit marketing and branding teams. Yet more than half have no established way to share that information.
Scale AI Around the Business Outcome
Scaling AI across hiring starts with the business outcome an organization wants to improve. Leaders need to look beyond the speed of an individual task and consider how the technology affects candidates, recruiters, hiring managers and the wider organization.
That means identifying friction between stages, building trust in the data, involving people in testing and connecting AI activity to measures such as recruiter capacity, time to offer, candidate experience, hiring quality and workforce performance. Quality of hire highlights the gap between strategic importance and measurement readiness. LinkedIn found that 89% of talent acquisition professionals expected measuring quality of hire to become more important, while only 25% felt highly confident in their organization’s ability to measure it effectively.
Organizations also need to treat AI as part of an operating model that will continue to evolve. As Josh advised, leaders should keep their attention on “the business problem, the business opportunity, the business growth driver” and use that focus to decide which capabilities and processes need to change.
When AI supports a connected hiring journey, efficiency becomes the starting point for broader value. Recruiters gain more time for strategic and human work. Candidates receive faster, more relevant engagement. Hiring teams can respond to changing business needs with greater confidence.
Build a More Connected Hiring Journey With Radancy
The Radancy Talent Acquisition Cloud supports the complete hiring journey through one industry-leading, agentic AI-powered platform. Connected intelligence, automation and human-guided AI help global employers reduce hiring friction and costs, strengthen recruiter capacity, improve candidate experiences and make better-informed hiring decisions.
Watch the full webinar to hear Wanda Cole-Frieman, Josh Bersin and Jahkedda Akbar discuss how organizations can create recruiter capacity, maintain human judgment and turn AI into measurable hiring value.
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