Ava Cado is coming to Chipotle, and no, I’m not talking about guacamole.
On Tuesday, the fast-casual restaurant chain announced a new recruiting tool (named “Ava Cado”) to help beef up hiring. The new “virtual team member,” built by recruitment software company Paradox, will chat with candidates in various languages, answer their questions, collect basic information, schedule interviews, and even send offer letters, according to the company. Chipotle anticipates the tech to reduce hiring time by 75%.
“We expect that increasing our speed to hire will be an advantage in a competitive labor market,” Ilene Eskenazi, Chief Human Resources Officer for Chipotle, told Fortune. The company’s in-restaurant and field leadership roles account for 98% of total hiring.
Using AI for recruiting at a large restaurant chain makes a lot of sense for an organization that hires on a large scale every year. The restaurant chain announced in 2024 that it would be hiring 19,000 employees for “burrito season,” a particularly busy time for the company that lasts from March until May. Chipotle isn’t the first fast-food chain to incorporate an AI into the hiring process: McDonald’s launched McHire, its own custom virtual hiring assistant, in collaboration with Paradox in 2019. Two years into using it, the restaurant has cut back hiring time for hourly workers by 60%, according to Paradox.
Chipotle’s announcement comes at a time when HR leaders around the world are trying to figure out the best way to incorporate AI into their workflow. Recruiting has been a major focus of many CHRO’s AI efforts for some time because it can be used to create job postings, write emails, and filter through applications.
“AI enabled recruiting is particularly well suited for distributed blue collar recruiting. Restaurants, retail, warehouses, distribution businesses are all ripe for AI enablement,” says Dan Kaplan, a senior client partner at Korn Ferry’s CHRO practice. “We have come a long way and yet we aren’t even in the first inning.”
But it’s crucial that CHROs make sure that if they do use AI for recruiting, there’s still a human involved in the process. Sending an offer letter too quickly, with little to no human interaction, may lead candidates to believe the offer is a scam, or that the company isn’t serious, says Mahe Bayireddi, CEO and co-founder of Phenom, an HR technology company that develops AI-based software for recruiting. One of his clients went overboard and cut their total recruiting time from application to offer letter to just 45 minutes. “While a lot of people got offers, only 50% of them actually showed up to work,” says Bayireddi.
He adds that at least 10% of the hiring process should involve human interaction. And it’s important to note that number increases when it comes to hiring knowledge workers— a more personalized hiring process is more critical for those roles.
Brit Morse
brit.morse@fortune.com
Today’s edition was curated by Emma Burleigh.
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A round-up of the most important HR headlines.
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Watercooler
Everything you need to know from Fortune.
Brain drain. More than 2,400 of Kaiser Permanente’s unionized mental health workers in California went on strike Monday over unmanageable workloads and staff shortages. —Damian Dovarganes, AP
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