Chipotle's AI hiring tool is helping it find new workers 75% faster

• Chipotle has integrated a conversational AI chat platform into its hiring process it calls “Ava Cado.”
• The AI is able to help potential workers fill out their applications, answer questions about working at Chipotle and schedule interviews.
• It's boosting the hiring pipeline for Chipotle, with more applicants, faster application times and hastening the applying-to-hired process, critical for a company onboarding as many as 10,000 new workers annually.

From robots that help make chips to those that prepare avocados for guacamole, Chipotle is using AI to make its restaurants more efficient while allowing workers to focus on other tasks. The fast casual restaurant chain is also applying AI to the process of hiring workers, allowing managers to stay more focused on running their restaurants.

Chipotle added an AI-powered platform to its hiring process that it dubbed “Ava Cado.” The platform, created by AI HR firm Paradox, is essentially a conversational chatbot that interacts with job candidates, answers questions about the company and the job, collects information about them, and ultimately can schedule interviews with human hiring managers. It can also converse in English, Spanish, French, and German.

Chipotle chief human resources officer Ilene Eskenazi said the company's growth plan was a factor in the decision to use the AI hiring technology. With projections for about 300 new restaurants opening each year with an average of 30 employees per location, the company estimates it will have somewhere between 9,000 and 10,000 new hires per year, on top of other positions opening up at existing Chipotles.

Making sure there is no friction in that process is key. Prior to rolling out Ava Cado, Chipotle managers were tasked with scheduling all of the interviews, both from people who applied online as well as during hiring events or when people came in seeking employment. That led to a lot of administrative work for managers.

Since introducing the AI chatbot, Eskenazi said Chipotle's number of applicants “has increased dramatically” and the company is also seeing about an 85% application completion rate. Ava Cado helps the job candidate by populating the application with the information they provide, cutting down the average time it takes to complete at application to around eight minutes.

“That has greatly increased our funnel so that we're serving up many more candidates for our managers to evaluate,” Eskenazi said. “Maintaining our pipeline of candidates is always something that we're very focused on,” she added.

Ava Cado is also tasked with managing the interview schedules for managers, who are able to block out certain times during the week and candidates can then be scheduled based on their availability.

Perhaps most importantly, Eskenazi said, is that while Ava Cado walks candidates through the application process, it also shares information about Chipotle and the job with them, so that “they're much more informed about what the job really is, and so then we know that the applicants are that much more interested in the job by the time they're meeting a hiring manager in person.”

That's helping Chipotle hire faster, reducing time to hire by up to 75%, CEO Scott Boatwright told CNBC's Jim Cramer earlier this year. “We leaned into an AI hiring assistant from Paradox about six months ago that has put us on better footing from a staffing perspective,” Boatwright said. “And we've been, in the eight years I've been in the organization, pushing past numbers we thought were all-time highs just last year.”

Paradox has roughly 1,000 clients that use its conversational AI platform at some point in the hiring and recruiting process, including 7-Eleven, General Motors, Nestle, Marriott International and Lowe's.

Eskenazi said that Chipotle has been seeing candidates go from application to ready to hire within three and a half days thanks to Ava Cado, which previously could have been up to 12 days.

Still, much like how workers are concerned about AI taking their jobs, there are some concerns about how AI is increasingly being integrated in the hiring experience, whether that's through screening of resumes or even speaking directly to an AI powered recruiter. There are also potential concerns about the security of applicant data when interacting with AI recruiters — earlier this month, Paradox reported that a security vulnerability was detected by researchers, potentially exposing applicant names, email addresses and contact info. Paradox said none of the data was leaked or made public. Wired had previously reported the affected client was McDonald's.

Chipotle's Ava Cado AI does not screen resumes and does not make employment decisions, and Eskenazi said the company has a strong interview and training process that its managers will continue to lead and make the decisions for.

However, she said, the company is looking to expand Ava Cado's capabilities, whether that's sharing videos with candidates to give them a better view into what working at Chipotle is like, or giving applicants a prompt to also consider other locations where there may be openings nearby. There are ways AI can also be integrated into the company's learning and development programing.

“We've gotten a lot of anecdotal feedback from both general managers and candidates, and it's been incredibly strong,” Eskenazi said. “I personally have been pleasantly surprised by how much candidates have enjoyed interacting with Ava.”