Capita cuts hiring time by 43% with Workday AI tools

Capita has expanded its use of Workday across recruiting and broader people operations, adding HiredScore AI for Recruiting and embedding Workday Assistant into Microsoft Teams.

It reports that the changes have reduced time-to-hire by 43% and cut the time employees spend on common HR administration by up to 80%.

Capita is a business process outsourcer with 34,000 employees across eight countries. It receives close to 300,000 job applications each year, making recruitment throughput and process design a material operational issue.

This latest phase builds on Capita's existing relationship with Workday, shifting the focus from manual processing to automation in recruitment and HR administration.

Recruiting and talent operations sit alongside large-scale service delivery contracts, where hiring demand can change quickly across accounts and geographies. In labour-intensive service sectors, time-to-hire is often a key measure because it links staffing levels with delivery performance.

Recruiting changes

Workday Recruiting now provides a single view of activity across the talent lifecycle, from workforce planning to onboarding. Capita says this shared view of roles and candidates has improved collaboration between recruiters and hiring managers.

Capita is also using HiredScore AI for Recruiting for parts of the screening process. The software surfaces candidates based on fit and automates elements of early-stage review.

Capita says the result is faster decision-making, while giving recruiters more time for direct engagement with candidates and hiring managers.

"I would describe the Workday AI effect within Capita as profound," said Scott Hill, Chief People Officer at Capita. "It's enabled our colleagues to spend more time serving customers, rather than transacting internal people processes. We've spent the last two years putting high-quality foundations in place, and Workday gives us a superb platform to keep enhancing the experience for our colleagues."

Capita has not disclosed the size of the investment linked to the rollout, the extent of Workday use across finance or other corporate functions, or governance arrangements for automated screening, such as human review requirements or monitoring for unintended bias.

Teams integration

Another part of the initiative focuses on day-to-day HR queries and transactions. Capita has embedded Workday Assistant into Microsoft Teams, which many organisations already use as a primary collaboration tool.

The assistant can retrieve information for HR questions and complete certain tasks within Workday. Capita positions it as a way to reduce the administrative burden for employees and HR teams.

Capita says employees now complete common HR processes, including booking time off, 70% to 80% faster than before. The scale of the saving depends on adoption levels, the range of tasks available through the assistant, and how widely Teams is used for HR interactions across the business.

Workday has been expanding AI features across its product suite, focusing on conversational interfaces for HR workflows and automation of routine steps in processes such as recruitment. In large workforces, even small reductions in time spent on routine actions can compound across thousands of employees.

Capita's approach reflects a wider pattern in HR technology, where vendors increasingly emphasise unified data models and embedded assistants. Companies often frame these deployments as a way to reduce friction in HR processes and make self-service more attractive for employees.

Daniel Pell, who leads Workday in the UK and Ireland, linked the rollout to changing approaches to automation in people operations.

"We have entered an era where AI doesn't just support the business; it sits at the heart of the employee experience," said Daniel Pell, Vice President and Country Manager, UKI, Workday. "With Workday, Capita is turning this vision into reality by embedding intelligence into the flow of work, empowering its people to focus on more meaningful tasks. The result is a more human-centric and agile workforce that is better equipped to serve customers and adapt to evolving market demands".

Capita says Workday will remain central to further changes in its people operations, with future work expected to build on the data and automation foundations already deployed across recruiting and employee self-service.