Acquiring talent used to be a recurring challenge for global professional services firm Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL), largely because of its 15 fragmented HR systems supporting its 115,000 employees across more than 80 countries. This meant different payroll vendors in each country, separate recruiting tools, and disconnected time-tracking systems.
However, after consolidating those systems, the company was able to fill one vacancy in just four days, from posting the role to making an offer.
Duplicated inefficiencies
According to Ajay Pimpalshende, Director, Product & Program Management, JLL Technology, every new system meant another integration, another security audit, and another set of access controls to manage.
Operationally, pulling critical data for decision-making involved manually reconciling datasets across markets — a slow, error-prone process that made meaningful insights almost impossible to extract quickly.
For talent acquisition, workflows and processes were tedious and repetitive, preventing staff from focusing on higher-value work.
“Hiring managers were spending large portions of their day on administrative tasks such as scheduling and follow-ups, rather than on judgment-based work,” he said.
Unified view
Partnering with Workday, JLL made a deliberate decision: consolidate first, innovate second.
“We unified 108,000 employees onto Workday as our single source of truth before layering on any AI. Today, our teams work from one platform and one dataset, which has significantly improved operational efficiency,” Pimpalshende said.
JLL then deployed Workday’s Paradox platform, which it branded internally as HireBuddy. According to Pimpalshende, it changed how recruitment worked for both hiring managers and candidates.
“For hiring managers, the system now handles administrative recruiting tasks such as scheduling, reminders, and routine questions that used to take up much of their day. For candidates, it means they are never left waiting in silence because, in a competitive talent market, silence can cost you candidates,” he said.
The company deliberately started small, rolling out the platform to its US Property Management business in August 2025 before expanding to other markets.
“Within that pilot, we recorded the fastest hire in our company’s history: a Property Associate role in Cincinnati, filled in four days from posting to offer,” Pimpalshende recalled.
Since launch, JLL has scheduled more than 10,000 interviews through the platform, with a median scheduling time of 20 minutes. The same task previously took days of back-and-forth emails.
“On the strength of that proof point, we are now expanding the offering to our offices in the US, Canada, UK, and India,” he added.
With Workday as its system of record, connected to HiredScore for AI-assisted matching and Refer2JLL for referrals, JLL was able to identify previous applicants for new roles and match existing employees to internal opportunities they may not have known about.
“HiredScore processes around 1.5 million applications a year for us. Since deploying it, we have reduced time to fill from 52 to 30 days and increased hiring output from 3,180 to 5,215, a 64% increase, while improving recruiter productivity rather than adding headcount,” Pimpalshende said.
Hiring trends
Organisations are increasingly using autonomous AI agents to perform hiring tasks that were previously done manually. Activities such as interview scheduling and expense claims can now be delegated entirely to AI, observed Jess O’Reilly, General Manager, ASEAN, Workday.
However, giving these agents greater autonomy also introduces new risks, she noted.
“When an AI agent makes an error, it isn’t isolated to a single instance but can be replicated multiple times before it is detected, let alone rectified,” O’Reilly added.
While putting a human back into every decision point is well-intentioned, it ultimately defeats the purpose. Instead, organisations need oversight through people who establish guardrails, monitor how AI agents operate, and intervene when necessary, she said.
Meanwhile, traditional deterministic HR systems are giving way to workforce intelligence that reasons across data, identifies patterns, and anticipates needs based on historical information.
“What that looks like in practice is AI that doesn’t wait to be asked. Rather than running a report on open roles, a probabilistic system might flag that a candidate from six months ago is a strong fit for a position that just opened. This frees up time for hiring teams to focus on work that requires human judgement,” O’Reilly said.
Organisations are also increasingly recognising that workforce intelligence can strengthen the business case for HR investment.
“When data can illustrate how improvements in time to fill translate into broader operational outcomes, the conversation tends to shift, with HR decisions evaluated alongside business decisions, not separately from them,” O’Reilly emphasised.
ASEAN focus
Rapid infrastructure and data centre expansion across ASEAN is increasing JLL’s demand for specialised talent. The company needs engineers, project and program managers, and technical and operations specialists, often within compressed project timelines.
Because each ASEAN country has different compliance requirements, hiring preferences, and talent pools, JLL’s previous approach of building a customised process for every market was no longer efficient.
“Workday lets us configure once and scale across markets, so when a project ramps up in one country, we can move quickly without rebuilding the process from scratch,” Pimpalshende said.
Unified workforce data also changed how JLL planned workforce deployment and hiring, he noted.
“Because skills, availability, and internal mobility now sit on a single platform, we can see where specialised capabilities already exist across the region and deploy them, rather than defaulting to external hiring every time.”
Looking ahead, Pimpalshende said the next rollout is India, where the program is being expanded this year.
“It is a mobile-first market. Reaching candidates via WhatsApp and SMS is not a nice-to-have there; it is simply how you reach people. Our platform lets us accommodate those local requirements without fragmenting our operations again,” he concluded.
