Adecco: applicants its AI agent prescreens are 2x as likely to be hired

The Adecco Group's recruiters now start from a scored shortlist that an AI agent builds by questioning applicants in chat. Candidates the agent prescreens are twice as likely to be hired, Salesforce says in a customer story dated 30 April 2026 about the staffing company's use of its Agentforce product. The page does not say twice as likely as whom.

Applicants who show interest in a role on a job board or Adecco's website can opt in and chat with the agent at once, in French or English. It asks recruiter-approved questions about availability, location, eligibility and key skills, writes the answers to the candidate's record and produces a match score: how many of the role's requirements the candidate meets. Salesforce's example is a job that needs someone within 20 miles of a distribution centre, with warehouse experience, available immediately.

What the numbers show

• Twice as likely to be hired: no comparison group, period or hire counts. Applicants choose whether to take part, and about 50% of those invited do. My reading, not the page's: people who answer at once may be more available or keener than those who do not, which would lift their hire rate with or without an agent.
• More than 65,000 conversations since April 2025. The same page says Adecco handles 300 million applications a year; 65,000 ÷ 300,000,000 is about 0.02%, one application in roughly 4,600. The page does not say which countries or brands use the agent.
• 4.3 out of 5 in post-conversation surveys. The number of responses is not given.
• Job campaign prep went from three to four hours to 10 to 15 minutes, which Salesforce calls more than 93% faster (15 minutes against 240 is 93.75% less). This is a second use: the agent takes job details from client calls and emails and drafts the campaign.
• A 28% faster end-to-end hiring process, with no baseline in days and no period.

The people side

Salesforce's page counts 1,400 recruiters at Adecco and does not say how many work with the agent. Recruiters approve the agent's questions and keep adjusting the requirements and screening logic, the page says.

Previously, a recruiter might have spent half an hour combing through applications to get candidates on the phone. Now, they see engaged candidates straight away.

Kizzy Price, vice-president of change and business excellence at the Adecco Group, quoted by Salesforce

The page does not say whether a recruiter looks at applicants who score low or who decline the chat, how recruiters were trained, or whether recruiter numbers changed.

The catch

Salesforce is the seller and gives no cost: no licence, usage or services figure, though it says Adecco worked with Salesforce Professional Services. On controls, the page says data processing follows GDPR and CCPA, the European and Californian privacy laws, and that AI recommendations leave an audit trail. It says nothing about testing whether match scores differ by age, sex or ethnicity. A tool that scores applicants takes part in a hiring decision.

On what happened next, the page is out of date. It says Adecco began a pilot in November 2025 of phone prescreening with Agentforce Voice, which ran more than 30 interviews in the UK within two months, and that a global rollout "is planned for spring 2026". It does not say whether that happened. It also says the agent will move from eight screening questions to 50.

What to do if you run recruiting

• Before a pilot, fix the comparison: hire rate for prescreened applicants against similar applicants for the same roles in the same weeks who were never offered the chat.
• Ask the vendor in writing for the comparison group behind any "more likely to be hired" figure and for adverse-impact results on the match score, and take both answers to employment counsel.
• Have a recruiter review a weekly sample of low-scored applicants and of those who declined the chat, and count how many were qualified.