How Formula One cut time to hire by 10 days by consolidating its HR tech stack 

Workers are not disengaged or disconnected in the age of AI. The issue is that they are stuck doing the wrong kind of work.  

According to a survey of 6,000 leaders by Workday, eight in 10 individuals are acting as translator for AI, copying and pasting information between disconnected, disparate systems. 

In fact, 20% of workers are wasting 7+ hours a week on this work; that’s almost a whole working day each week.   

At Workday’s Elevate London event, the HR tech giant’s VP and Country Manager, UK&I, Dan Pell, declared that workers are acting as “human middlemen” for AI tools – and it’s affecting not only their productivity, but their wellbeing. 

The solution? Rather than having lots of siloed tools that don’t talk to each other, AI needs to be embedded into the systems and workflows that already run the business.  

As Workday’s Pell tells UNLEASH in an interview at Elevate, this requires simplification and consolidation of HR’s “complex technology landscape” – it is currently “impossible to try and apply any type of intelligence on top of that.” 

Just 27% of businesses have embedded and consolidation their AI tech, according to Workday’s research. An example of an employer seeing success from HR tech consolidation is Formula One (F1).  

Speaking at Workday’s event, Alastair Goss, HR Systems Lead at the sports association, advice to his HR peers was “to make technology decisions that seek to reduce the number of disparate, disconnected systems.”  

Let’s dig into F1’s partnership with Workday; how did a consolidated tech stack help solve the sports association’s hiring challenges? 

Formula One cut screening time by 16% and time to hire by 10 days: What role did consolidated tools play?

During a press panel at Workday Elevate London, Goss shared that when F1 started its Workday journey, it had separate systems for HCM, payroll, time and attendance, performance management and recruiting.  

“With fragmentation, with that disparate nature of systems, that reduces your ability do critical task[s] really well,” Goss shared.  

That’s why when Goss attended Workday Elevate London in 2024 on a HR buying mission to help solve F1’s hiring challenges, he chose HiredScore (acquired by Workday in 2024). 

“One of the key selling points for me was that it was already integrated really well with Workday,” he explained.  

F1 was grappling with 78,000 applications per year – that was 520 per role. As a lean organization with just 800 staff, and only three full time recruiters.  

High candidate interest in your organization is “a great problem to have”, but F1’s Talent Acquisition (TA) team faced an “impossible task,” stated Goss during his Elevate keynote.  

The hiring process was slow, good candidates were being missed, and recruiters were bogged down in manual work. It did not feel “solvable by adding more people into the equation” – that’s where HiredScore’s technology came in.  

“I knew I needed something that fit well with our existing tech stack. I knew I needed a solution that was already proven. I knew I needed something that I could get over the line internally…HiredScore fit all three criteria.”  

Goss worked hard to get all the important stakeholders – notably Legal, Compliance and the TA team themselves – on board with the change.  

He built trust with the TA team by involving them in the testing of the product on historic requisitions – they could see the benefit of the tool first–hand.  

UNLEASH asked specifically in the press panel how Goss got legal and compliance involved. He stayed out of it, he wasn’t a middle man – he let his Legal, Compliance and Security colleagues “talk directly to the people who had the answers.” In other words, HiredScore.  

With an eight-year tenure at F1, Goss knew the right colleagues to put in those conversations: “It wasn’t a case of talking to Information Security as a whole, it was this person in that department I know people listen to. If I bring them in and get them comfortable, I’ll be in a better position later.”  

Formula One’s Alastair Goss speaking on the Workday Elevate London Main Stage.

F1 is now a year on from the implementation of HiredScore – what have been their main successes?  

Goss told the press at Elevate that he had three metrics he wanted to reduce – screening time, time to hire and agency costs.  

Screening time is down 16%, while time to hire has declined by 10 days. He is still working on the agency costs, and F1 is measuring quality of hire in the long term.  

From the candidate experience perspective, Goss shared during his Elevate keynote that before HiredScore “frankly, we could not guarantee every applicant that their CV would be reviewed – now we can.”  

In addition, the fact that 97% of screening is now automated has freed up the TA team to do more value-adding work. They have more time to be business partners and support hiring managers in making better hires.  

For example, early on, HiredScore was surfacing candidates that weren’t right for the jobs. F1’s TA team realized it was because the job descriptions were too vague, so the tool did not have right information or context to make good hiring suggestions.

As a result, the recruiters are now working more closely with hiring managers on their precise requirements for open roles.  

Goss’ advice to the audience at Elevate was to have “the right foundations in place.”

HR, are you ready to get your data, your context, and your tools right so you can have a productive, healthy and successful workforce?