You likely recognize Dolby from those surround sound speakers your parents had when you were growing up, but this consumer electronics pioneer plays a huge part in developing the audio, visual, and voice technologies that power today’s entertainment industry.
It’s highly technical and specialized work that requires talent of the same caliber. So when Dolby looks for new hires, their leaders need a longer list of skills than most. Now with AI, Dolby is easily finding the talent it needs.
David O’Connor, Director of Global Recruiting at Dolby, sat down with Jen Mark, Regional VP, Implementation Services at Eightfold, to share how Dolby arrived at the decision to use AI-native talent intelligence, how it transformed the recruiting process, and some wins to date. [Ed note: Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.]
Related content: Watch this conversation with David O’Connor of Dolby and Jen Mark of Eightfold from Cultivate ‘24.
Jen Mark: How are you traditionally finding and sourcing talent?
David O’Connor: Traditionally, what we’ve done is leaned on LinkedIn an awful lot and done a lot of outbound sourcing. We’ve gone out to the market and tried to find that talent. We’re lucky that we have a robust college and university relations program. We know the universities that are graduating the folks that we’re looking for. We know the companies that employ the people we’re looking for. But like many others, it can be difficult to go after them. Traditionally, it was outbound sourcing. Our recruiters would be trolling through LinkedIn, or they’d be getting on the phone. We’d be looking for referrals.
We also focused on converting a lot of our interns into longer-term employees. We would go to college fairs. We would meet with them where they were. We would use the job boards and their career sites and create relationships with the universities — and we still do that. We’ve always had a lot of luck with attracting talent like that.
For instance, our latest intern class — I think we’re at about 160 interns for the year. We had over 60,000 applicants for those roles. Trying to go through all of those applicants is difficult. Let’s face it — you cannot put human eyes on 60,000 applicants if you want to have a cost effective recruiting function. We were missing a lot of that talent.
Related content: David O’Connor, Director of Global Recruiting at Dolby, shares how using talent intelligence made it possible to sift through thousands of résumés and find the right fit for Dolby’s intern program.
JM: How were you able to leverage AI for your volume hiring and that continual pool of 60,000 candidates every single year through your internship programs?
DO: One of the many reasons that we adopted Eightfold about four years ago was to help us with our sourcing capabilities. Our recruiters were crying out for something that was user-friendly. We were looking to automate some of our more mundane functions, like scheduling, interviews, feedback, things of that nature, and allow the recruiters to do what the recruiters do best, which is to go out there and talk to candidates, sell Dolby to candidates, review candidates, and also talk to the manager more about what their specific needs are.
Eightfold allowed the cream rise to the top, so to speak. We still don’t put human eyes on 60,000 profiles, but what we do is give everybody a fair shake. We look at all the skill sets, and that means that we get a much more manageable number of profiles. Every person who applied at Dolby can rest assured that their resume was considered, and four years ago, I couldn’t have said that. But today, you know, thanks to AI, we go through and look at everybody’s profile.
The other beautiful thing about Eightfold is those other 59,800 profiles don’t just go away. They used to in the past. Now, those profiles remain in our database, and they’re a living, breathing document because Eightfold continues to update those profiles. Every time we open a new role and we calibrate that new role, that prospect tool continues to bring [those profiles] back into our search. So it’s not just that we reviewed them at that time, but we continue to review them for each and every role that we open and source for.
JM: Now we’ve talked a lot about volume, but I know that Dolby also has specialized in niche roles and very specific types of criteria that you’re looking for to satisfy those engineering roles. Tell us about how you use Eightfold to try and find that cream of the crop there as well.
DO: Traditionally, we were in audio and vision technology. That’s our bread and butter. But we have a big research team, and we are looking to hire AI graduates, ML graduates, data science graduates and so on.
We’re looking for specialized people in different companies. We do a lot of outbound sourcing for all of those folks. But we also look into our database that’s many hundreds of thousands of profiles, and we see if people have expressed an interest in Dolby before. We go fishing in our own pond, so to speak. It’s a mix of outbound and inbound sourcing.
JM: Can you tell us a little bit more about the recruiter efficiency that’s gained there? And what the recruiters are telling you with using Eightfold instead of having to go to outside sources?
DO: Our hit rate is so much higher. If we reach out to a candidate through our database, we look at that as a warm prospect. They’ve interacted with Dolby before. They’ve expressed interest in our company before. We know that we’re on their radar, whereas if we go after somebody you know on LinkedIn that they may or may not know us, they may or may not be interested so they’re a cold prospect.
It’s night and day the hit and response rate. The people that had applied before probably have some of the relevant skills that we’re looking for, and then three or four years later, we’re able to see the skills that they’ve been able to gain since then as well.
Related content: David O’Connor, Director of Global Recruiting at Dolby, talks about how AI allowed Dolby to resurface a previous candidate who was a perfect fit for a highly technical role.
JM: With all these really smart strategies, I can imagine you’ve had so many success stories. Can you share one with us?
DO: We had a candidate applied a few years ago. Good person, but we didn’t even interview them. It was a more junior role. They stayed in our database. Luckily enough, Eightfold updated their profile. We had a new role, and it was to start a research team. It was a really specific, hard-to-fill type role. We needed somebody who had a Ph.D. We needed somebody who had published white papers on specific subjects and topics, who had a few patents to their name. These people don’t grow on trees. There are not a lot of them out there.
So when we calibrated the role, we looked into prospects, and sure enough, in the top two or three people, this person was sitting there. The hiring manager thought, “Wow, home run.” We reached out to the person. They were interested, and we were able to hire them. I’m not saying we wouldn’t have found them without Eightfold, but it was really good that we did. We fill that role far quicker than normal. It wasn’t luck; it was Eightfold.
JM: And how about from the recruiter perspective? I’m sure that they’re thrilled to find that kind of top-tier talent. Can you tell us a little bit more about what kinds of efficiencies they’re finding throughout using Eightfold?
DO: We were using different off-the-shelf products for scheduling, for interviewing, and our recruiters had tech fatigue. Every time we would introduce a new technology, we’d bring it in and get all excited. They would roll their eyes, and they would look at us and say, “Not again. This is something else I’ve got to learn.”
The promise of Eightfold was that it would be a start-to-finish product that was user-friendly. It’s a very intuitive product.The recruiter loves it. They don’t have to use SuccessFactors — it sits on SuccessFactors. We open the role and make the offer in SuccessFactors. Between those two things, we forget about it, and we sleep at night. It’s a very intuitive product to use.
It also takes away the mundane parts of the job: scheduling, interview, feedback. We had to beg, borrow, and steal to get interview feedback before. This is all automated. Scores are automated, and it goes right to the hiring manager. It’s really good. And then also the sourcing. So the recruiters, it’s a great tool for them.
JM: What’s next for Dolby? And how are you thinking about generative AI?
DO: Dolby is a unique company. We’ve been around a long time, and when you’ve been around a long time, you either get stale or you have to innovate twice as hard. And I like to think that we do the latter. Our director of work innovation, which is a newly created role, is looking at the company, how we do things, and not accepting the status quo. He’s going out and figuring out new ways to do things and leveraging AI in a big way to do it.
We’ve all started using Microsoft Copilot a little bit for creating job descriptions, creating dedicated emails to potential candidates. It’s all done really well. We have our own LLM at Dolby called Stormy, and we’re doing an awful lot of experimentation where we’re bringing new tools in and playing with them. We’re checking them out, you know, we’re using them to make our jobs better, but we’re also using them as well in the technologies and products we create.
JM: Is there any advice you have for talent acquisition leaders?
DO: I would say, if some of you are thinking of adopting AI, do it. It’s great. It will repay you the investment you make in it — you will save with decreased head count. We’ve already made our investment on it. Don’t be afraid of it. It will take away all of the mundane tasks that you hate, and it will allow you to do the strategic work that we should be doing but haven’t always been able to. It makes us look better. I get more compliments now than I ever did, and it’s not me — it’s the technology.
And I can’t underscore enough, I think the one thing that we hear often is that people are afraid of AI, but having that AI assist them in their jobs and find that efficiency is paramount. Don’t look at AI for AI’s sake. Look at the problem that you want to solve, and then bring the technology in to fix it rather than saying, “Oh, let’s have AI.” I think that’s the roadmap that you’ll also get leaders to buy in a lot more.
Watch this entire conversation with Dolby at Cultivate ’24, now on demand.