Customer Stories
Kantar

How Kantar uses GoodTime’s AI to make hiring more human

50%+

reduction in time spent scheduling

40%

reduction in scheduling
lead time

productivity per
recruiter

Industry

Market Research

Location

London, United Kingdom

Company Size

12,000

ATS

How it started: AI helps meet specific staffing needs

Kantar is a brand intelligence agency, helping brands around the world make better decisions about how they use their marketing spend. Delivering intelligence that’s up to the task calls for exceptional talent, and that involves scouring almost 60 different countries, each with its own hiring criteria and pressures.

This challenge led Kantar to embrace AI across a 12,000-person-strong workforce. The initiative started with a large-scale Microsoft Copilot rollout, and the momentum expanded into hiring.

“Our people strategy is all about being AI first, and our TA teams have been at the very forefront of that thinking,” said Andy Doyle, Chief People and Agent Officer at Kantar.

Becoming an AI-first company has meant rethinking how work gets done, and using tech that can take tedious work off recruiters’ plates without decentering people.

“Human judgement is central to everything we do, and AI enables that,” explained Heidi Eckersley, Global Head of Talent Acquisition at Kantar. “AI supports us with the repetitive administrative work that carries a lot of friction.”

When global hiring creates global complexity

Kantar hires around 2,000 people every year. The team coordinates tens of thousands of interviews annually across various teams—and they used to manage it all manually.

According to Eckersley, scheduling alone could take half of a recruiter’s day or in some cases, even a whole day. Panel interviews frequently involved multiple time zones and calendars, while volume hiring initiatives like graduate recruitment involved coordinating massive numbers of candidates.

The process tanked productivity and cost recruiters time, while making it harder to maintain a consistent, enterprise-wide experience. The candidate experience was also inconsistent, which didn’t put Kantar in the best light.

“Every interaction that a candidate has in a recruitment process is a reflection of your operations as an organization,” Eckersley explained.

Kantar began the search for a platform that offered:

more control over scheduling and real-time information
comprehensive guidance to support best practices
increased efficiency without losing the personal touch

They found it all in GoodTime.

AI Assist simplifies complex scheduling

Kantar primarily brought in GoodTime to fix scheduling, but it transformed much more. GoodTime automates all the monotonous pre-interview prep so hiring moves fast. Integrations with Workday and Outlook allow applicants to book slots instantly. As a result, candidates can select times that work best for them, while communications stay consistent and management has real-time access to necessary information.

The platform also handles Kantar’s messiest scheduling problems. Hiring events like Superdays can now be configured in just 10 minutes. Even though candidates choose their preferred interview times, the platform evenly balances workloads across managers.

GoodTime’s AI agent makes this possible, and that agentic approach reflects exactly how Kantar wants the technology to work: continually moving things forward while preserving human judgment when and where it matters most.

“The advantage of the agentic wave is that you can translate the thinking into doing,” Doyle said. “The human will always be in the loop at the moments that really matter.”

By halving scheduling time, recruiters gain capacity

Since deploying GoodTime, Kantar has:

reduced recruiter scheduling time by at least 50%
lowered the amount of time between issuing a candidate an interview invite and booking that interview by about 40%
accelerated hiring while giving candidates more flexibility

The extra flexibility means candidates arrive better prepared. At the same time, hiring managers receive built-in guidance for inclusive interview practices, closing a gap that had widened as Kantar scaled.

Kantar has now effectively doubled productivity per recruiter. At the same time, reschedules have fallen by more than 50%. With these results, recruiters have greater capacity than ever.

“The biggest win isn’t the efficiency itself,” Eckersley said. “It’s what the recruiters have done with that time.”

Freed from logistics, recruiters can focus on the stuff that moves the needle: building relationships, assessing candidates, and shaping long-term talent strategy.

A partnership built on two-way learning

The technology is only half the story. The partnership behind it matters just as much.

For example, GoodTime installed an engineer within Kantar’s internal team for two months. Both teams watched workflows unfold in real time, testing fixes on the spot instead of waiting for the next release cycle. The teams continued working closely together on the various regulatory requirements attached to AI adoption.

“The partnership has been like nothing I’ve seen before,” Eckersley said. “It’s definitely a two-way partnership, where we learn from them and they learn from us.”

Through ongoing experimentation and problem-solving, the relationship has become a model for how Kantar’s Talent Acquisition team collaborates with its partners.

“Our partnership with GoodTime has been transformational for both the TA team and the wider HR function because it’s shown the art of the possible,” Doyle said.

Where we landed

50%+

reduction in time spent
scheduling since implementation

40%

reduction in scheduling
lead time

productivity per
recruiter

AI for more human hiring.

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