Chipotle has integrated a conversational AI chatbot named “Ava Cado” into its hiring process, boosting its recruitment efficiency significantly. This AI platform helps prospective employees complete applications, answers questions about working at Chipotle, and schedules interviews.
The tool is accelerating Chipotle’s hiring pipeline, increasing applicant numbers, speeding up application completion times, and shortening the overall apply-to-hire timeline—critical for a company that onboards up to 10,000 new workers annually.
From robots assisting in food prep to AI transforming recruitment, Chipotle is leveraging technology to streamline operations and free up managers to focus on running their restaurants.
Chipotle Chief Human Resources Officer Ilene Eskenazi explained the company’s growth plans played a key role in adopting Ava Cado. With projections to open about 300 new restaurants annually—each employing roughly 30 staff—Chipotle anticipates hiring between 9,000 and 10,000 new workers each year, plus openings at existing locations.
Smoothing the hiring process was essential. Before Ava Cado, managers handled all interview scheduling, whether applicants came online, through hiring events, or walk-ins, adding a significant administrative burden.
Since rolling out Ava Cado, Eskenazi said the number of applicants “has increased dramatically” with an application completion rate near 85%. The AI populates applications based on candidate responses, reducing average completion time to about eight minutes.
“That has greatly increased our funnel so that we’re serving up many more candidates for our managers to evaluate,” Eskenazi said. “Maintaining our pipeline of candidates is always something that we’re very focused on,” she added.
Ava Cado also manages interview scheduling by allowing managers to block times and then fitting candidate appointments accordingly.
Most importantly, Eskenazi noted, Ava Cado educates candidates on Chipotle and the role, ensuring “they’re much more informed about what the job really is, and so then we know that the applicants are that much more interested in the job by the time they’re meeting a hiring manager in person.”
This has enabled Chipotle to reduce time-to-hire by up to 75%, CEO Scott Boatwright told CNBC’s Jim Cramer earlier this year. “We leaned into an AI hiring assistant from Paradox about six months ago that has put us on better footing from a staffing perspective,” Boatwright said. “And we’ve been, in the eight years I’ve been in the organization, pushing past numbers we thought were all-time highs just last year.”
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