When Cisco launched its pilot of a predictive talent matching platform in early 2024, the goal was modest: shave two weeks off the average time-to-hire for technical roles. What happened instead surprised even the project’s champions inside the company.
Within nine months, average time-to-hire across the pilot’s scope had fallen by 60 percent. Quality-of-hire scores — measured by 90-day manager ratings — improved by 22 percent. And the percentage of hires who remained with the company through 18 months increased by 14 points compared to a matched historical cohort.
The platform at the center of these results is Eightfold AI’s Talent Intelligence Suite. The system combines job description analysis, candidate profile matching, and predictive performance modeling to surface candidates that traditional keyword-matching approaches routinely miss — while deprioritizing the credentials and signals that have historically correlated more with socioeconomic background than with actual job performance.
“The biggest shift wasn’t the speed,” said Cisco’s VP of Global Talent Acquisition. “It was the quality. We started seeing candidates we would never have found through our old process. People who turned out to be exceptional hires who had been systematically filtered out by our screening criteria.”
