First Student clears 66 offers in 10 days and shortens the road that follows with Alex

At a Glance

• ~75% faster at every step from application to onboarding
• +50% offer to training start conversion
• Median under 2 hours to a first interview, from over 15 days
• +68% driver interviews, on 6% fewer applications
• Under 3% of candidates ask to speak with a human instead, against a 10% expectation

The Customer

First Student runs about 4.8 million student journeys every day across more than 530 locations in the United States and Canada, with a fleet of more than 48,000 vehicles and roughly 66,800 employees. It has been carrying students for nearly half a century and needs to hire 10,000 to 20,000 school bus drivers every year.

Renee Boydo is Vice President of HR Experience. Her team of just under 260 people covers talent acquisition, candidate experience and area training across North America, and is responsible for every person who becomes job-ready at the organization. Boydo came up through safety and organizational development, owning First Student’s global safety training for close to a decade before building the HR Experience function, "We are responsible for the most precious packages in the world.”

The Challenge

Hiring a school bus driver is not a linear process, and at First Student’s scale the gap between an application and a driver in a seat had become the central constraint on the business.

A regulated journey that most candidates never finish

A candidate has to pass multiple written tests at a local DMV, train on a bus, pass a road test and clear a set of regulatory compliance requirements, and the rules differ by state, region and province. From application to carrying students takes 70 days on average. Between the offer and the first day of training, First Student was losing roughly 70 percent of the people it had already decided it wanted.

Volume that outran the team’s ability to answer it

First Student receives close to 400,000 applications a year, more than half of them for driver roles, and interviews more than 90 percent of qualified applicants. That means ~5k calls a week. The team aimed to reach a new applicant within six days and in practice averaged 10 to 15 days, because it was still working through the people who applied the week before.

The best candidates were gone before anyone called

In a saturated CDL market, Boydo’s read is that the strongest applicants are lost after the first 72 hours. Application and interview volume had grown over 90 percent year over year while job ready drivers grew only 10 percent, so the effort was landing at the top of the funnel and not reaching the end of it.

“We were using our people in a way that we were following a really good standard process. But it was taking too long and we were not able to do the follow up.”
Renee Boydo, VP of HR Experience, First Student

The Solution

A rollout the area general manager called the smoothest of his career

First Student went from business requirements to a live pilot in about two and a half months inside an enterprise technology stack. The area general manager over the pilot area had braced his organization for the usual hiccups. Boydo reports he described it afterwards as the smoothest rollout he had experienced in his career at the company.

The process stayed First Student’s

Boydo’s team did not reshape its hiring process around the software. Field leaders were part of testing and helped shape what was built, which Boydo distinguishes from implementation: the goal was adoption.

Interview, offer, and then stay with the candidate

When a candidate completes an application, Alex is available immediately for the interview, at whatever hour suits the candidate, and the conversation can run through to the offer stage. The part Boydo singles out comes after that. Alex keeps up the reminders and check-ins through the permit and testing process, answers questions by text at any hour, and points candidates to the next step, work the team previously tried to do by hand across thousands of people at once.

“It’s really the follow up Alex does. It’s the consistent follow up and touch base and the way for candidates to get back in touch with us. That’s really changing the game.”

First Student also kept their processes in tact, "We did not have to fit our business processes around a technology. We were able to take a technology and fit it around our specific business processes. That’s a game changer that I don’t think a lot of people really know those options are out there.”

The Results

From 15+ days to a median under 2 hours

The pilot area had been averaging over 15 days to a first interview. Boydo reports a median now under two hours from application, with about 90 percent of candidates reached inside the first 48 hours, the window she considers decisive in this market. Days to complete offer are down from a 38-day average to 3 days. One candidate went from application to offer in 9 minutes!

Candidates interview when it suits them, and they are not opting out

Just over 35 percent of completed interviews in the last month took place outside 9am to 6pm, including evenings and the small hours. First Student had planned for up to 10 percent of candidates to decline the AI interview and ask for a human. Boydo reports the figure has run under 3 percent.

Offer to training start moved from about 30 percent to about 45 percent

This is the number Boydo cares most about, because once a candidate starts training, about 90 percent go on to drive in revenue service. In the pilot area she reports that conversion from offer to training start has gone from around 30 percent to around 45 percent.

The candidate experience specialists are doing different work

The 260-person HR Experience team was built to shepherd people through a hard, regulated process, and for years most of its capacity went to the first phone call instead. In the pilot area, that first call is no longer the team’s job. Specialists now work the outliers: the candidate who asked for a human and did not book, the one stalled between a written test and a road test, the one who needs someone to walk them through a government form. That is the concierge service Boydo wanted the team doing all along, and it is the part a bus driver remembers.

“We don’t look at our Alex AI agent as a replacement for our candidate experience specialist. They are a partner to our candidate experience specialist, which allows our people to do the really human part and allows the automation to happen where it needs to.”
Renee Boydo, VP of HR Experience, First Student