Fills open shifts with eligible, willing staff in minutes.
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NORTHWIND
Customer story
Northwind Logistics fills open shifts in 11 minutes and cuts hourly screening time 44%
An 18,000-employee distribution network deployed the Scheduling and Recruiting Agents across 41 sites during peak season.
“A dispatcher at 4 a.m. should not be working a phone tree. The agent knows who is certified, who is rested, and who said they want hours. It asks them in that order and books the first yes.”
Priya Raman
Director of Workforce Operations, Northwind Logistics
Challenge
Northwind Logistics runs 41 distribution centers with about 14,000 hourly employees. In peak season, daily call-outs ran between 6% and 9%. Each open shift cost a dispatcher or shift lead 2 to 3 hours of calls and texts, and the people who answered first were often the ones already near overtime. Certification rules for forklift and hazmat, hours-of-service limits for drivers, minor-labor restrictions in three states, and seniority provisions in collective agreements at 12 sites all had to be checked by hand.
Hourly recruiting ran at about 1,200 applicants per site per month in peak. Recruiters could not read them all. Time from application to interview averaged 9 days, by which point a third of applicants had taken another job. Site managers were interviewing candidates who lacked basic eligibility because knockout questions were not asked until the interview.
Northwind's legal team had specific requirements: no automated rejections, adverse-impact reporting per requisition, and a full offer history for every shift fill to satisfy predictive-scheduling ordinances in four cities.
Approach
Scheduling Agent, rules first. The team encoded rest periods, maximum consecutive shifts, certification requirements with expiry dates, hours-of-service limits, minor-labor rules by state, and the seniority provisions from 12 collective agreements as hard constraints. The agent connected to the workforce management system, time and attendance, and the HRIS. Employees opted in by text; 78% had opted in by week 4, most citing the chance to pick up hours.
Offers went out in ranked waves of 5 by SMS, 4 minutes apart. Fills that would trigger premium overtime paused for shift-lead approval. Unfilled shifts escalated to the shift lead at 45 minutes with the full offer history.
Recruiting Agent, knockouts by text. For hourly requisitions, the agent sent knockout and availability questions by SMS within 10 minutes of application, scored applications against the site's criteria, and offered interview slots from the hiring manager's calendar. Recruiters reviewed ranked shortlists with rationale and approved every advance and rejection. An adverse-impact report was generated per requisition before any decision was released.
Rollout by region. Six sites went live in week 3, the Southwest region in week 6, and all 41 sites by week 10, before the peak-season hiring surge.
Results
Median time to fill an open shift fell from about 2 hours of dispatcher effort to 11 minutes, with no rest-period, certification, or seniority violations in agent-filled shifts across the season. Premium overtime on backfills fell 18% because offers reached rested, willing employees before they reached the near-overtime regulars. Dispatchers reported spending the recovered time on dock planning.
In recruiting, screening time per requisition fell 44% and manual recruiter reviews by 70%. Time from application to interview dropped from 9 days to 2. Interview no-show rates fell because candidates chose their own slots. Legal received an adverse-impact report on every requisition and the offer log satisfied the four predictive-scheduling ordinances without additional work.
Northwind added the Help Desk Agent for hourly employees in the following quarter, starting with pay and schedule questions.
| Measure | Result1 |
|---|---|
| median time to fill an open shift | 11 min |
| premium overtime on backfills | −18% |
| screening time per requisition | −44% |
| application to interview, down from 9 | 2 days |
Timeline
24 weeks from scoping to steady state, in 5 phases.
Phase 1: Weeks 1-2
Rules and connections
Labor rules, certifications, and 12 collective agreements encoded as constraints. WFM, time, HRIS, and ATS connected.
Phase 2: Weeks 3-5
Six-site pilot
Scheduling Agent live at six sites with SMS opt-in. Recruiting Agent live on hourly requisitions at the same sites.
Phase 3: Weeks 6-8
Regional rollout
Southwest region live. Escalation thresholds and wave sizes tuned from pilot data.
Phase 4: Weeks 9-10
Network-wide
All 41 sites live ahead of peak. Adverse-impact reports routed to legal per requisition.
Phase 5: Weeks 11-24
Peak season
Steady state through peak. Help Desk Agent scoped for the following quarter.
- 1.Modeled outcomes from design-partner deployments. Results vary by data quality, workflow scope, and approval policy. ↩
Agents in this story
The agents Northwind Logistics runs
Each agent is scoped to one workflow, reads only permitted data, logs every action, and routes consequential actions to a named approver.
Screens, shortlists, and schedules against the role you defined.
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Answers employee questions from policy and the system of record.
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