Business It News / Business Intelligence
How Uniper is using Celonis and AI to speed up recruitment
One of Europe’s largest energy companies, Uniper, has partnered with Celonis, the global leader in Process Intelligence, to vastly improve its recruiting processes and hiring of top-tier talent.
Uniper uses an AI agent powered by the Celonis Context Model and built on Microsoft Copilot Studio to work with greater speed, accuracy and is more cost efficient. This has led to improvements such as reducing the average time-to-sign for candidates by 27 days, while the average screening phase has improved by 13 days.
The agent uses a natural language interface to give Uniper’s hiring managers important insights such as open requisitions and applications that have been shortlisted. It identifies and highlights urgent and overdue tasks for recruiters and managers. It also orchestrates actions for HR staff such as drafting and sending emails to colleagues and candidates.
To evaluate the agent, the team ran the same prompts twice, once with the agent using only raw data from Uniper’s HR System and once using operational context from the Celonis Context Model.
The agent was asked: “What are the bottlenecks in the recruiting/hiring process?” With just the Uniper data, the agent provided a list of generic answers, such as “data fragmentation”, “hiring manager overload”, and “missing task visibility”.
But when the agent was grounded in operational context from the CCM, it gave detailed answers specific to not just Uniper’s HR team, but to the individual team member as well. For example, “There are 27 candidates across various job requisitions who have been on the shortlist for more than 14 days.”
Robert Daamen, Head of Process Intelligence CoE at Uniper, said: “With Celonis as our context layer, we’re building AI solutions that aren’t just tools we experiment with, but assistants we trust. The Celonis Context Model gives our HR teams complete transparency into the hiring and recruiting process and removes unnecessary hurdles that delays new talent from joining our team.”
Lars Reinkemeyer, Chief Evangelist at Celonis, said: “Enterprise AI can only live up to its full potential when it understands how an enterprise actually runs and how to make it run better. The striking results Uniper achieved demonstrate how companies can generate tangible, compounding value by transforming business-critical operations with Enterprise AI grounded in context from Celonis.”
Based on the initial results, Uniper has put the agent into full production and is realising significant operational improvements including recruiters and managers receiving precise information rather than generic answers, improved transparency and improving token efficiency.
In addition to improving HR processes, Uniper, Celonis, and Microsoft are working to transform other critical business processes, such as plant maintenance, hydro power operation, ITSM, energy sales and trading, financial services, and internal audit. For example, Uniper’s Sales and Trading business executes hundreds of trades per hour. With Celonis Data Core, the company’s Process Intelligence CoE can stream this data into Celonis in real time, enabling Uniper to make the right decisions and take action at the right time.
Key to leading this expansion are the collaboration and sponsorship of Uniper executives, including the CIO, CFO, and CPTO (Chief People and Transformation Officer), who owns HR and technology transformation.
