TL;DR

One of the largest utility providers in the United States partnered with Pontoon and Glider AI to modernize hiring for its high-volume customer care program. The company first introduced skill assessments to ensure candidates had the right capabilities before moving forward. While this improved candidate alignment, in-person interview no-shows still caused delays and wasted time.

By evolving to a full skills-based hiring strategy, combining targeted assessments, supplier alignment, and on-demand video interviews, the utility reduced time-to-offer by two business days, saved hundreds of recruiter hours, and scaled the model across multiple business units.

The Challenge: Skills Gap and Interview Inefficiencies

Customer care is one of the most critical functions for utilities. Representatives field high volumes of inquiries, manage complex billing or service issues, and often handle calls during storm-related outages or peak usage events. Hiring for these roles at scale is always demanding—and for this utility provider, the process was falling short.

Two major issues stood out:

• Skills mismatch: Too many applicants lacked the communication, empathy, and problem-solving abilities essential for customer-facing roles. Resumes alone weren’t enough to evaluate whether candidates could handle the day-to-day realities of utility customer care.
• In-person interview no-shows: Managers and recruiters were losing significant time preparing for interviews that were frequently abandoned or rescheduled. This slowed hiring cycles and left roles unfilled for too long.

The result was a hiring process that consumed valuable recruiter and manager hours without delivering consistent results.

The Solution: AI-Powered Skills-Based Hiring

Working with Pontoon and Glider AI, the utility provider redesigned its hiring process around skills-based hiring principles. The goal was to evaluate what candidates could actually do—rather than relying on resumes or unstructured interviews.

Key elements included:

• Targeted skill assessments measured customer care competencies such as active listening, communication clarity, and problem-solving under pressure.
• Supplier consistency ensured all staffing vendors used the same Glider AI process, creating a single standard for candidate quality. An additional supplier was onboarded to expand candidate reach.
• Ongoing calibration through bi-weekly meetings helped refine assessments as job requirements evolved.
• On-demand video interviews gave managers the ability to review structured candidate responses anytime, removing scheduling bottlenecks.
• Personalized candidate experience included a welcome video from utility leaders, giving applicants a clearer sense of culture and expectations.

The shift to AI-powered skills-based hiring not only streamlined evaluation but also built confidence among hiring managers that they were seeing the right candidates from the start.

The Results: Faster, Fairer, Scalable Hiring

The new approach delivered measurable, business-level results:

• 277 in-person interviews eliminated per year, saving recruiters and managers hundreds of hours.
• Time-to-offer reduced by 2 business days (from 17 to 15).
• Improved retention by aligning hires to verified skills instead of resumes.
• Expansion into new business units: Another division adopted the model, onboarding 162 customer care representatives with release-to-offer averaging just 11 days.

By connecting assessments and interviews into one seamless process, the company turned a reactive recruiting program into a scalable, proactive system.

Client Feedback

The Takeaway: A Scalable Model for Enterprise Hiring

For one of the nation’s largest utility providers, the shift from traditional recruiting to skills-based hiring delivered real impact: faster cycles, higher-quality candidates, and improved retention. By embedding AI-powered skills-based hiring strategy through assessments and video interviews into the process, the company eliminated inefficiencies while building a stronger candidate experience.

As utilities across the U.S. face rising service demands and customer expectations, modernizing hiring is no longer optional. Skills-based hiring strategies give organizations the ability to move faster, hire smarter, and ensure that every new employee is equipped to handle the challenges of customer care.