El Jannah uses AI recruitment agent to power aggressive store expansion plans

The charcoal chicken empire plans to hire 1800 people to fuel its growth using artificial intelligence agents that work 24/7 to handle the first round of interviews.

El Jannah expects its new AI recruiter, developed by Employment Hero, will save it more than $500,000 a year. Picture: NewsWire/Monique Harmer

Fast-growing Australian charcoal chicken chain, El Jannah, has found a secret weapon to fuel its aggressive expansion.

The restaurant group – which is set to triple the number of its restaurants in the next two years – has been quietly trialling a new artificial intelligence agent to handle its first-round job interviews.

Already it has saved the group hundreds of thousands of dollars, can complete hiring in three days and comes as its founders Andre and Carole Estephan have joined the ranks of Australia’s wealthiest.

The Estephans founded El Jannah in 1998 with a single store in Sydney’s Granville, with its chicken and garlic sauce earning cult-like status and have since sold the chain to US private equity firm General Atlantic for $800m.

With annual sales reportedly pushing $300m, El-Jannah currently has 50 stores and plans to open 150 outlets across Australia in the next two years under chief executive Brett Houldin, a former Craveable Brands executive. The Estephan family is understood to be staying on as minority shareholders and in management.

To support this dramatic growth, which includes hiring more than 1,800 people over the next year, El Jannah has adopted end-to-end AI recruitment agent into its human resources system.

The restaurant chain expects the technology, developed by Employment Hero, will save it more than $500,000 a year, primarily by eliminating between 1000 and 1400 hours of administrative work.

The software functions as a tireless, 24/7 hiring assistant, conducting initial phone interviews, generating tailored questions, and instantly scoring candidates against a job-specific rubric. El Jannah senior HR business partner Michael Oliverio said the challenge was volume and consistency.

Hiring staff for its restaurants was a challenge for El Jannah.

“The scale of hiring began to stretch our restaurant managers and risk the consistency we pride ourselves on, from the amazing fresh food we serve to the positive experience we want every team member and guest to have,” Mr Oliverio said.

“With such high volumes, we were already saving hours by short-listing and connecting with quality candidates through Employment Hero’s SmartMatch system. But as our growth accelerated, first round interviews had become a real pain point.

“It was a challenge to keep up with the pace of applications while still giving every candidate a consistent, positive experience.”

Employment Hero co-founder and chief product and technology officer Dave Tong said the AI agent was designed to act as an assistant to take over “mundane” tasks, thereby freeing up human recruitment teams from a constant “hamster wheel” of tasks.

This time is then meant to be reinvested into strategic work. Preliminary data indicates customers using the Recruitment Agent are already saving an average of 10 days for the average time to hire.

Mr Tong said Employment Hero has implemented strict ethical guard rails to prevent the agent going rogue or misuse from employees. For example, the AI is designed to filter out protected attributes such as ethnicity, gender, or accent, preventing them from influencing the screening and scoring process.

Human managers are presented with all conversation extracts and scoring rubrics, ensuring they retain “full control of the process and making final decisions”.

“It’s really important that we think about AI as assistants and as colleagues, and so it’s not replacing any role,” Mr Tong said.

“It’s supposed to help take over the day-to-day mundane stuff and help provide a better work life balance and help employees and businesses spend that time working on higher value tasks.”

Employment Hero is currently tracking several metrics beyond initial time savings, including retention rates and post-hire success.

“I would think about this as a benefit to the business, because they would have a higher quality outcome by freeing themselves up to do that strategic work,” Mr Tong said, citing examples like analysing the retention rate for hired candidates, optimising job advertisements, and engaging in more meaningful relationship building with hiring managers.

Mr Tong said that a suite of subsequent agents is planned for 2026 and beyond, targeting other notoriously complex pain points in employee workflows such as payroll and HR.