At the recent IAMPHENOM conference in Philadelphia, Dallas College CHRO Louis Burrell was named CHRO of the Year. The honor comes a year after the HR tech org named Burrell’s company as its Rookie of the Year, due to the big gains it made with its AI-powered HR transformation. Such acknowledgements, Burrell recently told HR Executive, are elevating the function’s strategic capabilities.

“Once you start getting recognition like that, those little bragging moments, it gives even more credibility to the function,” Burrell says.

That credibility has skyrocketed in the last few years. Burrell joined the college, which employs about 20,000 people, in 2023 and immediately got to work transforming the function’s tech stack. By leaning into AI-powered processes, particularly around recruiting, he says Dallas College has right-sided hiring and is now sharpening its focus on internal mobility.

Here’s more about where Dallas College’s HR function is headed:

HR Executive: How different does Dallas College’s recruiting strategy look today, compared to when you joined three years ago?

Burrell: When I interviewed with the board, they said, “The first thing we need you to do is recruit. It’s taking way too long. We can’t fill critical positions.” When I started talking to the talent acquisition leader, I said, “Tell me what’s working and what’s not,” and he said, “We don’t have any technology. We don’t really have experienced processes.” So, the first thing we did was put in a Black Belt. We had just gone live with Workday, and I said, “Let’s do a current state map; let’s look for opportunities to streamline the process.” We standardized all of our processes and eliminated about 23 steps throughout. Then we connected with Phenom, and that was about the CRM and ATS platforms, and we got a really strategic partner. We changed our business model and moved almost all of the recruiters into operations, so we could employ more experienced recruiters. We cut our cycle time by over 50% each month. We’re getter better quality hires. It’s been a real partnership that’s changed things across the college.

HR Executive: How are you continuously refreshing your approach to recruiting?

Burrell: One of the things that we put in place this year is a candidate experience scorecard. That’s how the team is evaluated. It’s not just about filling a position. We want to know, what was that candidate experience like, the end-to-end process? When a person goes through that process, at first they’re a candidate, and then they become a new hire, and the whole team gets held accountable for that.

I would also say you can’t get married to a process forever. We have a team that’s actually looking at our business processes and saying, “What makes sense?” and they may come back with suggested improvements. That’s not just because we want people to follow the processes; it’s because the marketplace changes. Certain roles become harder to fill, certain roles are seasonal. So, are we ready when the high season comes?

See also: ‘AI is a big word.’ Why this CHRO is focusing on the foundation

HR Executive: How are you thinking about governance when it comes to AI in HR?

Burrell: At the beginning of the year, I went through an HR AI certification with SHRM, and I came back and taught that to my leadership team. During one of the sessions, we had everybody doing Copilot, teaching them prompts—some people had a license and some people didn’t, so everybody got a different answer. My point to them was: Garbage in, garbage out. So, we created data governance around AI. We did data literacy courses. We have a data governance process. Before you put data into an AI application—the only one we’re approved to use is Copilot, the Dallas College version—you have to get approval to put that particular document into Copilot. The reason for that is data governance. You don’t want everything into the system. Is it clear, clean data?

I have a Friday meeting called Process Improvement, where team members present their business case on how we can use an agent for something, how we can do something better within Phenom, how we can do something better in Workday. All those ideas get captured, and then we work with IT to say which we’ll approve and which we’ll put on the nice-to-consider list. With the pace of change at which AI is coming, you can’t keep up, but you can prioritize some of the low-hanging fruit. That builds confidence and gives us a structured way of evaluating things we want to move forward with.

HR Executive: How are you balancing the need for AI integration and human oversight?   

Burrell: You still need human judgment in your processes. I’m a big believer that if HR and IT don’t work together to lead this stuff, it will eventually disrupt how HR is performed. The technology that we use only enables HR to do things faster so the human side can show up when it matters most. Yes, we may have a faster way of processing something, but when you really need a human resources professional to talk to you, pick up the phone or get on the video chat. I always want that to be the case. When there’s a real human intervention needed, we’re going to be there.

HR Executive: As Dallas College gets ready to launch a new tech-enabled focus on internal mobility, how are you getting employees involved?

Burrell: We created change champion networks, and we’re telling all of our ERG groups. We have about 1,200 people in an ERG in some form or fashion, and we’ve got them excited about it. They’re like our hackathon group. We created some buzz around it, then linked it back to our employee education survey. We told people, “This is what you told us about your career path at the college, and this is what we’re doing about it.” Everything we’re doing, everything we’re introducing, all ties back to that survey and the chancellor’s vision of the college as a 22nd century college. He’s made it very clear he doesn’t think four-year institutions are going to be ready to keep up with the demands of the workplace, but community colleges will be. His challenge to us is, how do we make sure our students are ready to contribute day one, when they are hired? This is part of that journey.

HR Executive: What do you anticipate will be your greatest HR challenge the rest of this year?

Burrell: It’s not digital. We’ve got all the tools that we need. It’s going to be the change management associated with all the changes that are happening—at the college, at the state or federal levels. How do you get people to buy into change when so much uncertainty is happening? It’s about getting people to feel that what we’re introducing is not an HR initiative, it’s a business initiative. It really is going to impact how they work in the future and the career they have at Dallas College.

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