Most talent leaders can recite the same hard truth: the technology rarely fails on its own. Implementations stall on the human side, the recruiters who quietly keep using the old tool, the hiring managers who never log in, the data scattered across chats, emails, and spreadsheets that no one can measure.
At Cultivate US, Marcie Small, CACI Chief Human Resources Officer and Erin Modrow, CACI Vice President of Digital Talent Strategy, join Kelly Kelly of The Groove, to share how they avoided that fate. Their verdict, in Marcie's words, was unusually direct: it was the smoothest HR technology implementation she'd been part of in her career.
CACI is a national security in the DC metro area serving the Defense and Intelligence communities. With roughly 27,000 employees and about 6,000 hires a year, many of them cleared technologists in software, systems, cyber, and signals the stakes for getting talent acquisition right are high. Here's how they approached it, and what other talent teams can take from their experience.
Start with the “why,” not the system
Before evaluating any technology, CACI named the problem. They called it “preparing for a people pivot”: getting ahead of the disruption AI would bring to the workforce, the demographic shifts changing talent availability, and the persistent scarcity of cleared candidates. Continuing to recruit the way they always had would leave gaps they might not be able to fill.
That framing drove organizational change before any software decision. CACI moved its full-lifecycle recruiters off business-aligned teams and onto skills-based delivery teams, giving them deeper expertise and more credibility with candidates in the specific skills they recruited for. A separate talent attraction organization handled sourcing, recruitment marketing, and university and veterans programs, each with its own way of working.
The lesson: skills-based hiring is as much an operating-model change as a technology one. CACI made the structural changes first, then looked for a system that could enable them.
Consolidate point solutions into one system
A comprehensive review of CACI's talent tech stack revealed what many teams will recognize, a tangle of point solutions, "all these different colors and boxes and arrows," as Marcie described the diagram. Critically, information was scattered: manager feedback lived in Teams chats, emails, and phone calls, which meant it couldn't be measured.
Rather than stitch more tools together, CACI wanted a broader system that could drive engagement across the full lifecycle, candidates entering the system, employees looking for internal moves, hiring managers giving feedback all in one place. They chose Eightfold Talent Acquisition, which covered the full lifecycle including internal mobility with Talent Management to follow, valuing a platform that could consolidate candidate, employee, and hiring manager data in one system, learn continuously from skills signals, and give CACI the data to act rather than another point solution it couldn’t measure.
Getting every recruiter, sourcer, candidate, and hiring manager into one system was, in Erin's words, a game-changer, not only for the experience, but because it finally gave them data across the entire lifecycle to decide where to make changes. Beyond consolidation, the platform’s AI could learn from skills signals across every touchpoint surfacing the kind of talent data their previous stack was never designed to produce.
Solve the hard requirements with smart configuration, not heavy custom builds
CACI came to the table with two unique demands. The first was their distinctive talent organization, with sourcers and recruiters operating separately at roughly a 1-to-7 ratio and needing clean handoffs. The second was security clearances, they need to find cleared talent, rediscover candidates they've met before, and accommodate clearance validation steps that happen outside the system.
The Groove approached these as a consulting problem, not a configuration checklist. Working from CACI's non-negotiables and their combined Workday and Eightfold knowledge, they adapted standard functionality in inventive ways:
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Handoffs: They repurposed the feedback functionality normally reserved for interviewers so sourcers and recruiters could pass candidates back and forth, captured and measurable inside the system.
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Talent pools: They configured communities so the sourcing team could build curated lists to hand off to recruiters.
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Clearances: They brought in custom fields so recruiters had the clearance data they needed without bouncing between systems because, as Kelly noted, if recruiters have to leave the tool, adoption suffers and the investment goes to waste.
As Kelly put it, none of it was a grand custom system and that was the point. Solutions built on best practice are easy to manage, easy to adopt, and easy to maintain.
Treat change management as the project, not an afterthought
If there's a single thread running through CACI's story, it's that change came first. The team set guiding principles in strategy sessions before kickoff, then used them as a constant check: are we overcomplicating this? They communicated early and often, tying every message to expected outcomes, not just "this is coming," but "here's why, and here's why you should adopt it" and secured buy-in from leadership down.
They ran focus groups with recruiters, hiring managers, and employees, facilitated by neutral parties so feedback stayed candid, then closed the loop publicly: we heard you, and here's what we changed. They were deliberate about language around AI, repeatedly framing it as “CACI-approved AI,” routing it through their governance council, and publishing FAQs and a simple visualization showing exactly how the AI worked, so people could see the team had done its due diligence.
The training model mattered too. The Groove ran train-the-trainer sessions, but the end-user training was led by recruiters themselves, peers standing up in front of 100 colleagues to say, in effect, “I learned this, I believe in this, and here's how to use it.” Questions went to those peer experts, not the HR tech team. For hiring managers, who could still fall back on Workday, the team kept feedback friction-free: thumbs up, thumbs down, a couple of checkboxes, done.
The results
CACI went live in February. Beyond the smoothest implementation Marcie had seen, the early signals are strong: a candidate experience score hovering around 4.7, and rarest of all in recruiting operations, unsolicited positive feedback, including candidates at job fairs remarking on how easy the career site is to navigate. The momentum has set CACI up to move directly into its Eightfold Talent Management implementation, already underway.
The takeaway for talent leaders isn't a single feature. It's a sequence: name the strategic “why,” consolidate around one system, solve hard requirements with thoughtful configuration, and treat change management as the work itself rather than a final step.
Want to see how Eightfold Talent Intelligence can move your organization from scattered point solutions to a single system for skills-based hiring? Explore Eightfold Talent Acquisition.
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