The City of Denver Talent Transformation: How Train and Retain Turned a Lean Team into a Talent Powerhouse

City of Denver uses HireBoost.ai to Increase Recruiter Productivity

When the City & County of Denver set themselves up to reclaim more than 6,600 hours of recruiting capacity a month, it was not because they bought a faster tool. It was because they did two things most organizations treat as separate, and did them together: they trained their recruiters to think like experts, and then they retained that expertise by embedding it into the work itself. That pairing, Train and Retain, is the whole story, and it is why the change stuck.

Here is how a lean public sector team turned a breaking point into a talent powerhouse.

The challenge: high complexity, low runway

After a traumatic period of layoffs and budget cuts, the City & County of Denver's Talent Acquisition team had to rebuild. Nineteen recruiters were supporting 10,000 employees across 900 disparate roles, and the team was stretched to the breaking point. Budget cuts had reduced their LinkedIn licenses to just four seats, so the tools they had leaned on were suddenly gone. First-year turnover was high, which created constant rework, and recruiters had been reduced to order takers rather than strategic partners. They were expected to do more with less, flexing across roles they had no prior domain expertise in.

The real gap was not a tooling gap. It was the distance between the hiring manager's "Ask" and the recruiter's "Search," the strategic hiring intelligence that tells a recruiter exactly how to fill a role they have never worked before. The City & County of Denver did not need another way to find more people. They needed a new way of thinking, and a way to make it permanent.

Why the City of Denver chose HireBoost.ai

Leadership recognized something important early: software alone would not fix the culture, and a training day alone would not survive contact with a 900-role workload. They needed a partner that combined intelligent software with expert-led training, so the learning would take hold and then stay. That is the Train and Retain model, and it is what set HireBoost.ai apart.

The decision came down to a few criteria. HireBoost.ai went beyond sourcing to deliver deep role intelligence, so recruiters find the right people, not just more people. It could take a recruiter from zero to expert on any role in about 10 minutes, the only realistic way to cover 900 diverse roles with a lean team. It acted as a force multiplier, making their limited tech stack far more effective without adding operational complexity. And as a no-integration, web-based solution that meets the NIST framework and passed the required security assessments, it cleared the security and IT hurdles that stop most tools in the public sector before they start.

The discovery: listening before training

Before any training, HireBoost.ai ran one-on-one diagnostics with every recruiter and team leader to find the real friction points. What surfaced was telling: a deep fear that AI was there to replace recruiters rather than empower them, a reliance on "post and pray," constant friction with hiring managers over unrealistic "unicorn" expectations, a grind mentality from carrying heavier loads with fewer tools, and a sense of being hamstrung by rigid government pay bands. These were not problems a generic workshop could touch. They needed training built on each recruiter's actual work.

Train: a one-day immersive built on real, live roles

The training side was a customized, one-day immersive delivered live, on-site with the City & County of Denver, and its power came from one design choice: it was never theoretical. Every recruiter selected a live role they were currently struggling to fill. Before the session, HireBoost.ai pre-loaded each of those active roles through the platform, so recruiters walked in to see their own hardest search already mapped. Then they were handed an end-to-end strategic roadmap for that real role, built to avoid the pitfalls that derail a search. That single shift, from "learning a software tool" to "learning how to execute a master hiring strategy," changed everything about how the day landed.

The curriculum centered on the three-playbook Strategic Hiring Framework: Align, Find, and Assess. Align gets the role and the hiring manager right from the start. Find pinpoints where the best people actually are and how to reach them. Assess brings a structured, consistent way to evaluate and close. On top of the core framework, HireBoost.ai ran modules built for the City & County of Denver's exact constraints: strategic sourcing with Boolean and Google X-Ray search to find non-paid talent pools without LinkedIn, data-driven influence to challenge unicorn roles and align on pay upfront, a total rewards pitch for closing candidates inside fixed budget bands, and an "AI Escape Room" that proved AI was a force multiplier, not a replacement, turning fear into empowerment.

The result was an immediate confidence spike. Recruiters saw, on their own live roles, that any role could go from zero to an expert-level game plan in about 10 minutes: the expert game plan, the right questions to ask the hiring manager, where the best people are, and how to assess them.

Retain: making the expertise second nature

Training that ends when the day ends does not change how a team works. The retain side is what made the City & County of Denver's transformation permanent. By embedding the Strategic Hiring Intelligence framework directly into the HireBoost.ai platform, the training became "expert scaffolding" that sustains the learning on every search, long after the trainer goes home.

In practice, recruiters kept using the platform to upload their role discovery notes and generate a full playbook for every new role, so the framework was not a memory from a workshop, it was the way each search started. By leaning on the AI to handle the research, they escaped the 20-hour grind that had kept them stuck in transactional work and stepped fully into consultative roles. And because the platform walks a recruiter through the same expert, step-by-step playbooks on every single search, the habits of a world-class strategic talent advisor became second nature. The framework stopped being something they learned and became something they simply do. That is the difference between a training event and a lasting capability: the train side teaches the thinking, and the retain side makes it stick.

The transformation: the results

The impact was immediate and measurable. Recruiters saved 20+ hours of research and prep per search, which returned more than 6,600 hours of capacity to the team every month for higher-value work. Every search now begins with a structured, expert framework embedded in the output, 100 percent of the time. The training earned a 4.8 out of 5 rating, with 92 percent of participants saying it met or exceeded their professional goals, and the survey showed a real mindset shift toward strategic leadership (4.5 out of 5) and growing confidence in using AI for strategic work like market analysis and sourcing (4.3 out of 5). As Tara Eckberg, Head of Talent Acquisition, put it, HireBoost is "a capability multiplier, not a cost center."

The behavior changed too. Recruiters said they would be more assertive with hiring managers using new market-data talking points, moved away from "post and pray" toward Boolean and X-Ray sourcing to reach the 90 percent of candidates who are not looking, and used the first playbooks to sync with hiring managers from day one, filling roles faster while raising candidate quality. One Compensation Director role hit 100 percent alignment and a "fantastic hire" immediately after the session. HireBoost.ai is now officially embedded in the City & County of Denver's 2026 hiring strategy, and the team has moved the measure of success from "time to fill" to long-term quality and retention.

In the recruiters' own words

The team described the change plainly. "The ultimate tool to position me as a strategic consultant." "HireBoost.ai puts into words and provides the data necessary to create a cohesive, aligned recruitment plan." "It builds knowledge and strength about roles quickly when we recruit across so many industries and job profiles."

And from Tara Eckberg, Head of Talent Acquisition: "HireBoost.ai does in thirty minutes what it currently takes recruiters weeks to do. It clarifies the true value of the recruiter and improves quality without increasing operational complexity. We could not be happier."

The takeaway: why it has to be both

The City & County of Denver's results came from refusing to choose between training and technology. Train a team without a system to reinforce it, and the workshop fades within weeks. Deploy software without teaching the thinking behind it, and you automate the same order-taking faster. Train and Retain works because the two halves complete each other: the training makes your recruiters expert, and the platform makes that expertise permanent, reinforced on every search until it becomes who they are. That is how a lean team of 19 took on 900 roles and became a talent powerhouse. Slow, strained hiring is not a headcount problem or a tooling problem. It is an expertise problem, and Train and Retain is how you solve it for good.

Want to see what Train and Retain could do for your team? Reach out for a walkthrough.