Zurich Release Deep Dive – HRSD
This blog aims to be a deep dive blog on the features coming in HR Service Delivery space as of the July 2025 Store/Zurich Family Release. Some of the features may have dependency on a family release. This will be called out in the feature section.
Release blog content:
- Hiring Experiences* (new in Zurich)
- Hiring tab - Manager Hub
- Applicant Center
- Recruiter Workspace
- Interview Management & Scheduling
- Pre-Hire Experience
- Create Job requisition (Now Assist)
- Scheduling Interview (Now Assist)
- Employee Experiences (CKM & EJM)
- Generating Onboarding Ramp-up Plan v1.1 (Now Assist)
- Resolve HR Cases v2.0 (Now Assist)
- HR Multi-Instance Integration (HR MII) Enhancements
- Document Templates Enhancements
- Policy Evaluation Enhancements (Now Assist)
- Sentiment Analysis (Now Assist)
- Lifecycle Events logging
- Journeys Usability Enhancements
- Case Summarization, Email Reply Recommendations and Resolution Notes Enhancements (Now Assist)
- Growth Experiences (earlier Talent Development)
- Help Plan growth conversation (Now Assist)
- Multiple mentoring programs
- Alumni Experiences
- Alumni Center- Simplifying alumni registration
I. Hiring Experiences (new in Zurich)
This suite of applications is built to simplify and improve the hiring process for hiring managers, recruiters, interviewers, and applicants. It is released for the first time in the July ’25 store and with the Zurich release. Previously, the product was known as Talent Acquisition and offered as a standalone solution with limited availability. Now, it has been integrated into HRSD and is generally available as ‘Hiring Experiences’. This is included in the new HRSD Professional and HRSD Enterprise SKUs introduced in Zurich. To find out which SKU you have and your access to hiring features, please contact your account team.
i. Hiring Tab (Manager Hub)
- Persona – Managers
- Availability – Hiring tab v6.0 plugin available on the ServiceNow Store
- Dependency – Manager Hub & Employee Center Pro. No dependency on family release.
The hiring tab enables Hiring Managers to perform and track all their hiring-related activities. It enables hiring managers to open their job requisitions and collaborate with recruiters to get them finalized. As applications stream in, hiring tab provides a one-stop destination to view, track & provide decisions on applications. The hiring tab provides features for hiring managers to easily collaborate with Recruiters in the context of job requisitions & applications and allow easy and fast decision-making. After enabling the requisite plugins managers will be able to see hiring tab within Manager Hub on employee center pro.
ii. Applicant Center
- Persona – Applicants
- Availability –Applicant Center v6.0 plugin available on the ServiceNow Store
- Dependency – Universal Tasks, Talent Profile, Employee Center pro & Time limited authentication. No dependency on family release.
A portal designed for applicants who receive invitations, allowing access via a magic link login (no password required), where they can view their applications and progress, complete assigned tasks, schedule interviews, review resources, and communicate with the hiring team.
Applicant Center allows organizations to support and actively engage with their job applicants. Applicants, on this portal, can view company-related content and track their applications and related tasks. Applicant Center also provides an easy way for applicants to reach out to and interact with recruiters, so they feel supported through the process. As they go through a hiring journey with the company, they can also provide their feedback on the process to empower organizations with data for improvement
iii. Recruiter Workspace
- Persona – Recruiters, Coordinators
- Availability –Recruitment workspace v6.0 plugin available on the ServiceNow Store
- Dependency – Universal Tasks, skills foundation and Talent Profile. No dependency on family release.
The Recruitment workspace application provides recruiters with a centralized platform to manage their work efficiently, offering features such as KPI dashboards, job requisition tracking, and stakeholder collaboration. It enables recruiters to streamline their hiring process, track key metrics, and improve hiring efficiency in one unified workspace. Increase productivity with a flexible workspace that facilitates effective communications among the hiring manager, the hiring team, and the applicants. Through this workspace recruiters can either create new or complete the draft job requisitions created by hiring managers before posting them on external ATS systems after due approvals.
iv. Interview Management & Scheduling
- Persona – Recruiter, Applicant
- Availability – Interview Management v2.0 plugin on the ServiceNow Store
- Dependency – Skills foundation, Employee Profile. No dependency on family release.
The Interview management application simplifies and optimizes the interview process through structured workflows, flexible scheduling options, automated reminders, and streamlined feedback collection, enabling faster and more collaborative hiring. This capability also allows recruiters to set-up interviews, select panelists and available time slots, allows applicant self-scheduling along with notifications and reminders.
Additionally, it facilitates seamless feedback sharing and tracking, empowering hiring managers to efficiently compare applicants and make well-informed decisions.
v. Pre-Hire Experience
- Persona – Managers, Pre-hires, New hires
- Availability - This feature is a part of Journey Designer v7.0 and has dependency on the Zurich Release
- Dependency - the "Explicit Roles" plugin must be enabled to use this functionality.
Pre-hires often encounter uncertainty, unclear onboarding tasks, and limited communication, which leads to disengagement and a slow start to productivity. Organizations struggle to deliver secure, personalized experiences for individuals not yet officially onboarded, resulting in manual effort and role management errors.
The OOB Pre-Hire Experience transforms this experience by enabling pre-hires to begin onboarding tasks ahead of their start date, fostering early engagement and readiness. Security is preserved through limited-access roles that restrict visibility to only essential features, while automated transitions from pre-hire to employee reduce administrative overhead. Customizable content and quick links allow organizations to tailor workflows to specific business needs, boosting pre-hire satisfaction, reducing churn, and accelerating productivity.
vi. Create Job Requisition (using Now Assist AI agents)
- Persona – Manager, Recruiter
- Availability – HR Talent AI agent collection plugin available on the ServiceNow Store
- Dependency – Interview Management, hiring tab, Talent profile, Recruiter workspace, applicant center and Hiring connector.
The job requisition process can often be slow and challenging to scale, with hiring managers sometimes uncertain about how to begin or what is required. This agentic use case enables managers or recruiters to initiate a job requisition directly within the 'now assist' conversation by simply responding to a few targeted questions. This team of agents streamlines the process by gathering relevant inputs, conducting compliance checks, and refining requisition details, resulting in reduced time to open positions, lower cost per hire, faster and more accurate hiring decisions, and improved candidate quality.
vii. Scheduling Interview (using Now Assist AI agents)
- Persona – Recruiter
- Availability – HR Talent AI agent collection plugin available on the ServiceNow Store
- Dependency – Interview Management, Hiring tab, Talent profile, Recruiter workspace, applicant center and Hiring connector.
This capability streamlines interview scheduling by interpreting intent, finding optimal time slots, drafting communication and handling invites automatically. This agentic workflow enables hiring teams to schedule interviews faster & efficiently with reduced need for re-scheduling and thereby decreasing time-to-hire. Recruiters or coordinators can trigger this by typing schedule interview on the now assist chat right from the workspace view. By most of the heavy lifting being done by AI agents in scheduling the interview, it helps reduce time to schedule per interview by more than 60%.
II. Employee Experiences (CKM & EJM)
i. Generating Onboarding Ramp-up Plan v1.1 (using Now Assist AI agents)
- Persona – Managers, Onboarding Specialists, Employees
- Availability - Now Assist for HRSD v10.0 plugin available on the ServiceNow Store
- Dependency - HR Service Delivery AI agent collection (v4). Has soft dependencies on the following for an ideal output: Talent Acquisition, Talent Development Core and Learnings
Managers often spend hours manually curating onboarding plans for new hires, gathering learning materials, scheduling introductory meetings, and assigning team-specific tasks. The Zurich release introduces the Generate Onboarding Ramp-Up Plan, an AI-powered workflow that automates and personalizes the onboarding experience.
Once a candidate accepts an offer, the system applies a standard organizational template and, five days before the start date, activates three agents. The Input Gathering Agent analyzes resumes, interview notes, and job descriptions to identify skill gaps. The Plan Generator Agent builds a structured, stage-based plan with personalized learning tasks, team activities, and 1:1 introductory invite. Finally, the Reviewer Agent presents the plan to the manager for review and customization. Once approved, the new hire gains access to a tailored onboarding journey that boosts engagement, accelerates ramp-up, and sets them up for success from day one.
ii. Resolve HR Cases v2 (using Now Assist AI agents)
- Persona – HR Agents, Employees
- Availability - Now Assist for HRSD v10.0 plugin available on the ServiceNow Store
- Dependency – HRSD Core, HR Service Delivery AI agent collection (v4). Soft dependency on Knowledge Graph.
Resolving HR cases has traditionally been a time-consuming process for Tier 1+ agents, requiring manual review of policies, FAQs, and fulfillment instructions to understand context and craft a resolution. The Zurich release introduces the HR Case Planner AI Agent to solve for the same.
When an employee submits an HR request, the AI agent evaluates its urgency, routing critical cases to human agents and automatically resolving non-critical ones via the noncritical HR case agentic workflow, by synthesizing relevant knowledge articles and sending responses via email and NAVA. For critical cases, agents can now use the “Generate Plan” UI button on case form, which triggers the planner agent. This planner agent then compiles case details, fulfillment steps, and supporting content into a clear, step-by-step resolution plan. Agents can review, adjust, and approve the plan, which is then saved to the worknotes for audit purposes. These enhancements streamline the resolution process, reduce manual effort, and empower HR teams to deliver faster, more consistent support.
iii. HR Multi-Instance Integration (HR MII) – Advanced Capabilities
- Persona - Provider Admin, Provider Agent, Consumer Admin, Consumer Employee
- Availability - HR Multi Instance Integration for Provider v2.0.0 and HR Multi Instance Integration for Consumer v2.0.0 store apps
- Dependency - Service Bridge application, HR Core, Agent Workspace for HR case management, Universal Task Plugin and Employee Center. To explore HR MII, the recommendation is to be on the New SKU and on Zurich family release.
The ServiceNow HR Multi Instance integration application enables inter instance communication between the provider instance and a consumer instance for HR service fulfillment. This helps centralize HR service Delivery in a shared service model and provides a seamless employee experience for consumer requesting remote vs local HR service fulfillment. The Zurich release brings powerful enhancements to HR Multi-Instance Integration (HR MII), enabling an enhanced experience for employees across distributed ServiceNow environments.
Provider agents can now initiate ad-hoc approvals and assign HR tasks within remote HR cases created by consumer employees, each delivered as a Universal Task that redirects the assignee to the provider instance for action. All 13 task types are supported, including a newly introduced "URL" task type that guides employees to helpful resources directly from their "My Tasks" view.
To improve transparency, provider admins can now distinguish between internal and external users via a new "External" flag in the HR Profile table. Additionally, knowledge base articles hosted by the provider can be attached to remote cases and accessed by consumer employees through secure magic links. With the introduction of Wrapper HR Services, consumer HR admins can combine remote catalogs with local tasks and approvals into a single, unified service; streamlining fulfillment and elevating the employee experience across instances.
iv. Document Templates – Enhanced Signing and Filling Capabilities
- Persona – HR Agents, Employee Persona
- Availability - Document Template plugin v6.0 available on the ServiceNow Store
- Dependency - HRSD Core. No dependency on the family release.
Prior to the Zurich release, HR agents and employees faced significant friction when attempting to fill out or sign documents from mobile platforms. The experience was often fragmented, had limited support for signing PDF templates on mobile browsers and Now Mobile, and a lack of seamless integration with Agent Workspace (AWS) made document workflows cumbersome. Users frequently encountered truncated documents requiring horizontal scrolling, which disrupted the signing flow and reduced efficiency.
With the new release, signing support for PDF templates is now fully enabled across Mobile Browser and Now Mobile using ServiceNow Sign, Adobe Sign, and DocuSign. The introduction of full-tab signing eliminates the need for scrolling, offering a clean and intuitive experience across EC, Now Mobile, Mobile Browser, and Platform. Additionally, HR agents can now initiate one-click redirection from AWS to fill or sign both PDF and HTML templates, streamlining document handling and significantly improving productivity and user satisfaction.
v. Policy Evaluation Enhancements (Now Assist)
- Persona – HR Agents
- Availability - Now Assist for HRSD v10.0 plugin available on the ServiceNow Store
- Dependency – HRSD Core, HR Service Delivery AI agent collection (v4).
The Zurich release introduces a powerful new AI skill that transforms the way HR agents handle tuition reimbursement requests, which often involves manually interpreting complex policy documents and employee context to determine eligibility.
The AI agent automatically evaluates HR case details and employee context against policy criteria, providing agents with clear, contextual outputs. It also supports interactive Q&A, allowing agents to ask policy-related questions and receive tailored answers in real time. This not only reduces complexity and improves performance but also empowers HR teams to make faster, more accurate decisions.
vi. Sentiment Analysis (Now Assist)
- Persona – HR Agents, HR Operations Manager
- Availability - Now Assist for HRSD v10.0 plugin available on the ServiceNow Store
- Dependency – HRSD Core
HR agents have limited tools to assess the emotional tone behind employee requests, making it difficult to identify and prioritize sensitive or potentially escalated cases. This often leads to delays in addressing urgent issues and missed opportunities to improve employee satisfaction.
AI-powered sentiment analysis within Agent Workspace enables HR agents to instantly gauge the emotional tone of each case. Every case is assigned a sentiment score ranging from -5 to 5, visible in both the case list view and individual case records. Agents can sort and prioritize cases based on sentiment, and the reasoning behind each score is displayed to provide context. This allows HR teams to proactively address low-sentiment cases, mitigate potential dissatisfaction, and improve CSAT outcomes.
vii. Lifecycle Events Logging
- Persona – Lifecycle Event Admins
- Availability – Lifecycle Events Application
- Dependency – Journey Designer v7.0 plugin on the ServiceNow Store. Has dependency on Zurich Release.
Prior to the Zurich release, customers had limited visibility into flow execution, making it hard to troubleshoot issues independently. This release changes that by introducing detailed logging for every step of a flow, creation, execution, and known errors, so users can quickly identify what went wrong and why. Lifecycle Event Admins can now access execution logs directly within the case, with flexible logging levels (Error, Info, Debug) to suit different troubleshooting needs. This increases self-resolution, reduces the number of support cases, and helps internal teams respond more efficiently when assistance is needed.
viii. Journey Usability Enhancements
- Persona – Journey Owners, Managers, Employee
- Availability - Journey Designer v7.0 plugin on the ServiceNow Store
- Dependency - Installs the following additional plugin: Journey Accelerator v6.6
The new capabilities bring a fresh wave of usability enhancements designed to simplify and personalize the onboarding process.
A new “Show Case to Subject Person” flag within HR Service Configuration gives admins better control over what individuals can see, improving transparency and privacy. Journey owners can now cancel “Accelerator-only” journeys directly from the portal, making it easier to manage standalone workflows.
The Journey Overview page is also more customizable; teams can hide task templates and the “Create a Journey for your Team” widget to streamline the interface. Plus, sync issues between key fields like “Opened For” and “Journey Owner” have been resolved, ensuring smoother coordination and fewer errors. These updates empower HR teams to deliver a more intuitive, flexible, and engaging onboarding experience.
ix. Case Summarisation, Email Reply Recommendations and Resolution Notes Generation (Now Assist)
- Persona – HR Agents
- Availability - Now Assist for HRSD v10.0 plugin available on the ServiceNow Store
- Dependency – HRSD Core
HR agents often spend valuable time manually summarizing case details, drafting email replies, and documenting resolution notes. The Zurich release introduces powerful enhancements to case summarization, email reply recommendations, and resolution notes, all powered by generative AI.
Summaries are now cached and reused unless the underlying record changes, reducing redundant LLM calls and improving system performance. Email replies are enriched with citations from the knowledge base, boosting trust and accuracy in responses. Additionally, resolution notes can now be applied to extended tables (not just the base case table), ensuring broader coverage and flexibility across HR workflows. These enhancements streamline case handling, improve agent productivity, and elevate the overall employee experience.
III. Growth Experiences (Formerly Talent Development)
Growth Experiences applications use a suite of products to help employees develop, grow and deliver on critical business outcomes. You may have heard of some of these capabilities in conversations around Talent Development or Employee Growth and Development earlier. This release there are two major updates in the conversation and mentoring apps.
i. Help Plan Growth conversations - Using Now Assist AI agents
- Persona – Manager
- Availability –Now Assist for HRSD v10.0 plugin available on the ServiceNow Store
- Dependency – HR Talent AI agent collection
This agentic flow assists managers by enabling them to effectively prepare for and conduct productive growth conversations with their teams. Leveraging a range of AI agents, managers can schedule growth discussions, access summaries of employees’ skills, achievements, and other relevant insights from Growth applications, and seamlessly incorporate suggested talking points into the meeting agenda. Additionally, these agents provide managers with pertinent resources to ensure thorough preparation for each conversation. The following sequence outlines how these agents collaborate to facilitate comprehensive support for growth conversations from start to finish.
Agent-1: Getting common time slots & schedule growth discussions
Agent-2 : Generating employee summary and get a list of suggested talking points
Agent-3 : Getting resources for managers to prepare for effective growth conversations
Managers can trigger this by clicking ‘Plan conversation with AI’ button on conversations tab.
ii. Mentoring - Multiple mentoring programs
- Persona – Admin, Employees (as mentor & mentee)
- Availability –Mentoring v2.0 plugin available on the ServiceNow Store
- Dependency – Career conversations plugin. No dependency on family release.
This feature allows managers and employees to view, manage, and enroll as mentors and mentees in various mentoring programs based on seniority, expertise, skill or role. Admin must configure mentoring programs from backend and define criteria for them to surface to users. This feature is part of Mentoring app within Growth experiences and it has light dependency on configuring skills profile and career conversations. Also on the Mentoring page, mentoring progress can be viewed for multiple programs in a single view.
IV. Alumni Experiences
i. Alumni Center Enhancements
- Persona – Alumni, Employees, Admin
- Availability – Alumni Center plugin v3.0 available on the ServiceNow Store
- Dependency – HRSD Core, EC Pro & EJM(for offboarding feature).
Alumni center enhancements address the current challenge of alumni onboarding to the portal which is manual and admin driven. This update will simplify portal access with automated employee-to-alumni transitions and self-registration for existing alumni. This is achieved by three main capabilities which are released:
-Part of offboarding Journey- Enable employees to review their personal details like personal email, contact details etc. for future communication and make alumni center onboarding easier. These are included as ToDos and Offboarding Journey tasks. This feature has dependency on Employee Journeys or Lifecycle events.
-Automatic alumni user creation- With configurable workflow, alumni accounts can be automatically generated during employee offboarding based on predefined conditions. This feature has dependency on Employee Journeys or Lifecycle events.
-Self Registration- This feature allows alumni to create their portal account by submitting their information, which the system uses to verify their former employee status. Alumni can easily register themselves using this self-registration option.
This sums up the features and enhancements in the HR Service Delivery space for Zurich and July 2025 store release. If you would like to learn more about any of the features, refer to our ServiceNow Product Documentation.
