February 9, 2026
RogerUtting/Depositphotos.com
How Will Automated Hiring Change Frontline Retail?
In a conversation curated by Chain Store Age senior editor Dan Berthiaume, 7-Eleven’s Rachel Allen, head of talent acquisition for the c-store giant, outlined a case study as to what frontline hiring could look like in the retail and service industry moving forward.
Allen noted that the company currently uses a mixture of recruiting contractors, Workday Paradox Candidate Experience, and Paradox Conversational Applicant Tracking Software to streamline its hiring process, all leading up to the all-important in-person interview of applicants by store management figures.
“There are a few ways applicants can start to connect with us. We have QR codes at our stores and on our website that they can scan to start texting with our assistant named RITA, which stands for recruiting individuals through automation,” Allen said.
“RITA will then start the conversation with them to initially do things like share their name and what store they are interested in applying to. Then we need to collect some information specific to being authorized to work and having an application on file which RITA helps accomplish through text,” she added, noting that the next step was an automatically scheduled store-level interview. Store managers can switch RITA on and off at will, depending on staffing requirements at any given time.
Interesting factoids pulled from the remarks offered up by the 7-Eleven exec:
- The move to recruiters followed 7-Eleven’s 2021 acquisition of Speedway, which had hundreds of recruiters in the field: These recruiters helped to drum up applicant interest in staffing various 7-Eleven locations, whereas previously the hiring model relied solely on store-level management.
- Unified, automated hiring cuts speed-to-candidate and ghosting issues: Allen noted that previous to relying on automated solutions and contracted recruiters, it was taking 7-Eleven nearly two weeks to hire a new worker. Further, many hires were simply ghosting, never showing up. The new, unified hiring system has cut hiring times down to three days, retention has improved, and perhaps most importantly — quality of the hires has increased.
- Store leadership saves hours, and more: Allen underlined the massive boost that automating the vast bulk of the hiring practice had been for the company at all levels. “We have saved our store leaders about more than 40,000 hours a week, which is over 2 million hours a year, in time saved by automating 95% of the hiring process for them, which was a huge win. 7-Eleven is also now able to be more strategic in where we put our recruitment marketing dollars to the level of an individual store, as far as where we may need have some needs,” she stated.
Moving forward, 7-Eleven plans to double down on the automation aspect by shifting to agentic tech support — but before doing so “we want to make sure we have the foundation set for any agents coming into the picture, whether it’s HR or somewhere else in the business,” Allen said.
Perhaps anticipating criticism of this move toward AI-driven hiring, support, and other operational solutions, Allen was keen to highlight that (in her view), this approach was more of a supplementation of pre-existing human-driven capabilities. Agents are there to support person-to-person interactions within the 7-Eleven ecosystem, rather than outright replacements.
BrainTrust
Nicholas Morine
Recent Discussions
Discussion Questions
Given 7-Eleven’s example, how will automated hiring change frontline retail moving forward? Are there any obvious drawbacks, in your opinion?
Do you believe automated hiring practices will become commonplace in retail operations over the next five years? Why or why not?
What hiring processes should always remain in the hands of humans?
Poll
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It depends on what the automation is being used for. General filtering of candidates based on their knowledge and responses to basic questions is probably sensible. Basic admin like scheduling interviews, following up and so forth is also logical. Using AI to make qualitative judgements – like interpersonal skills – is not such a good idea!
Human in the Lead should be the foundation of designing automated hiring processes. Candidate lifecycles inherently have many bottle necks that benefit from implementing automations and centralized workflows. However at scale the bottlenecks will move further down the hiring process and it is critical a Human is making the hiring decision and dispositions of the candidates.
Efficiency is important. If automation can help speed up the application process, everyone (both the applicant and the company) wins. Keep in mind that “help speed up the application process” does not mean take it over from beginning to end. It can take over the beginning, but at some point, human-to-human interaction is important. Imagine the manager who can save hours a week by automating the early stages of the process. That manager can focus on more important tasks other than sifting through the applications to find someone to interview.
Will automated hiring practices become commonplace? For the reasons above, I’m surprised they aren’t already!
Final interviews cannot be replaced with automation. In retail, the personal connection (human-to-human skills) is important. The face-to-face interview provides the final piece of the process.
This feels like a strong use of AI for the parts of hiring that don’t require judgement, like collecting basic information or scheduling interviews. Where it gets harder is when the process isn’t straightforward. Reschedules, exceptions, or personal circumstances will still require human oversight. I also wonder how this will translate beyond entry-level roles, where more context is often needed upfront.
All automated hiring is a disaster. Before AI, companies had begun pulling back from their dependence on algorithmic sorting of applications because it is a miserable failure. Unfortunately, AI hype has led them to, once again, refuse their responsibility to customers and trust in the almighty algorithm. Partly, automated hiring ensures companies will NOT have the diversity of frontline employees needed to overcome misdirections of company policies to ensure customers value the company. In part, it is impossible for automated hiring to learn. While can learn which hires “didn’t work,” it cannot ever learn which hires were rejected but should have been hired. The only path of automated hiring, then, is to become ever more conservative — which ensures lower and lower diversity of hires making a company more and more unhealthy.
There are numerous things that automated hiring can do to streamline the process. First, I would like to see the name changed from “hiring” to ‘recruitment screening.’ Candidates are NOT automatically hired. AI can be used to understand more about a candidate’s likelihood to be successful and remain employed by identifying key traits or attitudes prior to engaging in a personal interview with store managers.
If the main component of hiring – or at least one of the main components – remains an interview – as is inferred here – I’m not sure AI makes much difference. But if we reach the point that the interview itself is with a chabot, let’s talk…pun intended.
Automation Isn’t about replacing human judgment, it’s a tool to help store managers find employees more easily, not directly choose who to hire.
Having hired many people over the years, I cannot ever see turning 100% of employee hiring over to AI. Building the right team is, and always will be, a people skill.
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It depends on what the automation is being used for. General filtering of candidates based on their knowledge and responses to basic questions is probably sensible. Basic admin like scheduling interviews, following up and so forth is also logical. Using AI to make qualitative judgements – like interpersonal skills – is not such a good idea!
Human in the Lead should be the foundation of designing automated hiring processes. Candidate lifecycles inherently have many bottle necks that benefit from implementing automations and centralized workflows. However at scale the bottlenecks will move further down the hiring process and it is critical a Human is making the hiring decision and dispositions of the candidates.
Efficiency is important. If automation can help speed up the application process, everyone (both the applicant and the company) wins. Keep in mind that “help speed up the application process” does not mean take it over from beginning to end. It can take over the beginning, but at some point, human-to-human interaction is important. Imagine the manager who can save hours a week by automating the early stages of the process. That manager can focus on more important tasks other than sifting through the applications to find someone to interview.
Will automated hiring practices become commonplace? For the reasons above, I’m surprised they aren’t already!
Final interviews cannot be replaced with automation. In retail, the personal connection (human-to-human skills) is important. The face-to-face interview provides the final piece of the process.
This feels like a strong use of AI for the parts of hiring that don’t require judgement, like collecting basic information or scheduling interviews. Where it gets harder is when the process isn’t straightforward. Reschedules, exceptions, or personal circumstances will still require human oversight. I also wonder how this will translate beyond entry-level roles, where more context is often needed upfront.
All automated hiring is a disaster. Before AI, companies had begun pulling back from their dependence on algorithmic sorting of applications because it is a miserable failure. Unfortunately, AI hype has led them to, once again, refuse their responsibility to customers and trust in the almighty algorithm. Partly, automated hiring ensures companies will NOT have the diversity of frontline employees needed to overcome misdirections of company policies to ensure customers value the company. In part, it is impossible for automated hiring to learn. While can learn which hires “didn’t work,” it cannot ever learn which hires were rejected but should have been hired. The only path of automated hiring, then, is to become ever more conservative — which ensures lower and lower diversity of hires making a company more and more unhealthy.
There are numerous things that automated hiring can do to streamline the process. First, I would like to see the name changed from “hiring” to ‘recruitment screening.’ Candidates are NOT automatically hired. AI can be used to understand more about a candidate’s likelihood to be successful and remain employed by identifying key traits or attitudes prior to engaging in a personal interview with store managers.
If the main component of hiring – or at least one of the main components – remains an interview – as is inferred here – I’m not sure AI makes much difference. But if we reach the point that the interview itself is with a chabot, let’s talk…pun intended.
Automation Isn’t about replacing human judgment, it’s a tool to help store managers find employees more easily, not directly choose who to hire.
Having hired many people over the years, I cannot ever see turning 100% of employee hiring over to AI. Building the right team is, and always will be, a people skill.