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.