It used to take 7-Eleven 10 days to hire an employee. Now it takes 3. Here's how.

7-Eleven is a brand built on convenience. Their 13,000+ locations offer impressively indistinguishable customer experiences: Enter a store, find what you’re looking for, quickly pay, and leave. 

It’s simple. It’s fast. It’s 7-Eleven.

But that convenience was not reflected in their candidate experience. 7-Eleven hires 112,000+ people every year — store leaders just don’t have the bandwidth to handle both store operations and hiring logistics. The result: a slow hiring process, and understaffed stores.

“Previously our store managers had to open a requisition, get it approved, post it themselves, review hundreds of applicants, pick which candidates to talk to, call them, and schedule them for interviews,” said Rachel Allen, senior director of TA at 7-Eleven. “We needed to change something fast in order to stay competitive.”

To empower their stores to hire better, 7-Eleven implemented AI automation to handle the initial screening and interview scheduling of job candidates. The results speak for themselves:

• <3 day time to hire (was previously 10+ days).
• 40,000 hours saved every week for store leaders.
• 85% of applicants are scheduled in <1 hour.

7-Eleven’s candidate journey now mirrors that of their customers: simple, fast, and yes, convenient.

Leveraging AI to improve the candidate experience.‍

Like most retail organizations hiring hourly roles, 7-Eleven’s customer base directly funnels into their candidate pipeline — the chain’s hiring transformation started with more efficiently converting the former into the latter. All that store leaders need to do is advertise they’re hiring, either with a QR code or a shortcode CTA. Interested customers can follow either of these actions to instantly launch an application on their messaging app of choice, right in the store.

That application is driven by Rita, 7-Eleven’s conversational AI assistant, who handles all candidate communication, screening, and interview scheduling. Rita turns each application into a simple conversation — through a series of short text messages, Rita gathers critical candidate information, and checks each person for minimum qualifications. In the backend, Rita is synced with store leaders’ calendars; she sends open interview slots to each qualified candidate. 

Here’s what it actually looks like:

This whole process is seamlessly familiar. Customers can enter the store, start the application, fill their Slurpee cup, and get scheduled for an interview before they’ve finished their drink. In fact, 85% of candidates are getting scheduled less than an hour after they first contacted Rita.

“Rita meets our candidates where they're at. It feels like they're just texting a person,” said Allen. 

Saving thousands of hours for store leaders.‍

Candidates aren’t the only ones benefiting from a better application experience; 7-Eleven’s store leaders have also benefited from Rita’s addition.

”This was the first solution that really knew how to do high volume recruitment. It's been a game changer for us,” said Allen. “The coolest part is the ability to give store leaders those hours back in their day. They can refocus on more important things that they need to do to run the stores.”

With Rita, 7-Eleven store leaders have collectively saved 40,000 hours every week — time they’re able to funnel back into making the customer experience as convenient as possible. And for your convenience, here’s a handy chart of store leaders’ day-to-day hiring process before and after Rita’s implementation.

“In most cases when you're implementing something new, you're getting a lot of feedback of what's not working,” said Allen. “With Rita, we get comments like, ‘That's it? That's the easiest thing I've ever done.’”

In other words, Rita creates convenience. 

For store leaders, and for candidates. So much so that 7-Eleven has been able to drastically reduce their time to hire — what used to take over 10 days, then can now do in under three. That’s the sort of speed and convenience that’s made 7-Eleven so successful — and it’s now reflected in their candidate experience.

“Doing things in a conversational way — it’s earth shattering.”

Watch the full video: