This article was originally published by ERE in November 2024, and has been lightly updated with new information.
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Recruiters should recruit. And managers should manage. That’s not exactly a controversial statement. But it does raise one major question:
Who’s doing all the admin work?
For a long time, we didn’t really have the answer to that at 7-Eleven. We hire 100,000+ people every year — which means there’s essentially an endless amount of resume reading and phone tagging that needs to happen before all our candidates turn into employees. Without a viable alternative, we struggled to determine who should be in charge of it.
The recruiter?
Or the manager?
Initially, we thought it would be most efficient to have a centralized team of about 400 recruiting coordinators supporting the store managers. People in this role were tasked with handling all of that administrivia: the screening, scheduling, onboarding, etc. And the result was something I know many talent leaders in the high-volume retail space are very familiar with — the process was too slow, too clunky, and we were losing out on talent due to a poor candidate experience. It was taking over 10 days to fill a role.
We knew there had to be a better way. And we also knew that we wanted our recruiters to be more than just glorified administrators. We wanted them to be truly invaluable and irreplaceable and do the work that nobody else can do. And with the advent of modern hiring tools — namely AI automation — it finally became possible. Automation has allowed us to dramatically improve our candidate experience, which is not only good for hiring and our employment brand, but also for our retail brand.
We knew there had to be a better way. And we also knew that we wanted our recruiters to be more than just glorified administrators.
So here’s what we did:
First of all, we identified that our recruiters’ overly administrative process was not adding value for our candidates, our managers, or our brand. We needed to find a simple solution our hiring managers could embrace, allowing them to truly own staffing and labor optimization without the noise. Being understaffed is often a vicious cycle of inefficiencies that compound on each other — store managers need to find and hire help, but it’s precisely at this time when they have the least amount of time to do so.
We had to break the cycle.
Now, one thing that I think is really important to emphasize here is that we identified the problem we wanted to solve first, and then found the technology vendor who could help us do it. It can be easy to fall in love with a fancy new bit of tech and then try to figure out how to fit it into all your stuff, but it makes a massive difference when you know exactly how and why you want to use it before you ever make a purchase.
For us, the right tech was Paradox — we partnered with them to create an AI assistant named Rita who became a 24/7, 365 recruiter for every store leader. Rita automates all the recruiting tedium like screening and scheduling through text conversations, and eliminates the need for reading thousands of resumes or emailing and calling candidates to coordinate logistics. Implementing this tool alone allowed us to almost instantly cut our time to hire in half, and we reduced it further to about two days within the first year. We’re now saving our store leaders about 40,000 hours per week total across all 7-Eleven locations. That’s 2 million hours annually.
The direct result of all that time saved — a happy accident, if you will — is that we also improved our quality of hire because we were able to get to top talent faster. That was the feedback we received from our stores: not only can I do this 10 times faster, but I’m also getting better people. Rita is scheduling 85% of applicants within an hour, and our store managers are able to spend way more time making those critical hiring decisions to ensure the candidates brought in are great fits. So to recap quickly, Rita helped us:
- Reduce time-to-hire from 10+ days to two.
- Schedule 85% of interviews within an hour.
- Save store managers 40,000 hours per week.
- And improve the quality of hire.
And our recruiting coordinators? Well, that role as we knew it simply wasn’t needed anymore. But the people were.
With the AI assistant handling 95% of the hiring process and the stores hiring more effectively than ever, we were able to repurpose some of those resources into new opportunities and roles on the field recruitment team. The people who had always been burdened by busywork were freed up to be consultants and advisors and do more people-centric work, like finding the right store leaders. And when you find those right store leaders, then they in turn are able to leverage the technology we've provided them to find the right store associates. And then hopefully we're able to grow those store associates into those store leader roles… who then can grow and move up within the organization.
Recruiters recruit. Managers manage. And AI does the rest.
That’s certainly a vicious cycle I think we can all get behind.
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Watch Rachel Allen’s full webinar with The Josh Bersin Company below:
