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. 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. We also knew that we wanted our recruiters to be more than glorified administrators. We wanted them to be invaluable and irreplaceable and do the work nobody else can do. 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 good not only for hiring and our employment brand but also for our retail brand.
So here’s what we did:
First, we identified that our recruiters’ overly administrative process was not adding value for our candidates, managers, or 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.
So we partnered with Paradox to create an AI assistant named Rita, who became a 24/7, 365 recruiter for every store leader. Through text conversations, Rita automates all the recruiting tedium, such as screening and scheduling. Implementing this tool alone allowed us almost instantly to 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.
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 busy work were freed up to be consultants and advisors and do more people-centric work, like finding the right store leaders. When you find those right store leaders, they can 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 the AI does the rest.
That’s the kind of virtuous cycle we can all get behind.
