EXCLUSIVE Q&A: 7-Eleven streamlines store hiring
7-Eleven unifies frontline hiring across two store banners.
Chain Store Age recently spoke with Rachel Allen, head of talent acquisition at 7-Eleven, about how the convenience store giant has standardized management of applicant tracking and hiring across its 7-Eleven and Speedway store brands.
What issues was 7-Eleven facing with hiring practices and systems?
After acquiring Speedway in 2021, 7-Eleven had to deal with both legacy 7-Eleven and legacy Speedway solutions running on multiple technology stacks and hiring models. Speedway was already running Workday hiring technology.
In addition, frontline hiring models were different at Speedway, which has 100% corporate locations, compared to 7-Eleven, which was mostly franchised. Speedway had 200-300 recruiters in the field that helped to support recruitment store-level associate recruitment, while 7-Eleven had store leaders in charge of the hiring.
First, we added recruiters on the 7-Eleven side to mimic how Speedway was doing it. We added about 100 recruiting contractors, but then a business decision was made to have our store leaders be held accountable to their labor optimization as a whole, including the hiring and staffing of their locations. That decision was made before any technology decisions.
We were already taking a journey to use Workday as our human capital management platform to unify us as one company. That journey was already on the way. But instead of waiting for that to happen, we went forward with Workday Paradox Candidate Experience and Paradox Conversational Applicant Tracking Software (ATS) (Editor’s note – Workday acquired Paradox in 2025) and turned that on when it was still being powered by two different tech stacks.
[READ MORE: 7-Eleven streamlines frontline workflows]
Today we have Paradox as our applicant tracking system and use Workday for human capital management and workflows like scheduling and shift management.
What benefits has 7-Eleven achieved since unifying hiring processes on one tech stack?
Our biggest challenge was speed-to-candidate. We were losing applicants to our competitors. It was taking 10 days or more to hire a new employee. We were also challenged by ghosting – hires never showing up.
Once we moved to the unified hiring system we have today, we went from taking close to two weeks to under three days to hire someone. By becoming the first to the candidate we saw an improvement in the quality of our hires as well as in our retention.
Even the ghosting went down because we have a conversational AI tool that walks candidates through the whole process, as well as an in-person interview. But with that, we dramatically lessened the amount of ghosting. People show up to the interviews and to the first day, because when we were taking too long before there was too much time for them to get other offers and then not show up because they found something else.
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.
How does the hiring process work for a candidate?
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.
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.
Once all this information is established, RITA is able to automatically schedule an interview. Up to this point, the store leader really hasn't had to do anything, and then applicants show up for the in-person interview.
If the interview goes well and the store leader decides that they want to move forward with that candidate, they let Rita know and then Rita texts the candidate. Applicants are able to receive and accept offers through text with Rita, as well.
To kick off the whole process, the store leader literally just toggles Rita on or off. We manage all the application data and the information in Workday now, and that feed is what gets sent to Paradox. A store leader can go in and see if there is an open position that makes sense for their location, and then they can toggle it on and a day or so later, people start showing up for interviews.
How has store management responded?
Response from store management has been very positive, but we intentionally included them from the get-go to make sure that we had their stamp of approval throughout the whole process.
Are there any future plans for hiring that you can discuss
We want to shift to agentic tech support. Prior to that, 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.
We see it as supplementing and enhancing and supporting the humans that are doing the work so that the humans can focus on the moments that matter, I really see recruitment going back to the white glove experience and much more human-centric and focused. And the only way we can do that is if we have agents helping support them. So that's the direction we're moving.
