Abstract

7-Eleven Inc., one of the world’s largest convenience retailers, addressed the challenges it faced in high-volume frontline recruitment for its stores using a conversational AI assistant. Rita - Recruiting Individuals through Automation - developed in association with Paradox, helped the company attract high quality talent and reduce time to hire from 10 days to three. 7-Eleven acquired Speedway LLC, the convenience store arm of Marathon Petroleum Corporation, in 2021. The acquisition brought more than 3,800 stores into 7-Eleven’s fold. The company was then operating with two legacy recruitment systems. The management decided to overhaul recruitment. It made the store leaders responsible for end-to-end recruitment. However, the store leaders could not accommodate the tasks in their busy schedules and this resulted in hiring bottlenecks This, in turn, led to a vicious circle of understaffing and the resulting inefficiencies, and the loss of qualified candidates to nimbler competitors. Under the leadership of Rachel Allen, Senior Director of Talent Acquisition, 7-Eleven decided to bring in technology to increase speed-to-hire while creating a streamlined hiring process across locations. The new system had to address the challenges experienced by the legacy systems, and ease up the burden on store leaders. The solution was an AI-driven, mobile-first hiring model Rita. It automated screening and candidate engagement, conducted assessments, scheduled interviews, and even assisted in early stage onboarding. Rita’s implementation resulted in a reduction in time to hire, improved candidate experience, and freed store leaders from administrative burden, saving 40,000 hours per week for the company. While automation in recruitment helped the company, it also raised critical questions related to transparency, bias, and reduced human interactions and whether AI could evaluate soft skills and cultural fit of a candidate.

Learning Objectives

The case is structured to achieve the following Learning Objectives:

• Diagnose the reasons for candidates dropping out during the hiring process in high-volume frontline recruitment.
• Evaluate how AI-enabled hiring changes outcomes at each stage of the hiring process.
• Identify key risks of AI in recruitment and recommend safeguards to manage them.

Keywords

Conversational AI in recruitment AI in talent acquisition Recruitment funnel High-volume hiring Retail workforce management Text-to-apply hiringCandidate experience Time-to-hire reduction Algorithmic bias in hiring HR digital transformation Human-in-the-loop AI