7-Eleven: 24-7 AI Hiring

95% Automated. 0% Robotic. 100% Savage. 

Most corporate ATS platforms are built for comfy, professional-level roles. But what happens when you need to hire 110,000 people a year without your store managers losing their minds?  

You call Rachel Allen, Senior Director of TA at 7-Eleven, and you automate 95% of the damn process.  

In this episode, Chad and Joel grill Rachel on how she dragged convenience-store hiring out of the dark ages, cutting time-to-hire from 10 excruciating days to less than three.  

The Hot Takes:

• Rita the Chatbot: 7-Eleven's AI assistant is so eerily good, store managers literally asked to meet her in person. (Spoiler: She doesn't exist.)  

• The "Tactical Pause": Why Rachel stopped a major tech rollout right before summer because forcing software on stressed-out managers is a great way to start a corporate mutiny.  

• Free Recruitment Marketing: How the TA team shamelessly piggybacked on consumer marketing shipments to send out hiring posters for free.  

• The Accidental Fix: Turns out, when you stop letting candidates fall into a black hole, you magically stumble into better quality talent and higher retention. Who knew?  

Stop ghosting your candidates—they're probably buying your coffee right now. Grab a Big Gulp and learn how to actually deploy AI without destroying the human touch.  

Listen and enjoy!

PART 2 - The Human Brand Strategy

PART 3 - Hiring at 2am

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION

0:00:26.4 Joel Cheesman: All right, let's do this. We are the Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheesman, joined as always by Chad Sowash. And today we are talking to Rachel Allen, Senior Director of Talent Acquisition at 7-Eleven. Rachel, welcome to HR's most dangerous podcast.

0:00:44.0 Rachel Allen: Thank you for having me.

0:00:44.9 Joel Cheesman: No pressure.

0:00:45.1 Rachel Allen: No pressure at all. Happy to be here.

0:00:46.9 Joel Cheesman: Nervous laughter.

0:00:47.5 Rachel Allen: Yeah. It's gonna be great.

0:00:49.1 Chad Sowash: I, I appreciate the color pop first and foremost, 'cause we're fairly... Fairly drab. But for those of our listeners or viewers who don't know you...

0:00:58.5 Rachel Allen: Mm-hmm.

0:00:59.0 Chad Sowash: They know a 7-Eleven, come on. Tell them a little bit about you, a little bit about you, what you do, and at 7-Eleven.

0:01:05.0 Rachel Allen: Sure. So I'm actually a boomerang. This is my second time back. So I was here the first time 2010 to 2015, and I'm nearing my three-year anniversary this second time at the end of this month, actually. So total combined, eight years. Um, I lead talent acquisition there right now, and that is holistically for... And this is for 7-Eleven, Inc., which is US and Canada. And I call that out, right, 'cause we're a big, massive global brand. Um, but I am... I work for 7-Eleven, Inc., which is US and Canada. And we, we support all of the recruitment. So we have recruiters and teams that support all of our field ops recruitment, as well as what we call Store Support Center recruitment. And then we have a team, um, dedicated to TA operations. Um, and in that TA operations team is where we have a COE that supports our stores. So we support as a COE to the store-level recruitment.

0:01:55.9 Joel Cheesman: Give us some context on that, 'cause 7-Eleven feels like a massive organization. How many people are employed? How many job postings? How many hires a year? Like, give us some numbers on the breadth of...

0:02:08.9 Rachel Allen: Well, again, this is gonna be US and Canada. Um, but like a hundred... Over 110, maybe like 112,000 hires a year. And keep in mind, that's only our corporate stores. Um, that's not including anything that happens at the franchise stores. We're, we've got about 13,000 locations between US and Canada. About a 45/55% mix, um, franchise and corporate. Um, over 70,000 employees within the US and Canada. I think that's...

0:02:37.9 Chad Sowash: Huge, huge...

0:02:38.5 Rachel Allen: Yeah. High volume. And when you say high volume...

0:02:41.7 Joel Cheesman: High volume.

0:02:42.8 Chad Sowash: That is high volume. Well, that being said, so I understand that you, 7-Eleven, has moved into more of the automation on the side, uh, for recruiting. When did you do it and why did you do it? What were you trying to solve for?

0:02:56.5 Rachel Allen: Yeah, no, really great question. Um, so we have automated over 90% of our process, over 95% of our process at the store level. So we were really trying to solve for, um, that high-volume space. And quite honestly, historically, high volume didn't get the love in the recruitment space. All the technology that you've seen, all of the ATSs are geared towards those professional-level recruitment.

0:03:20.3 Chad Sowash: Which is crazy, right?

0:03:21.1 Rachel Allen: Yeah.

0:03:21.2 Chad Sowash: Because most of what you do is high volume.

0:03:23.2 Rachel Allen: Correct. The majority of the hires are at the high-volume space, but it just wasn't getting the love. We made a business decision to change from having recruiters actually support, um, our store leaders finding their store associates. And this came after an acquisition of Speedway. So, um, we have a family of brands, and you're familiar with 7-Eleven, and then there's Speedway. We also have Stripes, and with Stripes came Laredo Taco, and then we also have something called Raise the Roost. But after the acquisition with Speedway, um, we actually first went towards adding more recruiters out into the field to support our store leaders in finding their talent. But then a business decision was made that, you know, we really want to hold them accountable. We want our store leaders to maximize their labor optimization and to own that.

0:04:11.3 Rachel Allen: And so the decision was made to actually eliminate that role. So that role was taken away. And, and that was before any technology was in place, right? So a business decision was made, um, and totally agree with that decision of, you know, having our store leaders really own their talent. But then it also fell into my shop. So at the time when those recruiters were out there, it was decentralized, uh, manner in that they were, you know, in the field where they needed to be and reported into HR where they needed to be. Now all recruitment was centralized into my shop and, "Hey, you're gonna have oversight now even at the store level."

0:04:48.7 Rachel Allen: So I knew immediately, okay, the only way that I can help make them successful around doing this is empowering them with the right tools and technology. So then that... That's what we were trying to solve is, okay, we've, we've made this business decision to switch from having these recruiters out into the field to having our store leaders really own this. What do we do? How do we do that? And then that's when we went on the journey to find the right partner for us.

0:05:10.8 Joel Cheesman: Talk about the impact of speed.

0:05:12.4 Rachel Allen: Yeah.

0:05:13.1 Joel Cheesman: My guess as an outsider is you have an applicant applying to a lot of different competitors. Speed seems like it would be essential. When... How did that come into the equation in, in deciding to go to a more automated process?

0:05:25.4 Rachel Allen: That was number one challenge that we were trying to face, especially during the height of the war on talent. Like I mentioned, we couldn't get to our people fast enough. That was one of the main things that we wanted to solve through this. And we did find, we found that our candidates were applying to like 12 different places when they were applying for us. And by the time someone was getting to them, they'd taken the offer down the street. We'd lost out. Um, and so we knew we needed to get to them faster or we weren't ever gonna win this war on talent. And by automating the front end of that process and creating a conversational application process, we were able to go from over 10 days to hire to less than five immediately.

0:06:05.0 Rachel Allen: So a greater than 50% immediate reduction and we're now less than three, um, or around the average of three days for time to hire, which was a huge impact. Um, and what we didn't realize we were doing by solving for time is we also solved for quality. Because the ones that you wanted to get to first and best were... Yeah.

0:06:25.6 Joel Cheesman: Yeah.

0:06:26.0 Rachel Allen: Taken. Yeah. And so by being able to get to them first, we were getting the, the better talent that we wanted. And that was not something we realized we were, we were gonna be able to get as well.

0:06:33.9 Chad Sowash: So well you get from three days to three hours?

0:06:36.4 Rachel Allen: I mean, in some cases we do. Yeah. That can happen. It's just not on average. Yeah.

0:06:40.2 Chad Sowash: What's slowing you down and what you want to do next to get to that next level?

0:06:43.6 Rachel Allen: Yeah, no, um, it's a continuous improvement for sure. And we continue to see the speed getting even faster and the friction is not there to slow it down. It's quite honestly a decision-making process at that point. Um, and the candidate's availability. If they're ready, you know, ready to be there, it's their availability of when they can do the interview. Because we do still do in-person interviews. So we've automated everything up into that interview, um, and use this personal assistant, uh, or AI assistant, um, to do that piece of it. But then they go to the store for their actual interview. So that's in person. So it's gonna depend on the candidate's availability. If they're available that same day, we can make that happen. But if they're not, you know, we have to wait on them and then a decision needs to be made and in some cases they can start that same day. We can. It's just, you know, availability for our candidates and the store schedules.

0:07:35.2 Joel Cheesman: So speed first and foremost...

0:07:37.2 Rachel Allen: Yeah.

0:07:37.5 Joel Cheesman: But I'm guessing if you're getting better candidates, the candidate experience is better because they're more amenable to that. Retention, I'm guessing, is that better because you're getting better candidates. I mean, this is just a domino effect of quality. And it just started with make it faster.

0:07:53.1 Rachel Allen: Yeah. No, you're so right. Um, it was, yeah, the, the main challenge at first was how do we speed this up? And then we've seen this trickle-down effect of all these other great things that come with it. A lot of people are scared that AI is gonna take over, you know, humans in the process. Um, and they're also scared of that experience it can create for candidates. And we've found the opposite for us. By employing this, we were able to repurpose our resources. So while I say we eliminated that role, we repurposed them and doubled the size of some of our other teams, right? So, um, we didn't just totally eliminate humans, but we put them, we re, re... We put them where they could actually impact the moments that matter.

0:08:34.7 Joel Cheesman: So talk about that internal, I don't want to say strife, but you have people afraid that you're going to replace us, my job is going away, no, you're being re... What was that like internally? How did you sell it? Like, it's going to be okay, we're going to figure this out.

0:08:47.8 Chad Sowash: Messaging had to be big.

0:08:48.6 Rachel Allen: No, messaging, messaging is huge, right? Change management is the, the most undervalued aspect of any implementation in anything that you do. And so we had to have continuous conversations. And it's not, "This is taking away your job," um, but it is making it look different. And where you can actually focus your time is more valuable. It's less about, "Oh, it's going to take my job away," and more about learning agility and how can we grow you into the roles that, where you can make the bigger difference.

0:09:16.6 Rachel Allen: And then also to our store leaders who are scared, you know, where, "Ah, I'm going to go from having this human that comes and talks to me every day to, um, this virtual assistant." Um, but it was like, yeah, but what can... What can you accomplish if you just had an assistant, right? Like, think about it as a recruiting assistant versus AI. Um, and that made a huge difference. So our positioning and how we talked about it, so much so that our store leaders think that our assistant is real. Her name is Rita. They've actually asked us to meet Rita in person. [laughter] Um, so I think just how you position that really does make a difference.

0:09:52.0 Chad Sowash: So process-wise, and we've seen stories where some, uh, franchises, not 7-Eleven, but some other franchises, they, they didn't quite roll it out as well, and managers would have individuals show up for interviews and they didn't even know it because they weren't using their calendar.

0:10:08.3 Rachel Allen: Yeah.

0:10:08.7 Chad Sowash: So what did you have to do? Because again, this is change management, right? How did you roll this out to ensure that man... Your managers, everybody knew, "This is the process, this is how you're going to get your, your roles filled"? How did you go through that education process? Because that's hard too.

0:10:24.8 Rachel Allen: It is. And we had a massive hypercare strategy around it. We did a lot of communication upfront, um, and positioned around, "Help is coming," right? That type of a thing. We hosted open hours.

0:10:37.8 Chad Sowash: I love that. Help is coming.

0:10:38.8 Rachel Allen: Help is coming. [laughter] You've been asking for help, we're bringing it. Um, we had open hours, uh, office hours, and we had 'em, like, twice a week for multiple weeks, and they were just open there and our team was ready and available, so anyone could jump on and ask any of the questions that they had. We actually did take what we called a tactical pause even. Um, and I think sometimes there's these arbitrary deadlines that everybody has to plow forward on, and you, sometimes you need to adjust to what the business is needing and you need to listen to what the business is telling you.

0:11:11.7 Rachel Allen: And for us, we have something called the 100 Days of Summer. That's, that's our holiday season, and that's the summer. And we really try to limit what happens. And it turns out, um, we were trying to push to have this implemented by the end of May, um, in, in theory, so they'd have it in time to help with the 100 Days of Summer. But by that point, they were... They... It was too late, I guess, a little bit. And then you're asking them to deal with one more thing in the hardest time of their year. So we actually stopped and ended up not implementing until, um, October.

0:11:44.9 Rachel Allen: Um, so that was one of the challenges that we faced, but we found that that actually... Sometimes you have to slow down to speed up. And that's what we did in that case. We made sure everyone was on the same page and ready to go. There was a lot of communication. We were listening to the business. We took the tactical pause when they were saying, you know, "Mercy, we need some help." Um, and then we had the hypercare for months. We created a, a large hotline team, actually, and, uh, any... So for... And the hotline team still exists. It's smaller than it was when we first went live with the hypercare, but it still exists, and it's a direct line to our team for all things recruitment at the stores.

0:12:22.1 Joel Cheesman: Wow.

0:12:22.4 Rachel Allen: So it was a... It was a strong, um, change management hypercare strategy, and it made a big difference. It really did.

0:12:30.4 Chad Sowash: So you had a safety net, really.

0:12:31.9 Rachel Allen: We did.

0:12:32.3 Chad Sowash: You had a human safety net that was there and gives everybody, you know, that, that kind of like, "Okay..."

0:12:36.8 Rachel Allen: Don't worry.

0:12:37.3 Chad Sowash: "Uh, we'll be taken care of."

0:12:38.2 Joel Cheesman: Hypernet, not to be confused with ludicrous speed. Time is money.

0:12:43.8 Rachel Allen: Yeah.

0:12:44.1 Joel Cheesman: Right? You're saving time. What did that do in terms of your marketing budget for job postings, where you were spending money that maybe you didn't have to as much? What's the dollars and cents...

0:12:55.1 Chad Sowash: Look at that smile.

0:12:55.7 Joel Cheesman: Behind the... Yeah. She is smiling. Behind, behind that decision, talk about the dollars saved.

0:13:00.0 Rachel Allen: Yeah, no, that's a, uh, really good point. And that's something that we, I don't think, really wrapped our brains around how great of a savings we were going to have in that aspect, because we had to do, um, a one-size-fits-all solution when it came to recruitment marketing, and we did it nationwide across US and Canada. And by, by implementing the technology that we did, we have visibility to what's actually happening at our stores. Because before that, it was an evergreen type of a situation. It was just always on. Candidates were falling into the black hole, they never heard from anyone. And then when a store did need someone, they would go into this evergreen that's always been there.

0:13:37.1 Rachel Allen: The only way they could attract new talent was to unpost, repost, unpost, repost. We were having to deploy this wide net of recruitment marketing nationwide and spent a lot of dollars there. With the visibility that we have now through the technology, we can see which stores actually have something turned on, like they're actually asking candidates to come into the process. Majority have them turned off right now, um, which is interesting, but we never had visibility to that before. And so then we can see where exactly, to a store level, where there's struggle, and we can dedicate dollars where it matters and make sense. So we've been so much more efficient and effective with the dollars we have within our recruitment marketing spend, and we've, we've saved a lot.

0:14:17.8 Chad Sowash: I can only imagine how big your resume database, or at least your profile database is.

0:14:23.0 Rachel Allen: Yeah.

0:14:23.2 Chad Sowash: Um, is that the first source you guys are going to right out of the gate? So something opens up, you already know people who are interested. They might not be available, but they, they were interested before. Are you hitting that? 'Cause you've already paid for those individuals. Are you hitting them first?

0:14:37.8 Rachel Allen: So our store leaders are... We provide training and education on those types of things, and that is absolutely one of the tools that we tell them to, to dive into, right? You've already, you know, the, the candidates that have already applied, um, historically are obviously interested. And so, uh, those are folks that you want to go after. But in addition to that, those that apply new and maybe the store leader goes with someone else before they get into the process, we've got it set up to where campaigns automatically happen to redirect them to another location.

0:15:07.1 Joel Cheesman: Uh, wonderful.

0:15:08.1 Rachel Allen: So engaging that talent and engaging our candidates better than we ever have before. Yeah.

0:15:12.3 Chad Sowash: Big applause. Big applause. That is an amazing, that is an amazing experience for any candidate, not to mention they're customers, too.

0:15:19.7 Rachel Allen: Yeah. Oh, that's huge for us.

0:15:20.6 Chad Sowash: Right?

0:15:21.9 Rachel Allen: We have to remember...

0:15:22.6 Chad Sowash: Talk about that.

0:15:23.2 Rachel Allen: Oh, yeah. All of our candidates are our customers. And before, when we weren't able to provide that customized experience, you know, there's the concern that we're losing maybe one of our customers. And that's, um, that's something that we also are very aware of. And we want to make sure we're providing them the right experience. They're not falling into that black hole. They feel like their voices are heard. Um, they're engaging with us. And so then that keeps them coming back as our customers, which is our number one priority. We pride ourselves on being customer obsessed. And so our customer in the recruitment process is our candidate. Right. And so we've gotta make sure they're having a good experience.

0:15:56.4 Joel Cheesman: So tactically, how are you connecting in the store? Is it QR code? Is it text this to this? Like, what's most effective and, and how do you engage at the store?

0:16:05.3 Rachel Allen: We do both. So there are QR codes that can be, um, we send materials to the stores that they can use and place in different places, and there are QR codes. Um, there is also, you can text something to a certain number and then, and then it is, it is texting with the candidate as far as the communication from there.

0:16:23.4 Chad Sowash: So how close do you actually work with marketing, knowing that they, they touch, uh, you touch, yeah, you, you touch, you touch not just candidates, but customers on a daily basis. Talk to us about that, uh, helpful symbiosis.

0:16:38.0 Rachel Allen: It's like you've gone on this journey with us. I don't, like...

0:16:40.5 Joel Cheesman: We're in your head.

0:16:40.7 Rachel Allen: This is a little crazy, I'm not gonna lie. Um, yeah, we, the relationship that we've built with our marketing team has been huge over the past couple years as a result of this. And you're right, it is intertwined, right? So they're, they're in charge of the consumer brand, we're in charge of the employer brand, and we've gotta make sure that we're, we're on the same page as far as, um, you know, colors and fonts and all that kind of stuff, right? So you have to stay really close to marketing. Um, but we piggyback off them. We take rides on stuff that they already have going on. So we have, um, sign kits that are sent, uh, to stores on... Through different periods. You have a certain number of periods a year, and it's for whatever deals are going on for the consumer brand type stuff, buy two, get one, those types of things. We've hitched a ride. So now for free, we send some of our marketing materials for recruitment purposes to the stores by hitching a ride with our marketing partners. Um, which is really cool, so saved dollars there too.

0:17:36.0 Chad Sowash: Yeah.

0:17:36.3 Rachel Allen: Um, and then we're also in lockstep. They know what we're doing, we know what they're doing. Um, we use a lot of what they're using in the consumer brand and use it now on our career site, um, and different things like that. But we are locked at the hip with our marketing folks now.

0:17:51.8 Joel Cheesman: Any growing pains that you felt through this, any, uh, landmines that you stepped on that maybe, uh, you want to let people know about?

0:17:58.7 Rachel Allen: That's always a good one. Um, I think the main thing again was just the, the, the arbitrary deadlines that we put on ourselves and not remembering, um, what you're doing and what you're solving for. Again, we're customer obsessed and therefore our focus is the candidate. So as long as you're keeping your candidate as your North Star, and then in our case, we had to make sure our customers were also kept as our North Star, you can't lose sight of that. And often that gets lost, right? You, you know, you start getting into the process and you have these certain deadlines and you lose connection with why you're doing this in the first place.

0:18:32.9 Rachel Allen: So just every now and then stop, pause, rise up, and reground yourself as to why you're actually doing this, and then maybe adjust potentially to, something's changed since six months ago when you first started on the journey. Go ahead and adjust versus just plowing forward. I think that was something that really helped us out, is that we kind of stopped and paused and surveyed the land again and regrounded us before just plowing forward.

0:18:57.5 Chad Sowash: So surveying, is Rita doing any employee surveys, any pulse surveys, or are you going down funnel, to be, to be able to see how, I mean, again, you've got this technology there, you know who, who Rita is. Um, can, can you use her for other things?

0:19:13.1 Rachel Allen: Yeah. So we can ask her, um, you know, how things are going, and that is one way to get feedback. We do also have another, um, partnership with Survale, um, that lives on our career site and is always on and asking for feedback around their experience through the career site. And then for the professional level hiring, we do send a survey out at a couple places, um, one being after interviews, uh, we do seek that feedback. And then we also send one to our hiring managers at the end of the process to ask them how the experience went. So we do have surveys in, in a few places.

0:19:48.4 Chad Sowash: We've been talking a lot about high volume. What about those other positions? Have we, have we done some different things with that?

0:19:53.0 Rachel Allen: We're moving in that direction, right? So high volume hadn't been getting the love. We finally got some love there. We've got a really great setup. And so now we're thinking, okay, so how do we, how do we do more, right? Um, we are about to be able to use it, um, the same technology for scheduling at the store support center recruitment and our field recruitment level. And then we're, we're asking for more. We keep... I'm gonna, I'll be transparent in my vision here and what I'm hoping to get at some point is I wanna give my recruiters their own assistant.

0:20:24.7 Chad Sowash: Oh, yeah.

0:20:24.8 Rachel Allen: So we gave store leaders their assistant...

0:20:26.5 Chad Sowash: Yes.

0:20:26.8 Rachel Allen: I want my recruiters to have an assistant. And so much so of, like, how can we tap into the profiles we have of the great talent already, use those profiles to do proactive sourcing and building automatic campaigns to generate these pipelines that we can just automatically fish into, so.

0:20:42.6 Chad Sowash: You already have great business cases and how you've implemented this to be able to move upstream, I think, is amazing.

0:20:50.0 Rachel Allen: That's our hope. Yeah.

0:20:50.9 Joel Cheesman: Diversity and inclusion.

0:20:51.8 Rachel Allen: Yeah.

0:20:52.7 Joel Cheesman: What has greater efficiency, greater speed, greater technology done to widen the net for who you're, uh, getting in front of from an employment perspective?

0:21:01.6 Rachel Allen: Yeah. So at our store level, um, we, we hire who's in our community, right? And so that's always been a big piece is that community engagement and involvement and freeing up the energy of our store leaders by automating some of the administrative stuff so they can be more present in their communities and making sure that they're attracting some of, um, that diverse talent into, into the funnel. So that's been really great. But what's really cool about technology is you can recruit from anywhere, anytime, right?

0:21:30.3 Rachel Allen: And so, I mean, we're always open. We're 24/7, but we weren't recruiting 24/7 before. And there's a lot of folks that we need to be brought into the process that can't apply until 2:00 AM, and they're immediately having a conversation now. And so I think that's increased our diversity as well because we're able to reach everybody now, um, regardless of the type of schedule they have or where they are. Um, and I think that's been a huge, uh, impact from technology. The wider net, being able to reach our candidates where they are, when they need it, has been really helpful.

0:22:00.4 Chad Sowash: We don't talk enough about how the actual TA team feels. How do they feel now that they have this technology and that you've started to use things? And is it, is it made them happier? Are they, are they happier to come into work every day? Is it... That, that to me, we talk a lot about candidate experience. What about the, the experience of talent acquisition?

0:22:22.9 Rachel Allen: Yeah. That's why we want to move it into, um, moving it upstream, like I said. So we don't have any recruiters out at the high-volume level. We have a COE that supports them, um, from a technology perspective, education, best tricks and tips, and that type of stuff. So the COE supports at the store level. Um, but our recruiters have seen what it's done and they're kind of like, "Hey, you know, we want something too," which is why...

0:22:48.7 Chad Sowash: What about us?

0:22:48.8 Rachel Allen: Yeah, which is why we want to, uh, improve what they have access to.

0:22:53.2 Chad Sowash: Gotcha.

0:22:53.7 Rachel Allen: So they're ready for it, they're hungry for it. We've created that pull, which is really great because within talent acquisition, we try to push a lot of stuff and the adoption is really low. There's a lot of technologies out there. When you look at your numbers, no one's using it. And it's like, "Why isn't anyone using it?" So I think by being able to show really huge success at this high-volume level, you create some of that pull so that hopefully once we start, you know, throwing some stuff out there, we'll actually see some adoption. The feedback's been positive, um, for those who's interacted or seen what it can do.

0:23:25.6 Chad Sowash: Tell them help is coming.

0:23:26.8 Rachel Allen: Help is, help is coming. Exactly.

0:23:28.2 Joel Cheesman: Call me crazy, Rachel, but it sounds like you've bought in. It sounds like you're in.

0:23:32.4 Rachel Allen: You're crazy.

0:23:33.0 Joel Cheesman: You're all in. What's next? It, you sound a little bit like a junkie. Well, like, what, what are the next hits that you're going after? I mean, referrals, onboard, like, what are the things that are, that, what's coming?

0:23:44.3 Rachel Allen: So we are adding referrals. Um, that's, that's coming up shortly, within the next couple of months. We're also adding assessments at the front end of the process. So we solved for that time, which had the byproduct of quality. Now we wanna ramp up quality even more, and we're helping to do that through the assessments. We're also in that era, um, labor market-wise, where, you know, a couple years ago we needed to remove all friction. We're in an era where maybe a little bit of friction could help, right? With the volume and, and providing the information for candidates to opt out if it's not the best fit so that we can increase retention overall.

0:24:18.4 Rachel Allen: So we've got, um, the referral piece coming in, we've got the assessment piece coming in. On the professional recruitment side, we're about to turn on the automation of, of, um, scheduling of interviews, which is going to be really great. And then again, I'm hoping to at some point be able to provide that assistant to our recruiters that can help them with the sourcing and the pipelining and the recruitment marketing aspect of stuff.

0:24:39.3 Chad Sowash: For all your peers that are out there that are really scared about the, the prospective risk. What would, what would you, what would you say to them?

0:24:46.5 Rachel Allen: Yeah. I, I mean, I think you do need to evaluate the risk, um, and what it means for your organization, 'cause each company is different. So you need to understand the appetite that your organization has, first of all. You need to make sure that you have the right stakeholders, um, on the journey with you, that you're building the right business cases, that you don't lose sight of why you're doing it. What is the problem you're solving for, first and foremost? Build the business case around that, and then find the technology that enables the strategy that you're building.

0:25:14.5 Rachel Allen: Where we, where we mess up sometimes is we lead with the technology, the shiny new thing, versus what are we solving for? What is our strategy? And then go find the technology that can help with it. So I think... And you know, to help with that fear of the unknown, 'cause that's what it is. We, we're scared of what we don't know, and we don't know what we don't know, and that's what's scary. But there's enough people that have started going down this journey, so do your research. Go out and talk to the people who have already done it. Make sure, um, you understand what the objectives are of your company and what you're solving for, and then how you can add value from a talent acquisition perspective through some of the new technologies that are out there.

0:25:53.2 Rachel Allen: Um, so I think getting comfortable with the research that's available, having conversations with people that have already done this can help mitigate that fear factor a little bit. Um, and then you have to have a massive change management plan. Everybody always stops at signing the agreements and forgets that that's, like, you've just started. So don't stop at signing the agreement. You haven't won the battle yet. You make sure you've got that really strong change management in place and, and some of that hypercare.

0:26:20.0 Chad Sowash: It's not set it and forget it.

0:26:20.7 Rachel Allen: Yeah, correct. And then it, yeah, very true. Like, you, you don't just get to implement and be done. There's always that continuous improvement process that happens after with it, too.

0:26:30.0 Joel Cheesman: All right, Rachel, I'm gonna close this one with a hardball. You ready? Okay. You're on a road trip. You need some personal refueling. You hit a 7-Eleven.

0:26:38.3 Rachel Allen: Yeah.

0:26:38.5 Joel Cheesman: What's your go-to?

0:26:39.4 Rachel Allen: My go-to? I'm going... I'm getting a big diet... A diet Dr Pepper. Actually, I'm getting a Big Gulp. My kids, Slurpee. Slurpee all the way.

0:26:47.5 Chad Sowash: Joel, Slurpee all the way.

[laughter]

0:26:50.5 Rachel Allen: I'm a Big Gulp girl, for sure.

0:26:52.1 Joel Cheesman: All right. Thanks for joining us. That was Rachel Allen, Senior Director of Talent Acquisition with 7-Eleven. Thanks for hanging out.

0:26:59.0 Rachel Allen: Thanks for having me.

[music]

0:27:01.6 Outro: Wow, look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast-forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt. But save some soap, because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.