7-Eleven hires more than 110,000 employees per yearcross its 13,000 locations in the United States and Canada alone. But even the country’s largest convenience retailer has had its share of hiring challenges. Chief among them: finding quality candidates, getting back to them in a timely fashion and offering a competitive package that will attract prospective workers and encourage them to stay.

On average, it costs $1,294 to hire a full-time hourly associate and $1,119 to train the individual, according to 2023 data from the NACS State of the Industry Talent Insights Dashboard. “When you combine those costs with turnover rates above 100% (full-time sales associates averaged 125.3%), it really adds up,” said Jayme Gough, director of research and development at NACS. For part-time sales associates, the industry average total turnover rate was 169.6%.

“While there are a significant number of people that we could fill our open positions with, it’s about finding the right ones, and we have significant hurdles we have to get over in order to get people to join us and to stay with us,” said Rachel Allen, senior director of talent acquisition at 7-Eleven, during a NACS Show Education Session in October. It’s a sentiment that every retailer in the country, no matter the channel, understands. So how can your company gain an advantage when it comes to bringing in the right people?

Don’t Delay

7-Eleven’s hiring process used to take 10 days. And in those 10 days, the company lost a lot of applicants who were offered jobs at stores down the street, Allen said.

“Candidates have a low threshold” when it comes to waiting, “and there are consequences if we aren’t fast enough,” said Allen. “Oftentimes we were too late and not getting to candidates in time.”

It takes time to be selective.”

According to data Allen presented, 37% of retail candidates said they dropped out of an application process because it took too long to hear back from the company, and 21% said the overall hiring process took too long.

After 7-Eleven implemented AI to handle many of the early steps in the recruiting process (see the “Meet Your New Recruiter: AI” sidebar for more on that), it cut the 10-day timeline down to three days and saw a significantly better success rate.

Tennessee retailer Weigel’s, which receives about 60 applications per day, processes applications the day after they’re submitted and contacts applicants within 24 hours—“48 hours max from the time they apply to when we are scheduling an interview with them,” said Brad Anderson, director of recruiting and development at Weigel’s. “We know people are applying everywhere. So if I don’t talk to them today, they’ve already applied to 10 other places.”

Weigel’s also replies to applicants using multiple touchpoints, including texts, phone calls and emails. “If we miss them with one, they still have the other two avenues to reply,” said Anderson.

While speed can be a critical factor in the success of a retailers’ hiring strategy, Allen noted that “recruiting is a tradeoff between speed and quality—it is so hard to find the advantages of both of those. We’re faced with this dichotomy of finding the most highly engaging, human touch process that appeals to our candidates, while also being able to vet the candidates accurately and quickly, all at scale.”

That’s one of the reasons Family Express, a family-owned retailer in Indiana, takes the opposite approach with its process.

“In our industry, people tend to hire very fast. We are really selective in our hiring process, and believe in hiring slow and investing in finding that one person that is going to be the right fit, versus the constant turnover that puts a lot of stress on our stores and our customers,” said Lauren Young, training coordinator at Family Express, in a NACS Ideas 2 Go video.

The company only hires one in 50 applicants after putting them through a three-day pass-or-fail immersive orientation that President of Operations Alex Olympidis said he considers an extension of the interview process. “In an interview, you can put your best foot forward for 30 minutes or maybe an hour. But during a three-day, pass-or-fail orientation, you are really getting to know that applicant,” he said. “More importantly than just training them on how to do the job, we’re teaching them who we are as a company and asking them, ‘Are you the right person, at the right place, at the right time?’ We spend a lot of time and resources making sure we make the right hire at the beginning.”

Key to allowing Family Express to hire slowly but strategically is the tactic of hiring in advance of open roles. “We know the rate of attrition at each store, so we take that and we hire in advance of it,” Olympidis explained.

“We don’t want to wait until we need a position filled and then try to fill it as quickly as possible. That’s how you can get a lot of desperate hiring,” Young added. “Instead, we try to stay ahead of the game and are looking for our perfect fits beforehand.” The company’s store locations are clustered in the northwest corner of the Hoosier state, so it can staff hires at open locations nearby depending on which stores have openings. “We do not need to wait until that last minute,” said Young.

Flexible schedules were equally as desired as predictable schedules.”

Retailers need to approach hiring from a wholistic perspective, added Allen. “It is really hard in the hourly retail sector not to be reactive to those immediate needs—you need people ASAP, you need backfills and you focus on a just-in-time approach. But to be more effective, we have to think of a more wholistic way of hiring and talent sourcing to find the right person and make sure they’re joining our company in the right places.”

During Covid, TXB Stores, a family-owned Texas retailer with over 50 locations across the Lonestar state and Oklahoma, built out a recruiting team that now handles the early stages of the application process and “carries the candidate all the way through the onboarding process,” said Abby Curlin, training developer at TXB Stores.

“Our recruiting team has been huge for us to put the right people in the right roles. Not only do they do that first interview, but they arrange the employee’s first day, help through orientation and do all of their onboarding paperwork, which really lightens the load for managers,” Curlin continued. “Previously, we were in a position where our managers needed roles filled and weren’t being as selective because they just didn’t have time. But it takes time to be selective.”

Attract A-Plus Applicants

Not all businesses can make the investment in AI, sophisticated tech tools or large recruiting teams to process applications, but there are ways to ensure you’re finding quality applicants in a timely fashion.

Allen said the first step is making sure the job listing gives employees all the information they need upfront, which will better ensure that the right people are applying. “The more transparent a job ad is, the more it also gives candidates the opportunity to opt out. And when you’re looking through hundreds of applicants, that can actually be helpful. If it’s ultimately not the right fit, we don’t want to waste anyone’s time.”

Job ads should provide information about pay and benefits, the location and schedule requirements and details of the role. “But so often our job ads don’t address any of that, and it’s hard for candidates to get that information,” said Allen. “If they can’t see what is going to be offered to them, then they’re going to drop out of the process.”

Offering the right benefits also makes your company a more competitive player in the market.

According to data Allen presented, the most important factor among retail workers was the hourly wage, with 67% saying this was most important, followed by work location (40%), job stability (38%), benefits (34%) and work-life balance (25%).

“You need to emphasize the benefits that matter. For the third of respondents that said benefits were a deciding factor for them, they noted the top three benefits were paid time off (61%), having a fixed but flexible schedule (57%) and health insurance benefits (50%),” said Allen. In some cases, not offering these can be a driver of offer declines—28% of retail workers cited unappealing scheduling options as a reason they declined a previously accepted offer,” Allen said.

We built our whole training framework and schedule around our company values.”

“Flexible schedules were equally as desired as predictable schedules—people want something fixed they can work their life around easily or the flexibility to make their overall work-life balance better,” said Allen. “However, in our industry it can be hard to offer flexibility when we have immediate staffing needs, so in that case retailers can focus on the paid time off they can provide.”

Hourly workers are also highly interested in the opportunity for overtime work, with 57% of retail workers saying the ability to earn overtime or holiday pay is among the best aspects of their job and 84% interested in working at least one hour of overtime per week. “This is a great way to make yourself competitive while still paying hourly wages that are within your company’s parameters,” said Allen. “It’s another financial benefit that you could highlight to attract the talent you want.”

In the past year, Weigel’s has built out its benefits program, which helps it attract employees and retain the workers it hires. The company offers paid vacation to any employee who has worked for the company for more than a year, health insurance for employees working 20 hours or more a week, bonuses and a 2% match for 401K contributions.

“The benefits program has really helped us get a better quality and caliber of person—someone that is people first, want to run a clean store, wants to interact with customers and isn’t disengaged,” said Anderson. “We do mystery shops, and if an employee fails then they don’t get their quarterly bonus. It’s helped us attract really good hires.”

It has also helped with retention, added Kelly Bowling, Weigel’s director of human resources. “Showing them the benefits we offer not only gets them in the door but is a huge component of them staying with us long term. Offering insurance to employees, for example, is huge since so many people are looking for affordable healthcare, and we are able to offer that to them.”

For TXB, some benefits that make it a top choice for applicants can’t be quantitatively measured. “We have obviously seen the hourly rate be one of the most significant factors for whether someone applies or not, but people are looking for different things across all of our store locations,” said Curlin. “For us, we have seen success by having the reputation of being a great place to work and people hearing about us through word of mouth or referrals. Our applicant flow is a testament to being current economically in the market with what we offer, but also to having great store leadership that is encouraging and makes employees feel engaged. People want to feel wanted at work.”

Build Belonging

Implementing the best hiring tactics can be in vain if you don’t equally focus on retaining your employees. “Offer acceptance is just the beginning,” said Allen.

“There is a short- and long-term solution [to reducing turnover]—the short-term one being create an onboarding experience that sets your new employees up for success and equips them with the tools they need to enjoy their job and be engaged. New hires that have a good onboarding experience will stick around,” said Allen. “Then in the long term, continue to foster that engagement by developing connections and sharing opportunities for potential growth and advancement in the organization.”

But with the high-volume nature of retail hiring, she said onboarding can be difficult and time-consuming to tailor to each person. Allen said 7-Eleven uses a “high-tech, high touch” onboarding experience—meaning “you have to find a balance between what you can automate and where you can provide a strong human touch,” she said. “Automate the things that are administrative and then invest time and effort where you’ll be able to create and cultivate connection.”

For example, you can automate things like notifications for paperwork or to sign up for orientation sessions, or for deploying documents with essential procedures. But welcoming messages or meetings with leaders and team members, one-on-ones with supervisors and meetings about career growth plans are all processes that should be personalized.

TXB did an extensive overhaul of its training program last year, making it not only more efficient but steeped in the company’s values instead of individual tasks to help employees build a stronger sense of belonging, connect to the brand and be more engaged with the store. The new program reduced its turnover from 150% in 2023 to 90% in 2024. The average length of service days increased from 211 to 257, Curlin noted during an education session at the NACS Show in October.

“We wanted people to understand who we are as a company, so we built our whole training framework and schedule around our company values and how those bedrocks of our company are ingrained in our daily interactions,” Curlin said. “We wanted employees to dive into learning how to embody and match those values and principles on a daily basis.”

“What we found was that people want to be a part of something and feel special and welcomed,” she continued. “We have an official onboarding day where you’re spending time with your manager to get as connected as possible with the store. People need that connection and bringing that person into our culture is so important. It pays dividends.”

According to Allen, “Employees who feel a sense of belonging at work are five times more likely to stay with their company. So we know this is a really important concept—people need to feel connected to the job they have and you want to focus on that immediately.”