Company

Since its founding in 1923, Iconn has become a benchmark in the Mexican retail industry, operating in 17 states and employing more than 22,000 people nationally. Iconn’s business units include 7-Eleven convenience stores, Petro-Seven gas stations, MercaDía stores, Bodega MAS, and Mas Bakeries. Iconn also operates multiple distribution centers, logistics support services, and retail-wholesale programs to fulfill its mission of providing value to society.

‍

Goals

Even amid a global pandemic, the team at 7-Eleven dubbed 2020 as the year to centralize and streamline existing HR operations. The company’s goal was to move away from a dispersed team of 300 recruiters across the country who worked in a siloed fashion—and transform frontline recruiting into a single, coordinated effort.

7-Eleven envisioned a centralized talent acquisition strategy to support its complex, high-volume hiring operations for over 2,500 retail stores across Mexico. Some of the most pressing needs associated with this transition were:

• Hiring more than 20,000 frontline retail workers
• Managing communication and interview coordination with 2,780 store managers simultaneously
• Allocating candidates to certain stores based on priority and urgency
• Collecting candidate documentation in secure, digital formats
• Reducing the hiring cycle time from its current length of seven days

The team at 7-Eleven also recognized the value in collecting organized candidate data to build KPIs that better reflected an in-depth, nationwide recruiting process.

“Emi arrived at the best time because we were looking for a technology that could help us simplify our processes,” said Beatriz Sotres, Head of Talent Management at Iconn.

‍

Solution

When companies need customizable solutions to manage high-volume recruiting, Emi provides on-demand support to get the job done. Emi helped 7-Eleven launch a 24/7 chat feature to automatically pre-screen candidates, coordinate interview scheduling, and capture detailed post-interview feedback.

“With 24/7 chat, Emi allowed us to have an easy-to-use and agile tool for quickly bringing in our candidates and starting their recruitment process.”

The two-way chat functionality provides benefits to candidates and hiring managers alike. With more transparency and clarity into the entire recruiting process, job applicants have a seamless experience from awareness to hire. At the same time, hiring managers are able to more effectively identify the right people for the right roles. And in a candidate-driven labor market, this ability to hire efficiently is critical for business success.

‍

Results

Creating a centralized recruitment process

Emi's application gives 7-Eleven’s talent acquisition team the ability to follow every candidate’s journey in real time. It also allows hiring managers to proactively address any issues during the recruiting process.

When 7-Eleven vocalized its desire to centralize the hiring process throughout its largely dispersed regional territories, Emi built detailed analytics and live dashboards. These capabilities helped the company’s talent and HR leaders understand hiring status from both regional and store levels.

7-Eleven can now allocate resources based on accurate, real-time recruiting data—something that wasn’t possible before implementing Emi. By integrating Emi’s platform with 7-Eleven’s Human Resources Information System (HRIS), all candidate data captured with Emi is also automatically synced and stored in the company’s HR system of record.

Automating time-consuming hiring activities

With Emi, 7-Eleven store managers receive access to a 24/7 live chat feature. This tool allows them to set up interviews based on their availability and provide candidate feedback post-interview.

The chat-based solution is also used to gather candidate information from walk-in applicants for on-the-spot retail hiring. Using Emi, 7-Eleven can accelerate hiring speed—a key factor for hourly and frontline workers in determining where to work. The company has also gained tangible insights into who the best candidates are—and in what roles they might thrive.

Building a strong candidate pipeline

By integrating Emi with the company’s social networks and digital media campaigns, 7-Eleven can now attract and engage with more potential applicants by meeting them where they are, on the social platforms they already use.

Now, candidates can engage via live chat to complete the pre-screening process quickly. This includes coordinating upcoming interviews with store managers, updating their recruiting process status, and uploading required documentation.

For candidates who walk into retail locations knowing that they want to submit an application, Emi delivers simplified tools to help. With Emi, 7-Eleven’s hiring team can manage walk-ins, run live job fairs, and easily manage alternative conversational flows to help candidates apply anywhere, anytime.

Improving hiring speed and quality

As a national corporation that employs thousands of retail workers across Mexico, the ability to streamline hiring processes and shorten candidate wait times is essential. Given the growing frontline worker shortage, 7-Eleven needs to be able to respond professionally and proactively to avoid losing out on good candidates.

“With Emi, we can now find the type of candidate we’re looking for in retail—a type of candidate that if we don’t contact and recruit him quickly enough, will simply go to the next company to get a job,” says Beatriz.

Using Emi as the foundation of its frontline recruiting strategy, 7-Eleven has been able to: 

• Shorten the candidate hiring cycle by 45%—from 7 days to an average of 3.85 days
• Reduce the time it takes to collect candidate documentation by 97%—from 2 days to 1 hour, 15 minutes
• Increase the number of candidates who interview with a store manager and are subsequently hired by 50%

“The fact that the team at Emi has been working closely with us—from set up, to implementation, to achieving the results we've seen—and that they're still supporting us, has definitely been a great added value for us.”