How Giant Eagle Is Making Career Paths More Visible and Actionable for Frontline Workers

Giant Eagle's CEO started his career at a store window in customer service. That's not a detail the company buries in an “About Us” footnote. Rather, it's the premise for how the regional supermarket chain and retail pharmacy thinks about investing in its people.

When entry-level corporate roles were opening and internal candidates weren't applying, the easy answer would have been that frontline workers weren't interested. The more honest answer was that their employees didn't know the roles existed and, even if they did, didn't think their skills would translate. 

Dawn Lecker, Senior Manager of HRIS at Giant Eagle, walked through how the company is using Phenom’s various Employee Experience capabilities to change that, making career growth visible and actionable for store and warehouse employees.

Watch the full session here, or explore the highlights below.

Why Weren't Frontline Workers Applying for Internal Opportunities?

When corporate roles opened at Giant Eagle, internal candidates from stores and warehouses applied at low rates. Not because the roles were a poor fit, but because the path wasn't visible. 

Frontline employees don't have desks or check internal emails during a shift. Many don't know which of their skills might make them competitive for a corporate opening. "They automatically take themselves out of consideration without even applying, because they think they can't," Lecker said. The institutional knowledge those candidates carry such as product familiarity, customer context, and operational experience is exactly what makes them valuable for certain roles — but neither the candidates nor the hiring managers could easily see that connection.

The data confirmed that hiring trends showed internal candidates weren't even making it into consideration pools for entry-level corporate roles. Instead of a selection problem, it was a visibility problem. The question they were trying to answer: How do you show someone that the skills they've built in frontline work qualifies them for what's available at the next level?

“A lot of organizations talk about investing in their people,” said Lecker. We want to prove we're doing that every day to enable growth paths for our team members."

How Does Phenom Help Them Connect Skills to Opportunities?

Before committing to any solution investment, Lecker said they went back to the hiring data. "A fool with a tool is still a fool," she said. Without understanding why frontline employees weren't applying, no amount of technology would move the needle.

Armed with information, they felt confident in where to focus first. Phenom Talent Marketplace served as the foundation as a hyper-personalized internal career site revamped for usability and relevance across every level of the organization.

Lecker was clear that building better technology doesn't help if people can't get to it. For deskless workers, email campaigns don't work. The channel that works? Time clock messages. Every frontline employee punches in and out at a time clock. Giant Eagle put messages there (e.g. Visit the internal career site to see what's new. Did you know? You can look for new opportunities here) and saw an increase in visits as a direct result. Although it was a small prompt, it drove meaningful behavioral change.

Within the same experience, Phenom Career Pathing enables employees to explore what’s next for their work future. Instead of presenting roles that are simply the next rung up on the corporate ladder, non-linear opportunities and lateral moves that build toward a target role over time are recommended. Current skills are aligned to a target job, skills gaps are identified with suggested courses through an integrated Learning Management System (LMS), gigs or short-term projects that build relevant experience are suggested, and employees currently in a target role can be requested as mentors.

What Are the Results So Far?

Just six months into this effort, the anecdotal signal of success is strong. In addition to a 28% increase in visits to their internal career site, qualitative wins include:

• Internal hires who hit the ground running on culture and business knowledge

• Growth in internal pipeline for targeted positions

• Merchandising roles filled with frontline talent who know the product

The early success story Lecker shared was a team leader from one of the stores who found an entry-level role in Giant Eagle's communications team through the internal site and went through the process to secure it. Lecker described her alongside the CEO as proof that the method works — not as an exception, but as the model that their internal mobility strategy is built to replicate.

“By removing friction from our career sites and hiring processes, we open the door to talent, both internal and external, helping everyone see the career paths before them.”
— Talent Leader, Giant Eagle

What’s Next?

The near-term plan is expansion to make career paths and mentoring available to more of the workforce, not just the targeted group in the initial rollout. The longer-term challenge of not just giving frontline employees visibility to opportunities, but the time and space to actually pursue them is more complex.

Connecting skills to opportunities with AI and automation solves the information gap, but Lecker pointed out that it still it doesn't answer the question of when a store employee's development time is compensable.

Her broader advice for organizations thinking about internal mobility in a frontline-heavy environment is to be honest about where the talent already is. “You probably have talent available in your front line. They just don't see the path to get there, and we don't necessarily see them,” she shared.

The tools are there to surface both sides of that equation — the opportunity and the person. The work is making sure neither side is waiting for someone to tap them on the shoulder.

Learn more about career pathing. Download the AI & Automation Toolkit for Talent Management