Circle K's Approach To Pre-Hire Assessments For Fast-Tracking Quality Candidates

Convenience stores run on consistency — the same friendly service, stocked shelves, and quick transactions, regardless of who's working the shift. Delivering that experience starts with hiring the right people. At Circle K, a global chain of more than 16,000 stores across 29 countries, that means making quality hiring decisions thousands of times a week, often by store managers who are simultaneously running the business.

Darin Averill, Head of Global Talent Acquisition at Circle K, saw an opportunity to take the recruiting burden off those managers' plates. His goal: a manager posts a job, and a confirmed interview shows up in their inbox — with everything in between handled automatically.

At IAMPHENOM 2026, Averill shared how Circle K implemented Phenom Pre-Hire Assessments and Phenom Automated Interview Scheduling to rebuild the candidate journey from the ground up.

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

What Was Making High-Volume Store Hiring So Hard to Manage?

Circle K operates a deliberately decentralized model. Each business unit oversees roughly 500 stores, with managers responsible for both running the location and handling hiring. At that scale, consistency is hard to maintain without the right tools in place.

Without automated candidate movement, more than half of all applicants went uncontacted in the first three days. Recruiters and managers were spending hours calling candidates, texting when no one answered, and coordinating interview schedules by hand — time that could have been spent on the floor. Ghosting compounded the problem on both sides.

At the same time, shift misalignment was quietly driving turnover. Candidates would apply, get hired, and leave when the actual hours didn't match what they expected, because nobody had surfaced that gap early enough in the process. With 8,000 managers conducting interviews their own way, that kind of mismatch was hard to catch consistently.

What Does a Good Branded Pre-Hire Assessment Experience Look Like? 

Averill's team rebuilt the apply flow with the frontline candidate in mind. Each step carries Circle K branding, with rotating pull quotes highlighting employee benefits so candidates are learning about the company as they apply. In addition, every question across both the application and the assessment was evaluated for relevance before making the cut. That discipline is how a fully embedded assessment still clears in seven minutes end to end.

Phenom Pre-Hire Assessments run in two parts. First, a situational judgment test presents real on-the-job scenarios: handling an age-restricted sale, managing a gas spill, cleaning the restroom mid-rush. It's as much a realistic job preview as it is a screening tool. Candidates who aren't prepared for those situations often opt out before moving forward, which Averill considers a win. Second, a behavioral assessment measures traits like conscientiousness and customer service orientation that predict long-term fit.

Both sections use auto-advance, which shaved nearly 90 seconds off completion time compared to manual next-step navigation. 

How Does Phenom Automated Interview Scheduling Fit Into the Hiring Flow?

Candidates who pass these pre-hire assessments and all knockout criteria land on the application thank-you page with one option: schedule an interview now. Phenom Automated Interview Scheduling makes this possible. Managers pre-load their availability into Phenom Hiring Manager, the system matches it to qualified candidates, and a confirmation goes straight to the manager's inbox so there’s no phone tag or coordinating calendars by hand.

"The managers just have to post a requisition and then watch their inbox for a scheduled interview. All the stuff that happens in between… we've removed all the busy work," said Averill.

Early on, some high-volume stores ended up with more interviews scheduled than they could manage. Daily and weekly interview limits gave managers control over volume without losing the efficiency of automation.

Shift matching added another layer of precision. Circle K began populating shift type and time type fields in their Workday Applicant Tracking System (ATS) so that schedule details surfaced directly on Phenom job cards. They also added shift preference as a knockout question in the apply flow — stopping day-shift candidates from advancing into evening roles before anyone caught the mismatch.

Related: Why Shift Scheduling Is Now a Strategic Retention Lever — and What You Can Do About It 

Does Hiring Quality and Speed Improve When You Automate Candidate Screening and Scheduling? 

For Circle K, rebuilding the apply flow with Pre-Hire Assessments and Automated Interview Scheduling compressed a process that once took weeks into one that moves in seconds. "If you're not using self-scheduling and we are, our candidates are locking in and then they stop applying with everyone else,” said Averill.

The impact showed up across every stage of the funnel.

• Moved nearly 80% of applicants out of review and into contact within three days, down from a baseline of 30 or more

• Drove a 30% improvement in moving candidates out of initial review

• Maintained ~80% application completion in the U.S. and over 80% in Europe, despite a full assessment embedded in the flow

• Confirmed 86% of hires came from "Good" or "Strongest Match" assessment tiers, validating that automated screening surfaces the same quality candidates managers would have identified manually

• Drove a 10% retention improvement by surfacing shift type and schedule details on job cards before candidates applied 

• Generated $143,504 in cumulative recruiter time savings in 2025, surpassing the cost of implementation within the year

Now freed from manual screening and scheduling, Circle K's recruiters shifted focus to higher-impact work like identifying roles that need sponsored postings, supporting on-site recruitment events, and building the pipeline proactively.

Learn More: How Phenom Pre-Hire Assessments Strengthen High-Volume Hiring

How Is Circle K Scaling Phenom Adoption — And What Comes Next?

Of 8,000 eligible stores, 1,200 are currently using Automated Interview Scheduling. To accelerate the rest, Averill built a TA technology maturity scorecard rating each business unit on adoption across the full suite of tools. He works through the lowest-scoring units in person, leading with the why rather than the how. “You have to tell them why it's actually useful and what it does for them," he said.

The most effective story he tells involves a store manager who was handling all recruiting from home after her shift — calling candidates, texting when no one answered, and scheduling by hand. Once Averill showed her how entering her availability in Hiring Manager would handle everything automatically, she had an interview on the calendar before they left the store.

Coming next: availability matching at the front of the funnel so shift preferences become a shortlisting factor alongside assessment scores, on-demand video interviews for qualified candidates when a live scheduling slot isn't available, and a serial applicant automation that routes repeat applicants with no genuine hire intent away from the scheduling flow.

See how Phenom Pre-Hire Assessments support high-volume hiring at scale. Request a demo today.