Hitting Home Runs in Hiring: Rally House's Championship Formula for Retail Recruitment

Picture walking into a sports store the day after your team makes the playoffs. Jerseys are flying off the racks, fans are everywhere buying championship gear, and somehow, there are enough knowledgeable staff members to help everyone find their size and answer questions about the game. That perfect storm of demand and service doesn't happen by chance; it happens when retailers can hire at the speed of opportunity.

Here's the problem every high-growth retailer faces: How do you hire hundreds of people across multiple retail locations when you need them working today, not next month?

Bryan Brazil, Talent Acquisition Manager at Rally House, faced this exact crisis. Rally House, a Kansas City-based sports retailer, experienced explosive growth: from 140 to 300 stores in just two years, following winning teams into new markets. Traditional hiring processes were becoming the bottleneck that could kill their momentum. Using Phenom High-Volume Hiring, Rally House achieved the inconceivable: same-day hiring across hundreds of locations while maintaining quality and consistency.

Watch the video here or continue reading for the key highlights!

The Impossible Math of Sports Retail

Rally House's expansion strategy creates unique challenges that expose why conventional recruiting fails at speed. They don't just open stores based on demographics; they strategically position themselves around professional team markets and college campuses where fan passion runs deepest. “We opened our first brick and mortar store in the early 90s, and it took until just a couple of years ago to get to 140 stores," Brazil explained.

"We've got a diversified strategy," he shared. "Whether it's a metropolitan cluster around professional teams, or a single or cluster of locations around a campus location to support the university fans, that's another growth strategy for us."

This approach demanded something unprecedented: "We quickly realised we needed to be decentralised. We needed to make sure that stores could hire a customer who's interested in working there on the spot and have them start within a couple of hours, and that's not something that we can do in 300 stores from Kansas City," Brazil noted.

On top of rapid staffing, store managers were struggling with candidate screening during phone screens instead of serving customers, and seasonal playoff surges required instant responses. Traditional hiring processes that take days simply couldn't support a business model built around sports momentum.

How Phenom Made the Impossible Possible

When Rally House evaluated solutions, AI capabilities became the deciding factor. "AI was a big differentiator among the platforms we reviewed," Brazil recalled.

"We looked at that high-volume hiring workflow. We looked at that combination of a need for decentralisation, but also efficiency and automation. And to be able to use that, alone, has been our biggest game changer as we've tried to grow as quickly as we have," he explained.

Rally House identified five essential Phenom features that became central to their recruiting playbook for handling both seasonal hiring surges and new market launches:

1. Phenom X+ Screening
   Eliminates manual bottlenecks by processing candidates instantly rather than over days. Intelligent screening questions surface the best prospects automatically, freeing managers to focus on customers during peak sports moments.

2. Phenom Automated Interview Scheduling
   Enables candidates to schedule interviews, eliminating phone tag and administrative overhead. "We needed to have candidates who can go through a screening process and schedule themselves in for an interview, versus managers going through that screening process and manually doing that scheduling. And so that alone has saved us an exorbitant amount of time," Brazil reported.

3. Phenom Fit Score
   Helps rank candidates’ fit with respect to the roles automatically, especially for leadership positions "When we're looking for more leadership positions in a new store that we're about to open, I like to use that fit score where we can try and bring the best candidates in for an interview," he explained.

4. Phenom Campaigns
   Creates an emotional connection with candidates at a massive scale with personalised outreach featuring local team logos and sports-specific messaging. "When the big games are coming up and your team's in it, you're not just getting 'Hey, we're hiring.' You're getting 'Hey, we're hiring for your team' with their logo all over our products as part of that email campaign," Brazil emphasised.

5. Phenom Chatbot
   Works around the clock, moving qualified prospects immediately into their recruitment workflows. "One of the easiest things for us to get new team members up to speed on has been the chatbot," Brazil noted.

These elements from Phenom’s high-volume hiring solution didn't just improve Rally House's hiring — they enabled business strategies that were previously out of reach. The time savings alone created a positive ripple effect throughout their organisation.

Rally House achieved what seemed impossible: maintaining their personal "celebrating hometown connections" approach while scaling. "The time saved, the candidate quality that we're starting to surface to the top, and our ability to differentiate from our competitors by really drawing on their passion, their team, their hometown—that's something AI has helped us do. It's helped us add a personal touch at scale," Brazil explained.

The operational shift was equally significant. The team moved from administrative coordination to strategic value creation, focusing on three key areas: 

• Supporting stores with day-to-day recruiting needs

• Proactive sourcing that adds value

• Growth projects
  like employer branding and personalised campaigns for playoff-bound teams

Most critically, Rally House successfully doubled its store count without proportionally increasing their talent acquisition team size, proving that Phenom could handle whatever expansion plans come next.

The Competitive Reality for Retail

This success story reveals a fundamental truth about retail hiring: companies that can hire faster, more efficiently, and with better candidate experiences will capture the best talent and deliver superior customer service.

Rally House’s future plans center around maintaining their speed advantage while attracting even higher-caliber candidates by refining AI fit score criteria, enhancing screening questions, and implementing Phenom Design Studio for improved career site experiences. 

"Recruiters aren't going to be replaced by AI, but they're going to be replaced by people who use it or other recruiters who use it. Those who use it best will probably go the farthest when it comes to company performance and growth," advised Brazil. If you don’t know where to start, he suggests beginning with accessible tools like chatbots, allowing teams to gain confidence with AI-powered recruiting incrementally.

"Being able to pivot on a dime, depending on which team wins, is never going to lose its value," Brazil noted, highlighting how their automated hiring system supports their unique sports-driven business model.

Ready to enable same-day hiring and scale like Rally House? Phenom High-Volume Hiring can deliver the same transformation for your retail organization:

• Automate manual screening across all locations instantly

• Increase quantity without sacrificing quality

• Create personalized candidate experiences that drive preference

• Scale your hiring process to match your growth ambitions

Schedule a high-volume hiring audit to discover how you turn your expansion challenges into competitive advantages.