How SASR Used Applied AI To Speed Up High-Volume Retail Hiring

Staffing companies live and die by speed. When a retail client needs 30 people deployed across multiple locations in two weeks, your recruiting process can't take 45 days. When candidates wait a week for an interview callback, they've already accepted another offer. And when half your scheduled interviews end in no-shows, you're not just wasting recruiter time, you're failing to deliver on client commitments.

SASR, a cloud-based staffing company providing retail solutions across all 50 states, faced exactly these challenges. The company deploys multidisciplinary teams to execute store remodels, merchandising resets, and complex retail transformations for clients like Walmart — often on short notice. Their homegrown technology worked for basic job management but couldn't scale with the business. Recruiters spent two hours daily on manual scheduling. Time to hire stretched to 45-90 days. The candidate experience was fragmented, and data took a week to surface.

Bradley Cooper, Associate Vice President of Technology at SASR, led the initiative to replace manual hiring workflows with a scalable, AI-powered approach. In a recent webinar, he shared how SASR partnered with Phenom to automate workflows, reduce interview no-shows by 50%, and achieve a 93% first-day show rate for new hires.

Watch the entire session here, or read on for the full recap!

What limitations did SASR discover in their homegrown recruiting technology?

For years, SASR built everything in-house. When the business needed something, the team developed it on the fly. That approach worked when SASR was smaller, but growth exposed critical limitations.

"We were a homegrown business with a homegrown technology stack," Cooper explained. "It was really good at what it did, but it was limited in everything else that we could use to scale."

The system managed jobs effectively but existed in isolation. It couldn't communicate with employees or candidates. Training tools lived somewhere else. When Cooper's team mapped the entire candidate journey, they discovered over 70 steps with multiple handoffs and circular routes.

In addition, the recruiting process had become over-automated in the wrong places. "We were asking for personal information as soon as they were hitting our website, never interacting with anybody," Cooper described. SASR was over-hiring just to hit staffing targets because so many candidates dropped out during the fragmented process.

How long was SASR's time to hire before using Applied AI?

The average time to hire stretched to 45-90 days. "People weren't completing onboarding," Cooper noted. "Our team was spending a ton of time chasing people down, making sure interview invites went out."

Candidates would apply and then wait. Days would pass before they heard anything. When interview invitations finally arrived, the back-and-forth to find a time could take another week. The no-show rate reached 30-50%. For a staffing company that promises clients rapid deployment of retail teams, these timelines were unsustainable.

How did SASR modernize its HR and recruiting processes?

SASR brought in outside partners to assess its recruiting and HR technology and identify where AI and automation could have the greatest impact. Cooper emphasized that improving technology required first understanding how work actually flowed through the hiring process.

"We had to define every one of our processes and see what was inefficient, broken, or not working," he explained. "You have to understand from start to finish. You can't look at it as each stage in your process because you'll fix that stage, and then you'll push the inefficiency forward, and it'll bottleneck somewhere else."

This holistic view revealed disconnected systems were creating work, not eliminating it. SASR chose to partner with a best-in-class Applied AI provider rather than continue building everything internally, and Phenom became the foundation.

What Phenom solutions did SASR prioritize? 

Addressing high-volume hiring and workflow automation was a priority. Interview scheduling consumed an overwhelming amount of recruiter time. The team was spending roughly 922 hours annually — about two hours per day — just reviewing applications and coordinating interview times.

"From an efficiency standpoint, those are hours each year that we're putting back into the recruiting team to focus on other efforts," Cooper explained. "But if you flip that from a candidate standpoint, they were waiting a week for their interview, whereas now today, they're scheduling it the next day, and they know they have that within minutes of completing their application."

Phenom High-Volume Hiring and Phenom Automated Interview Scheduling eliminated the coordination dance entirely. Candidates can select their own interview times immediately after applying. "By having that scheduling automation in place, along with our high-volume hiring workflows, we were able to get that confirmed interview in a candidate's hands at the time of application," Cooper said.