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.

How did automation reduce no-shows across the hiring process?

Before interview scheduling automation, up to half of scheduled interviews ended in no-shows. Recruiters would block time for conversations that never happened, then scramble to reschedule or fill that time with administrative work.

With Phenom, that number dropped dramatically. According to Cooper, when candidates could schedule their own interviews immediately, they engaged while still interested. The self-service scheduling also created a stronger psychological commitment.

The impact of faster, self-service scheduling didn’t stop at interviews. That same momentum carried through to day one on the job. Employee attendance at SASR averages around 88%. "Schools get canceled, weather happens, personal emergencies," Cooper noted. "That's about a 10 to 15% no-show rate on any given day because life happens." But for new hires specifically, SASR now achieves a 93% first-day show rate. "We're doing a much better job getting people to go to work," Cooper said. "Five years ago, I probably couldn't even tell you how many new-hire no-shows we had."

The first-day show rate matters more than almost any other metric in SASR's business model. "A working new hire covers our cost to acquire, covers the cost to hire," Cooper explained. "They are strengthening our brand, our position, and our capabilities with the client when they're there."

Cooper credited the improvement to the complete automated journey. "By having all of these automated steps to get that human-to-human conversation and speed things up for candidates, our recruiters are really the frontline and the face of the company, and they're able to spend that time with the candidates to help them transition to an employee."

What was the impact of Phenom Voice Screening Agent?

With early gains from scheduling automation, SASR decided to pilot Phenom Voice Screening Agent to further streamline early-stage screening while keeping candidates moving quickly through the process. Just 24 hours after turning it on, Cooper had results to share.

The company sent 207 screening invitations. Fifty-one candidates completed their screenings that first day, representing approximately 17 hours of automated screening. The voice agent also disqualified nine candidates based on predetermined criteria, saving another three hours.

"That's 20 hours of work — half a week of work for one of our recruiters — that they can now focus on other areas of really being that human in the lead of the process," Cooper explained.

Voice Screening Agent works around the clock, conducting conversational screenings with candidates who opt in. "We're able to put the automation with the voice agent at each location that we need in a different workflow, so it's a customized experience for each candidate based on what we're hiring," Cooper noted.

Watch different types of Phenom Agents in action here

How did they get recruiting teams bought into new HR technology?

Many HR tech implementations fail because the people using the system on a daily basis aren't involved in designing how it works. SASR took a different approach.

"We have our senior recruiting manager hands-on every day in the decision-making process," Cooper explained. "The recruiters are in there helping us see what it's going to look like."

This ground-level involvement proved essential for successful adoption of Applied AI and automation solutions. When recruiters helped shape how the new technology would work, they became advocates rather than skeptics. Once early implementations began freeing up time and reducing errors, other departments took notice. "They get excited," Cooper said. "They start asking how they can automate more."

What’s SASR’s advice for companies just starting to use AI in HR?

Cooper's first recommendation: don't try to fix everything simultaneously.

"When you're buying technology or partnering with technology providers, you really have to understand what parts of the business they're going to be serving," he advised. Many times, "You're not buying the entire solution initially — you're working to find what you need the solution to do."

Identify the single most transformational workflow you can improve today. "That one workflow might be very limited, but it will be transformational for the business," Cooper noted. "Start there. Get that right, let people see the impact, then expand."

SASR also found value in having an AI & Automation Maturity Model framework to guide conversations. "It made it more tangible," Cooper explained. "It gave me a tool to start looking at our other tech stacks and have meaningful conversations with leadership about what we need to move the needle."

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