Kohl’s Strategies for Cashing Out Big on Retail Hiring

Enterprise retail runs on rhythm. The back-to-school rush, the holiday floor surge, the constant churn of seasonal hiring across thousands of stores nation-wide. 

For Kohl’s, keeping pace with that rhythm while building a candidate pipeline worth the effort requires more than hustle. "At the core, our goal was to shift recruiters from that administrative work to more of the strategic work," said Haley Engelhart, Team Lead of Digital HR at Kohl’s, during a recent session on the topic.

That shift requires the right systems, the right data, and a team that isn’t buried in scheduling logistics.

As a Phenom customer since 2016, Kohl’s has had a long window to evolve how it uses Applied AI across its talent operations. And the most meaningful gains came when the team stopped running parallel systems and started consolidating with fewer tools, more consistency, and results that showed up in the numbers.

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

What Gets in the Way of Strategic Recruiting in Retail?

For years, Kohl’s talent acquisition team was operating with disparate yet redundant tools. For example, two separate Content Relationship Management (CRM) tools ran side by side until a few years ago. Scheduling was equally fragmented. Some recruiters relied on Calendly, others handled it manually through email, and none of it was integrated with their Applicant Tracking System (ATS).

“A lot of their time was spent coordinating interviews, managing back-and-forth emails, and handling logistics. That’s not really where they added value," said Engelhart. What the team wanted was recruiters functioning as talent advisors, partnering with the business and building pipeline, not chasing calendar links.

The seasonal demand pattern added another layer of pressure. Kohl’s hiring surges hit twice a year, in summer and again before the December peak, requiring a consistent, scalable approach to reaching candidates quickly across a nationwide network of stores, distribution centers, and fulfillment operations.

How Did Kohl’s Shift Recruiters From Admin Work to Strategic Work?

The team’s first move was consolidation. In early 2023, Kohl’s officially moved all of talent acquisition onto the Phenom Talent CRM, retiring their legacy system and creating a single source of truth for over seven million candidate profiles. Then came scheduling. In March 2025, Kohl’s rolled out Phenom Automated Interview Scheduling in two phases — first, using a convenient scheduling link for recruiter phone screens, followed by a personal scheduling link for hiring managers, expanding outward across business units as adoption took hold. 

A thoughtful campaigns strategy became another core lever. The team partnered closely with their recruitment marketing function to build rotating theme campaigns for stores and distribution networks, each week spotlighting a different Kohl’s benefit such as weekly pay, associate discount, or tuition reimbursement to drive candidate engagement and applications. The specificity mattered. Rather than generic outreach, candidates were receiving targeted messages about what actually made Kohl’s different as an employer.

The team also piloted Phenom X+ Source, a natural language sourcing feature that lets recruiters search across both the Talent CRM and a public candidate database without building Boolean strings. With millions of profiles in the system, the ability to surface qualified candidates conversationally, filter results in real time, and take immediate action from a shortlist closed the gap between sourcing and outreach significantly. After the pilot, Kohl’s rolled it out to the full team.

Related: Finding Best-fit Candidates with Phenom X+ Source

What Was the Impact of Consolidating Their TA Tech Stack? 

The numbers from Kohl’s most recent business review told the story clearly:

• 44% YoY increase in job seeker volume

• Nearly 800K new candidate profiles in one year

• 9M automated campaign touchpoints in one quarter

• 3,600+ hours estimated recruiter hours saved with automated interview scheduling

• 51% open rate on benefits campaign

• 32% open rate on store hiring campaigns with a tailored persona strategy

"Crazy to say this number, but we added 800,000 net new candidate profiles in our CRM," revealed Engelhart. “That gives our recruiters that many more people to source from." That pipeline growth, paired with the scheduling time savings, meant recruiters were spending more energy on conversations that mattered and less on coordination that didn’t.

The 9 million automated campaign touch points in a single quarter stood out as a particularly vivid data point. That volume of personalized outreach, going out systematically and consistently, would have been impossible to replicate manually. Combined with soaring campaign open rates, it reflected a team that had learned to use the platform not just for tracking but for driving real candidate engagement.

What Kohl’s Is Testing Next: Meet Kira

More recently, Kohl’s began piloting Phenom Voice Screening Agent for loss prevention and store supervisor roles. Their agent’s name is Kira. Two weeks into the pilot, "Our recruiters were saying, 'We can't imagine not having Kira on the team,” shared Engelhart. Early results from the pilot showed that 90% of candidates completed their voice screening within a day, and 93% rated the experience four stars or above out of five.

The opt-out rate came in at roughly 1%, well below what the team had anticipated. Recruiter involvement was built into every step: candidates still applied in Workday first, and after Kira completed the screening, recruiters received a notification to review the recording or transcript before deciding whether to advance or disposition the candidate. "The most important thing for us as we started to pilot this was that the recruiter was remaining in the loop," Engelhart said.

Kohl’s is also continuing to expand the business interview scheduler to the remaining teams not yet using it. For a company that started this journey a decade ago and has been building steadily ever since, the pace of adoption has clearly picked up. The foundation is in place. The data is there. The next chapter is about scaling what’s already working.

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