Walmart Brings Retail Attrition Under 10% and Cuts Time to Hire From 14 Days to 7 With Vervoe

The challenge

Hiring relied on paper resumes dropped off in stores, with hiring managers flipping through the pile and stopping at the first plausible fit, so most applicants were overlooked. A small recruiting team had to handle thousands of candidates, which made for a very poor candidate experience, and the arrival of the pandemic made modernizing the process urgent.

The approach

Walmart’s team sampled the skills profiles of its best current employees to build standard assessments for each role, combining video answers, open-ended prompts, and multiple-choice questions. Recruiters grade assessments themselves, which trains Vervoe’s machine-learning grading on what actually matters, and hiring shifted from favoring credentials and years of experience to evaluating demonstrated skill.

The results

• Retail attrition fell into single digits
• Time to hire dropped from 14 days to 7
• The team estimates that without Vervoe it would need a recruiting team about seven times the size to handle the same volume
• The platform helped keep stores staffed through the pandemic