Hiring fast, hiring right, and hiring at scale are some of the daunting challenges for a retail HR manager. Whether it is a supermarket hiring 300 cashiers or a fashion chain filling 50 store managers across the country, the hiring process demands precision, speed, and compliance. Manual shortlisting, endless Excel sheets, and paper resumes are no longer the trends in a digital age. The emergence of the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) shifted the recruitment landscape in the HR ecosystem. Blending AI-powered resume parsing, automated shortlisting, and smart interview workflows has significantly transformed the way HR teams tap, assess, and onboard talent.
According to the JIRE (2025), the employee turnover rate in the Indian retail sector is expected to reach 30-35%. The seasonal hiring in the retail industry this year is projected at 15-20%. On the other hand, retailers are using a gig workforce/flexible staffing to adapt to location-specific demand fluctuations. Considering these trends, ATS isn’t just a software for advanced HR leaders, but a strategic tool to upend hiring efficiency.
The Rising Power of ATS in 2025
Currently, ATS platforms have become a yardstick for retail hiring success and helping HR managers transition from reactive to data-driven, proactive hiring.
- About 75% of the recruiters invest up to 75% of their recruitment budgets into automating recruitment (The Hiring ROI Report)
- Retail investment in AI and Automation is expected to surge $31 B by 2030 (EY Report)
- Over 36% of SMEs have adopted ATS for recruitment needs (GoHire)
- Industries across sectors have planned to adopt AI in Recruitment (India Skills Report)
- Over 78% of candidates expect regular communication & updates throughout the hiring process (LinkedIn)
- Over 94% of recruiters agree that ATS has had a positive impact on their recruitment process. (ATS Market)
5 Ways ATS is upending Retail Recruitment
HR managers handling a multi-store hiring in a fast-growing retail industry might face challenges from screening to rolling out offers and compliance. But exploring these 5 key benefits ATS brings into retail can help HR leaders stay time sensitive, organized and proactive in identifying the best talent to drive organizational efficiency & success.
Cut the hiring noise
Resume screening is one of the biggest bottlenecks in the retail recruitment process. According to ET (2021), Recruiters, on average, receive 250 resumes for open positions and spend over 23 hours to finalize on just 12% of the candidates. But with the help of an application tracking system, HR managers can now automatically screen resumes against preset filters like skills, experience, location, and education, saving hours from sifting through irrelevant applications. This also helps them to focus on engaging with qualified candidates, thereby speeding up hiring cycles, reducing bias, and improving candidate job-fit.
Multi-platform Job Posting
In a fast-paced retail environment, talent moves faster than customer trends. Missing the right and potential candidates can bring down sales and reduce service quality. A powerful applicant tracking system (ATS) can help retail HR leaders streamline every recruitment step by posting job ads on multiple social media platforms like LinkedIn and other online sites through a few clicks. With the HR applicant tracking software and modern recruitment tools in HR, hiring becomes faster, mobile-friendly, and social-ready. Integrating HR automation tools and HR tech software enables one-click sharing, candidate shortlisting, and analytics-driven hiring decisions.
Intelligent Feedback
In a highly attrition-driven retail environment, HR leaders must implement an applicant tracking system to streamline the recruitment process from job posting to rolling out job offers. With in-built communication tools that offer retail recruitment managers & store managers with structured scorecards and collaborative feedback modules to submit feedback inputs, build interview questions, compare notes, generate automated summaries and reports. This ensures communication consistency across all sites and locations. The notes captured by the HR applicant tracking system software allow recruiters in retail to a transparent, data-driven decisions and fair evaluations.
Digital Automated Offer Letters
Modern retail HR managers are increasingly leveraging ATS to overcome bulk hiring challenges at multiple store locations through automation. Through ATS, they access pre-built, branded templates and forms pre-filled with candidate data, reducing time on manual entries. By implementing recruitment tools, HR managers can generate automated offer letters with e-signatures, ensuring faster closures and better candidate experience. The advantage of using e-signature tools and documentation is cuts down administrative overhead and approval time.
Third-Party Consultant Login
Retail brands rely heavily on multiple recruitment agencies to search for fitting and qualified talent for store-level and seasonal positions. With ATS, HR managers can proactively create customized user roles and permissions for third-party consultants to view job requisitions on one portal. Due to mass hiring, retail HR leaders delegate part of the hiring to third-party vendors. To avoid any security or information breaches, ATS assists retail HR managers with accurate audit trails of role-specific logins and task activities to ensure streamlined collaboration, a transparent hiring pipeline, and real-time visibility across multiple vendors.
Compliance & Reporting
Workforce diversity directly impacts retail hiring and profitability. By creating gender-neutral and ethnic-neutral language in the job ads via ATS, retail HR managers can maintain unbiased recruitment records and adhere to anti-discriminatory laws. Moreover, storing loads of applicant records during seasonal hiring using ATS can help HR managers align applicants’ data with data security policies to avoid any costly penalties and legal compliance risks.
Way Ahead
In a fast-paced retail environment, success depends on how effectively HR teams can attract, engage, and retain talent. By adopting ATS, HR teams can actually lay the foundation for agile workforce management. Moreover, our advanced and automated TeamLease HRtech Recruitment module has upended the hiring landscape of our retail clients by reducing hiring delays, lowering administrative overheads, and enhancing workforce diversity in compliance with location-specific regulatory standards and labor laws. Ready to build a next-generation and high-performing sales team? Book a demo with us here.
