The retail industry is one of the largest employment sectors, employing more than 9 million people in the United States, 3.7 million in the United Kingdom, 3.1 million in France, and 1.3 million in Australia. Yet turnover is notoriously high, upwards of 60%, with employees frequently swapping jobs for better pay, better opportunities, or seasonal changes. With so much hiring activity, it’s helpful for retail recruiting teams to look at benchmark recruiting metrics that will help them see where they fit into the bigger picture, determine whether their own metrics are leading or lagging, and decide what interventions they can make.
Retail Recruiting Benchmarks 2025 Report
For our landmark Recruiting Benchmarks 2025 Report, SmartRecruiters examined nearly 90 million applications for 1.5 million jobs across 95 countries. This blog post dives into the retail metrics, offering a starting place for organizations to see where they’re performing well and where they can improve.
Note that the retail industry is defined at the company level, not the job level. In other words, the data includes all roles offered by retail companies, from home office to shop floor.
Here are the top takeaways:
Retail applicant competition
- Compared to other industries, retailers receive slightly fewer applications per opening, at 65 applications per hire. Therefore, interview and offer rates are slightly higher.
- From a candidate perspective, this data means it’s easier to get a job in retail than all industries tracked except healthcare, with 1.5% of retail candidates receiving offers.
Time to hire
- Retail is the quickest industry in which to get hired, with median hiring times of just 25 days to hire, 34% lower than the global median across all industries. Candidates get funneled through each stage quicker, having their applications reviewed in just four days and getting an interview in eleven days.
- Time to hire for organizations using AI is typically 11 days faster than those that don’t use it. For example, U.K.-based retailer Frasers Group uses SmartRecruiters’ automation and AI to achieve a 9-day time to hire across its 1500+ stores after carefully experimenting with response times for candidates, particularly at the offer acceptance stage.
- Retail companies, especially those that conduct e-commerce, usually employ a wide array of technical staff, which have hiring times similar to those in the Technology industry, which shows a median time to hire of 48 days. Hiring times for retail associates and warehouse staff, however, would be expected in most cases to be faster than 25 days. The SmartRecruiters system is built to handle a wide range of roles so that enterprise companies can use one system of record for hiring across both corporate and high-volume roles.
Recruiter productivity in retail
- Surprisingly, retail recruiters handle 12% fewer requisitions than those in other industries. However, retail roles are often filled with little to no recruiter involvement, meaning that many roles may be filled without being assigned to a recruiter.
- For example, JYSK, a Denmark-based home furnishings retailer with 3,000+ stores throughout EMEA and North America, uses SmartRecruiters’ applicant tracking software to configure processes that automatically post jobs and enable store managers to take charge of recruitment themselves.
- For retail teams that use hiring scorecards, adoption is almost universal. Rating candidates on key criteria helps streamline hiring decisions when interviewing retail associates at scale.
Retail sources of hire
- Retail lags in its use of referrals and internal hires, which is no surprise given the high turnover. Still, with only 2% of hires from referrals, retailers have an opportunity for retailers to incentivize their staff to work with friends and acquaintances.
More insights on retail recruiting benchmarks
Lighthouse Research & Advisory’s research shows that 72% of candidates in the retail industry say they would like to learn about career growth opportunities during the hiring process. In addition, those same candidates say that work-life balance is the number one factor that motivates them to apply for a job.
Managing candidates’ expectations by automating the pre-qualification based on their ability to work specific shifts could help store managers find more of the talent they need. Additionally, AI-powered candidate assistants can offer details about the company and the available roles, helping candidates decide if they are a fit before they apply.
Retail recruiting case studies
JYSK, a retailer with operations across EMEA, learned the importance of creating a hiring process that met hiring managers where they were. The organization merged with another retailer, dramatically changing the hiring process for many. The newly combined population of 3,500 hiring managers were trained on SmartRecruiters’ mobile hiring tools to speed up candidate reviews and quickly hire candidates for their stores, dropping time to fill by over 60%, even while processing 50,000 applications per month.
Frasers Group, a UK-based retailer and intellectual property group with more than 1,500 stores reduced the time to hire from 23 to nine days for its high-volume retail roles through a series of interventions, including AI-based screening, templated communications, and data-driven analysis. The company carefully analyzed candidate drop-offs by stage, and found that giving candidates a 3-day window to accept the offer netted 25% fewer candidate drop-offs. Over time, this helped them reduce new hire first-month churn by 50%. Sometimes faster is not always better. Quality candidates needed time to contemplate the offer rather than feeling rushed into making a decision. The 9-day time to hire is the sweet spot for high-volume retail hires at Frasers Group.
Get more recruiting benchmark metrics
Download the full report to get a global overview of hiring benchmarks plus insights on geographic differences in hiring across the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Australia. You’ll also find benchmark metrics on hiring in healthcare, hospitality, technology, and manufacturing.
