TL;DR
Kmart Group, with 55,000 team members and 450 stores across Australia and New Zealand, hires around 12,000 people a year. High turnover, uneven candidate quality and manual screening were putting pressure on both stores and talent teams. By introducing Sapia.ai’s chat-based interview as the first step for all frontline roles, Kmart Group has cut time to hire by 73%, improved retention by 2.5x for AI-matched hires, lifted First Nations representation to 8.25% against a 3% market benchmark, and maintained a 9/10 candidate satisfaction score. Every candidate gets a structured, mobile-first interview and a personalised feedback report, and recruiters now spend their time on workforce planning, talent pooling and partnering with store leaders rather than screening CVs.
A conversation with the CPO of one of Australasia’s largest retail groups
Retail hiring is a tough game. High volumes, seasonal peaks, high turnover, and a frontline workforce that is young, busy and often new to work.
For Kmart Group, that reality is magnified. The business employs around 55,000 people across 450 stores in Australia and New Zealand. Every year, they hire about 12,000 new team members into the Kmart and Target brands, with big spikes at Christmas and other peak periods.
In a recent episode of Josh Bersin’s What Works podcast, Tristram Gray, Chief People and Corporate Affairs Officer at Kmart Group, shared how they have reshaped frontline hiring with AI. This is the story behind that conversation.
Listen to the 20-minute podcast with Kathi Enderes from the Josh Bersin Company and Tristram Gray here.
The high-volume hiring challenge: Speed, quality, experience and fairness in conflict
Before starting their journey with Sapia.ai, Kmart Group faced a set of problems familiar to most high-volume retail hirers:
- Tens of thousands of applications every year
- Manual, repetitive screening across 450 stores
- Long time to hire, averaging 44 days
- Inconsistent experiences for candidates and hiring managers that were misaligned with the consumer brand
- A genuine concern that new tooling could create or amplify bias
They wanted to:
- Improve candidate quality and retention
- Hire faster, especially in peak periods
- Give every applicant a fair chance to be heard
- Protect and improve diversity outcomes
As Tristram puts it, the team were trying to hit objectives that usually pull in different directions: speed, quality, candidate experience and diversity.
The shift: a blind, chat-based interview for every candidate
Kmart Group partnered with Sapia.ai to make the first stage of hiring a structured, chat-based interview for every candidate.
Instead of CV screening, every applicant is invited to complete a mobile-first interview, answering a five questions about how they work, collaborate and learn. The interview is untimed, text-based and can be completed on any device.
Behind the scenes, Kmart Group and Sapia.ai worked together to define “what good looks like” in frontline roles across Kmart and Target. That meant identifying the traits that matter in stores, such as:
- Comfort in a high-paced environment
- Curiosity and willingness to learn
- Customer focus
- Team orientation and collaboration
- Drive for results
The AI models are tuned to those traits and to Kmart Group’s environment. The assessment itself is blind. No CV. No access to demographic data. Candidates are assessed only on what they write.
This approach is consistent with Sapia.ai’s broader design principles for inclusive assessment, which avoid demographic or CV data in training and scoring, and focus instead on job-relevant traits, competencies and natural language.
Better candidate quality – and an efficient, engaging experience
After rolling out the chat interview across stores, Kmart Group has seen tangible shifts in outcomes:
- Time to hire reduced by 73%
From 44 days in 2023 to 11.8 days today. Store leaders can move quickly when they need people, without sacrificing quality. - Retention 2.5x higher for AI-matched hires
Candidates recommended by the AI stay around two and a half times longer than average hires without the tool. In frontline retail, that is a meaningful shift in stability and customer experience. - Better representation for First Nations and people with disability
8.25% of hires now identify as First Nations, in a market where the benchmark is around 3%. Around 3.5% identify as having a disability, which is also above benchmarks. This aligns with Sapia’s broader research, which shows chat-based interviews achieving around 98% equity for people with disability from application to hire when everyone gets the same first-step interview. - Candidate experience rated 9 out of 10
Candidates rate the chat interview 9/10, and every applicant receives a personalised feedback report, regardless of outcome. Across Sapia’s global dataset of 6.7 million interviews, the average satisfaction score is around 9.05/10, with over 80% of candidates choosing to leave comments about their experience.
The candidate experience: consistent and inclusive
One of the most powerful parts of the Kmart Group story shared by Tristram is the focus on candidate dignity.
Every candidate:
- Gets the same chance to answer the same structured questions
- Has time to think and respond in their own words
- Receives a personalised feedback report with strengths and development suggestions – whether they get the role or not.
For many candidates, this is the first time they have received any feedback from a job application at all. In Sapia’s research, 96% of candidates say they find their insights useful, and 85% say they are more likely to recommend an organisation’s products and services after the experience.
Tristram shared the criticality for the group’s brand reputation of giving every candidate a positive experience – in retail, every applicant is also a potential customer.
What it means for recruiters and hiring managers
Recruiters have moved from repetitive screening to more strategic work. Instead of sorting through hundreds of CVs for each store, they focus on:
- Talent pooling and keeping job-ready candidates engaged
- Workforce planning based on store-level turnover and demand
- Coaching and partnering with line managers
Hiring managers are not forced to follow the AI. They still make the final hiring decision. What has changed is that they receive a shortlist of candidates who are already assessed for fit, along with structured, explainable insights that they can understand and interrogate.
This reflects the co-pilot model described in Sapia.ai’s FAIR™ Framework: AI provides the evidence and recommendations, while humans stay in control of decisions and are accountable for outcomes.
Tristram’s advice to other HR leaders
In the conversation with Kathi, Tristram’s advice is clear: embrace AI in hiring, but do it responsibly.
- Embed AI in your operating model rather than bolting it on at the side
- Integrate with your HRIS, so data and workflows flow properly
- Bring operations and store leaders into the design early
- Monitor outcomes monthly, not annually
- Combine AI with human qualities like judgement, empathy and discernment
It is not a choice between AI or people. A successful transformation requires AI and people, working together.
Listen to the full conversation on the Josh Bersin Podcast here.
About Author
