Size
10,000+
Industry
Retail
Focus Equalture
Retail
Each year, Rituals receives over one million job applications. How do you give every one of those candidates a great experience, while also reducing the workload for your store managers? As Anne Jaakke puts it:
“We want to make the impossible, possible.”
Anne Jaakke, CHRO at Rituals
When you design retail hiring for operational reality, this is the impact.
7x
Faster time-to-fill
3-6 hrs
Saved by Store Managers per hire
4.6/5
Candidate Experience
4:1
Interview-to-hire ratio, with top assessment scorers proving a good fit
At Rituals, Everything Revolves Around Experience
And that now includes their hiring process.
Rituals employs over 10,000 people across 1,400 stores in 33 countries, 18 of which are in Europe. Each year, the company receives close to one million job applications to make around 18,000 hires. A scale that demands efficiency, fairness, and high-quality standards.
To meet this challenge, Rituals chose Equalture as its global assessment partner for retail recruitment, launching first across all European countries.
Equalture’s Game-Based Assessments are now used to hire all store-based roles, from Shop Advisors and Assistant Shop Managers to Shop Managers and Seasonal Workers.
From CVs to Character: A New Retail Hiring Vision
Rituals wanted to move beyond traditional CV screening. A process that often overlooks potential and limits diversity.
“We wanted a process without CVs or screening. I don’t believe in cover letters or CVs. Now almost every candidate plays a few games before being invited, and those invitations go out fully automatically.”
Anne Jaakke
This new approach ensures every applicant is evaluated based on skills, traits, and potential, creating a truly modern recruitment process.
Rituals’ Retail Hiring Goals
“You quickly realize that the time a store manager spends on recruitment actually costs money. In our stores, we want our people to focus on the customer, not administrative tasks. That’s why we set ourselves a goal this year: how can we reduce the burden of recruitment for store managers while also improving the candidate experience? We wanted to solve several things at once, it was quite a journey, but in the end, we made it work.”
Anne Jaakke
Rituals set out to strengthen its recruitment process by focusing on three key pillars:
- Quality of Hire: Ensuring every new team member reflects the Rituals brand and demonstrates the competencies needed to perform well.
- Efficiency: Streamlining recruitment to be faster and more consistent across markets, allowing Shop Managers to spend less time reviewing CVs and more time serving customers.
- Candidate Experience: Offering an engaging, and inspiring journey from the very first click, because every applicant is also a potential customer.
Why Rituals Chose Equalture
“If you receive one million job applications and hire 18,000 people, it means you have to disappoint around 980,000. But those you reject are often your own customers. You don’t want to disappoint them, that would hurt your brand experience.”
Anne Jaakke
Rituals selected Equalture because the platform perfectly combines an engaging, mobile-first candidate experience with science-based, data-driven insights that continuously improve hiring quality and consistency.
Game-based experience: Retail candidates often apply via mobile and expect a smooth, modern, and stress-free process. Equalture’s short, inclusive, and immersive games make the experience enjoyable and bias-free, reducing drop-off rates while allowing every applicant to showcase their potential. This engaging format also strengthens Rituals’ employer brand. Many applicants are also customers, and the application experience now mirrors the Rituals brand itself: calm, intuitive, and human.
Data-driven approach: Rather than working with standardised Success Profiles, Equalture helps Rituals understand exactly which traits make someone successful in each role. To do this, current top-performing employees complete the game-based assessments first. Their results reveal the patterns and abilities shared by top performers, which are then compared with data from other successful retail hires to create clear, science-based Success Profiles for each role. When new candidates apply, their results are matched against these profiles to predict who is most likely to thrive. Over time, as Rituals tracks how new hires perform and stay with the company, this data feeds back into Equalture, continuously improving the Success Profiles.
The New Retail Hiring Workflow
Rituals redesigned its recruitment process to be faster, fairer, and more engaging, removing the need for CVs and cover letters entirely.
Application via chatbot: Candidates start their journey through a fully customised chatbot that collects only essential details, such as availability or relevant experience depending on role seniority.
Game-based assessment: Once these initial screening questions are completed, candidates receive a link to Equalture’s Game-Based Assessment — 91% of candidates complete it on mobile. The games provide a fun, inclusive, and science-backed way to showcase strengths and potential.
Automatic shortlisting: Candidates whose results align with the Success Profile are automatically marked as “high-fit” and invited to schedule their in-store interview.
In-store interview: The candidate meets with the Shop Manager for a personal discovery session focused on fit, motivation, and brand alignment. Using the assessment results as a guideline, the Shop Manager can tailor questions to each individual, leading to a fairer and more meaningful final hiring decision.
Early Results
The DACH region was the first to go live, and after just 1.5 months (as of early October 2025) the results speak for themselves:
- Strong Candidate Engagement
More than 11,500 candidates completed Equalture’s Game-Based Assessment, achieving an ~80% start-to-completion rate, well above industry benchmarks. - High Quality, High Efficiency
Over 800 candidates have already been hired. Shop Managers confirm that high-fit candidates perform strongly in interviews, validating the predictive accuracy of Equalture’s data-driven approach. Recruitment time has dropped significantly. - Outstanding Candidate Experience
Over 9,000 candidates rated their experience, giving an average of 4.67 out of 5 stars, 73% gave 5 stars, 22% gave 4 stars, and 0% gave 1 star.
In addition, over 3,000 candidates shared written comments about their experience. Many describe the games as fun, engaging, and stress-free, and express appreciation for being evaluated based on their potential rather than their background. This reinforces that Rituals’ recruitment process feels fair, inclusive, and true to the brand’s values: a process that treats every applicant as both a valued candidate and a potential customer. - Time-to-Hire and Manager Efficiency
The time-to-fill dropped from 65 days to just 7. Hiring managers are now fully relieved from manual recruitment tasks, allowing them to focus on what truly matters: their teams and customers.
The rollout started in Germany, but as soon as the first results were shared, other countries immediately asked to accelerate their own launch. A clear sign of how impactful this transformation has been.
A Process True to the Rituals Brand
Beyond results, Rituals’ approach transformed the entire candidate experience. Even candidates who aren’t selected leave with a positive impression.
Every interaction reflects Rituals’ culture of care and appreciation, as recruitment, just like their products, is all about creating a meaningful experience.
Rituals’ story perfectly reflects what we believe in at Equalture: Fair hiring, powered by science.
With our game-based assessments, we help organisations around the world reduce bias, increase diversity, and create a candidate experience that truly stands out.
Because every application is more than just a form; it’s an opportunity to make someone feel valued and to show who you are as an employer.
