Industry
Retail
Europe
Hires
15,000+
Results
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
What you’ll read
- Rituals’ Retail Hiring Challenges
- Why Rituals Chose Equalture’s Assessment
- Rituals’ New Retail Hiring System
- First Results
”Our goal was to create a unified, efficient, and potential-based retail hiring process that reduces time-to-fill while ensuring a fair and high-quality candidate experience across all countries.”
Anne Albracht, Global Director Talent Acquisition & Employer Branding
Rituals receives more than one million retail candidates every year. At the same time, the brand continues to grow rapidly, opening a new store every day. For that reason, retail hiring is a continuous, business-critical operation.
As Anne Albracht, Global Director Talent Acquisition & Employer Branding at Rituals, put it: “It’s a blessing to receive so many applications, but it also comes with a huge responsibility.”
That responsibility triggered a fundamental rethink of how their retail hiring process should work, which they designed together with Equalture.
This blog is a summary of a recent webinar, in which Anne Albracht (Global Director Talent Acquisition & Employer Branding at Rituals) & Charlotte Melkert (CEO at Equalture) shared more about this new hiring system.
Rituals’ Retail Hiring Challenges
Three challenges that Rituals experienced in its retail hiring process led to rethinking its retail hiring system.
Challenge 1. Time-to-fill & operational load for Shop Managers
Many parts of the hiring process were manual, which meant a heavy burden for shop managers. They were screening CVs, inviting candidates, planning interviews, and conducting them, while also running their stores. At the same time, candidates sometimes had to wait weeks before receiving feedback.
In a retail environment where speed matters and store managers should be present on the shop floor, that setup simply wasn’t efficient. Shop Managers spent too much time on hiring, while time-to-fill continued to increase.
Challenge 2. The limits of CV-based hiring
Anne had already stepped away from CV screening in a previous retail organisation she worked for, and had seen how little CVs actually predict success in store roles.
“A CV simply doesn’t show the full picture of someone’s ability to succeed in retail. Especially in an environment with strong onboarding and training, it makes more sense to hire for potential and then teach what is needed, rather than filtering people out based on past experience or background”, Anne explained.
At Rituals, this became a strategic question: if the brand invests heavily in onboarding and development, shouldn’t hiring focus on underlying potential instead of past experience? But removing CV checks also creates a critical follow-up question: what do you use as a reliable alternative?
Challenge 3. The need for global consistency
Rituals operates across 25+ countries, yet the hiring experience was not fully standardised. That means candidates could go through different processes depending on location, and decisions could vary accordingly.
As Anne put it: “We really want a unified process for candidates. A Shop Advisor in Germany should go through the exact same selection logic as one in Austria or Italy.”
These challenges shaped the ambition for the new retail hiring system: reduce time-to-fill, relieve shop managers from manual workload, replace CV-based selection with a data-driven way of hiring for potential, and create a fair, unified experience across countries.
In order to make this ambition happen, a critical next step was finding the right assessment partner.
”Equalture’s completion rates we’re seeing at Rituals are the highest I have ever seen for an assessment.”
Anne Albracht, Global Director Talent Acquisition & Employer Branding
Why Rituals Chose Equalture
During the webinar, Charlotte asked Anne why they chose to select Equalture as the assessment partner in this flow, playing a vital part in making efficiency qualitative and fair. Anne gave three reasons.
Criteria 1. Brand and candidate experience fit
‘’The game-based nature really fits our brand. At Rituals, we like things to still be a bit fun. On top of that, the assessment experience needs to fit the retail audience. We have clearly seen in the candidate satisfaction ratings that our candidates love the game-based experience’’, Anne mentioned.
Criteria 2. Completion rate
What stood out most for Anne was the high completion rates that Equalture’s games are achieving. “The completion rates we’re seeing at Rituals are the highest I have seen for an assessment. I have worked with other assessment solutions, but they never achieved such high completion rates. This shows it really fits our audience.”
Criteria 3. Scientific background and trust
Finally, Anne also stressed how important it was for Rituals to trust the scientific foundation behind an assessment.
“Especially for a project like this, where we decided to move away from CVs and ask hiring managers to rely on assessment results instead, we needed to fully understand what was being measured in the assessment, and, more importantly, why”, she explained. “We did not want this to be a black box or generic scoring model.”
Before assessing candidates, Equalture first identifies what actually predicts success inside an organisation. Current employees are asked to complete the assessments first, to reveal which competencies the top-performers in a sppecfic role share. Only once those insights are clear, assessments and success profiles are configured.
As Charlotte, CEO of Equalture, explained: “We don’t start with job descriptions or generic scoring models. We start with real, company-specific insights into what predicts success.”
Because the success profiles and assessment configurations were built using data from Rituals’ own top retail performers, and grounded in Rituals’ DNA, the logic behind the assessment was clear and explainable to the organisation. That made it much easier to build trust internally and prove the predictive validity.
Rituals’ New Retail Hiring System
Anne described the redesigned workflow in a simplified way – with a lot happening behind the scenes – but the core steps are clear:
Step 1. Candidates start the virtual assistant, “Luna” – Pre-select questions (role dependent)
Rituals introduced “Luna,” their virtual recruitment assistant. Luna supports candidates in searching, applying, and asking questions.
Luna captures a candidate’s personal details, availability, and other practical requirements. Depending on the role, Rituals uses pre-selection questions. Candidates who pass those remain “in the race”.
Step 2. Equalture’s game-based assessment
Candidates then receive an invitation via Luna to complete Equalture’s game-based assessment. The assessment (and therefore also the number of games) differs per role: after all, the competencies required for a Shop Advisor are not the same as those for an (Assistant) Shop Manager. These role-specific Success Profiles were configured after Rituals’ current retail employees completed the games first, allowing Equalture to analyse which patterns consistently showed up amongst participants with high on-the-job performance.
When candidates click the link, they enter a fully branded Rituals environment and are guided step by step through the games. Over 80% complete the assessment on their mobile phone.
Step 3. Automatic move to scheduling if fit is high
Rituals decided that if a candidate is a fit based on the Equalture games, there is no interference by hiring managers or Recruitment in that step. Instead, the candidate is immediately offered to schedule the next step via Luna. After three high-fit candidates have scheduled a discovery, the role automatically closes.
This way, Rituals aims to bring down the yearly number of candidates, which also means fewer rejected candidates who might be disappointed.
Step 4. The in-store “Discovery”
Rituals doesn’t frame this step as a normal interview. Anne explained that they call it a Discovery for a couple of reasons. First of all, it starts with a warm welcome. Shop Managers actively try to reflect how Rituals trains employees to welcome customers. During the Discovery, candidates can receive practical exercises, which are meant to help them discover what it’s like to work at Rituals.
Step 5. Decision and “digital handshake”
Quickly after the Discovery, Rituals sends a “digital handshake” through Luna, collects what’s needed for contract drafting, and moves to onboarding.
Results
Rituals and Equalture first launched the new hiring system in Germany in September 2025. Based on the learnings from this initial rollout, Rituals and Equalture are now preparing to implement the same approach across its other European markets in the next few months.
So far, more than 30,000 candidates have gone through the new process, leading to over 1,600 hires. With this volume already in place, Rituals and Equalture were able to share the first concrete results.
Result 1. Efficiency
- Time-to-fill went from 65 to 9 days (7x faster)
- Shop Managers save 3–6 hours per hire
Result 2. Candidate Experience
After candidates have completed Equalture’s games, they can optionalle leave a 1-to-5-star rating. Based on 15,000 ratings:
- The average is 4.63 out of 5 stars
- 71% gave a 5-star rating
- Only 1% gave a 1-star rating
- These ratings are very consistent across the different roles, seniority levels, and age groups
Result 3. Quality
Long-term retention cannot yet be measured, as the system only recently went live. However, early quality indicators are strong. Rituals now closes a vacancy once three candidates with a high fit score on the assessment have scheduled their discovery in the store. If the shortlist quality had been insufficient, roles would need to be reopened, but that has not been necessary so far. The interview-to-hire ratio shows that candidates reaching the interview stage are consistently hireable. These funnel ratios matter, as they indicate that the system is already selecting the right candidates before the interview stage.
First learnings shared by Rituals
Potential-based hiring requires interviewer support
Anne said that when you remove CVs, interviewers might feel like losing an anchor, and they need support to conduct interviews focused on potential.
Charlotte also described the “in-between” period: between going live and having longer-term retention insights, there’s a natural trust/confidence gap that requires ongoing education and data sharing.
Anne’s most practical advice to other retailers/high-volume hiring organisations
“If you’re thinking of redesigning your retail hiring process, be bold and start with a blank sheet of paper. Toss everything out first, and then redesign it.’’
Our takeaway
Rituals didn’t just speed up hiring. They redesigned the flow around three things Anne repeatedly came back to: candidate experience, unbiased selection, and reducing manual work for hiring managers, while keeping a unified process across countries.
Equalture enables Rituals to shift away from CV screening and still make confident decisions at scale, with a candidate experience strong enough to keep completion high.
If your retail hiring still depends on CV checks, manual screening, and long cycles, the question Anne implicitly challenges is: What would your hiring look like if you started from a blank sheet of paper, and designed it for reality?
