Challenge
With thousands of stores across the United States, this automotive services retailer relies on a steady pipeline of talent to maintain smooth retail and service operations. They faced a significant headcount deficit – with analyses revealing millions in lost revenue across stores nationwide. Why? Their recruitment model wasn’t delivering the talent needed to close staffing gaps and addressing deeper problems with the function.
After a challenging experience with a previous RPO provider, the company sought to find a partner to bring structure, accountability, and long-term positive impact to the recruitment function. This meant clear visibility into hiring performance, data that connected recruitment activity to workforce needs, and a partner able to fully operate as part of the business, and not a transactional, one-off service. Additionally, hiring demand also was greater than expected, with initial projections at tens of thousands of hires per year. To keep locations fully staffed, the reality was much higher than initially projected.
This company's leadership wanted a best-in-class recruitment function able to mitigate revenue loss, fill roles, and implement data-driven strategies that elevated its employer brand and tied hiring back to business-wide goals.
Solution
To address hiring gaps, the automotive retail and service provider partnered with Wilson to implement an end-to-end talent attraction solution. This meant building rapport by challenging assumptions, bringing transparency into every step of the process, and helping the organization understand what was really driving staffing gaps.
The RPO solution combined recruitment delivery with technology, analytics, and recruitment marketing, supported by experienced recruitment operations managers (ROMs), recruiters, and sourcers who worked across multiple levels of the business. Instead of operating purely as a recruiting team, Wilson brought talent acquisition leadership from the top down, helping connect recruiting activity with broader workforce strategy.
The major focus was visibility. Wilson developed customized reporting through Workday and PowerBI that gave leaders clear insight into hiring activity, candidate pipelines, and staffing impacts. These insights helped bridge recruitment with financial workforce planning, aligning talent acquisition more closely with the organization’s staffing model.
Communication was another priority. Weekly reporting and consistent operational touchpoints created a shared understanding of performance, expectations, and progress. With trust established, conversations could move beyond surface-level updates and focus on root causes and practical solutions.
The partnership also enabled deeper analysis of workforce dynamics. The company provided access to critical data points, including attrition rates, giving both teams the ability to identify patterns and refine hiring strategies over time.
From the beginning, the approach was simple: operate with transparency, tell the truth about what the data shows, and work together to improve the system.
