SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 24, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) —
HireQuotient, which recently announced its strategic partnership with Paylocity, today announced the results of a recent EasySource deployment for a PE-owned North American media and retail company. HireQuotient delivered another strong return on investment (ROI) for a PE-owned North American media and retail giant. Chief People Officer of the organization, Ann Jadown shared her amazement at closing 15 critical roles with a 65% reduction in time to close and a 70% reduction in manual effort. It is noteworthy that besides saving substantial recruiter bandwidth, Ann Jadown shared that her firm saved more than $50,000 in direct recruiting costs through HireQuotient’s EasySource AI platform.
Structural Recruitment Challenges in the North American Retail and Media Sector
The North American retail and media ecosystem operates under distinct macro-level hiring pressures that severely degrade recruitment efficiency when relying on legacy manual workflows. Addressing these operational bottlenecks requires analyzing three critical structural challenges faced by talent acquisition teams across the industry.
Challenge 1: Severe Churn Velocity and the Sourcing Treadmill
The retail and frontline trade sector experiences chronic workforce attrition. According to data published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), annual employee turnover in retail consistently hovers between 55% and 65%, with high-volume sub-sectors reaching attrition rates as high as 81%.
HireQuotient’s EasySource directly solves this through its AI sourcing auto-pilot – acting as an automated recruitment solution for candidate sourcing. Instead of recruiters manually executing repetitive sourcing tasks, EasySource ingests job vetting criteria and autonomously maps passive talent pools within 24 hours, building daily active candidate pipelines on complete autopilot.
Challenge 2: Frontline Deskless Disconnect and Manual Dialing Fatigue
Engagement in the retail and frontline landscape is hindered by the physical nature of the workforce. Authoritative market research from Gartner and Forrester indicates that 80% of the global workforce is deskless, meaning candidates rarely check professional email accounts during working hours. Consequently, talent teams depend heavily on direct phone calls and text messaging.
Without automated assistance, a single recruiter must manually place over 200 phone calls per day – spending up to 7 hours dedicated purely to dialing numbers – only to connect with 2 to 5 qualified candidates who are interested in open roles. This operational dynamic wastes human potential and leads to severe recruiter mental fatigue. EasySource eliminates this burden through AI-assisted calling and multi-channel outreach, reaching thousands of candidates simultaneously so that recruiters converse only with the pre-screened, qualified handful who express active interest.
Challenge 3: Limitations of Manual Screening and Candidate Discovery
Traditional recruiting workflows can rely heavily on keyword-based screening and manual candidate review.
EasySource addresses these workflow challenges by conducting deeper screening powered by semantic and contextual search algorithms. By evaluating candidate profile context, skill adjacencies, and career trajectories, EasySource helps recruiters identify relevant talent while reducing the time spent manually reviewing profiles.
EasySource Supports Enterprise Recruiting Workflows
When evaluating options to modernize talent acquisition, Ann Jadown – CHRO at the firm – assessed the broader HR technology ecosystem. She found that conventional recruiting platforms provide standard ATS capabilities, while her organization needed additional automation for outbound candidate discovery, contact enrichment, personalized AI outreach, and onboarding workflows. After extensive research and due diligence, she felt that an AI-native HR platform like EasySource could support the outcomes her organization was seeking and simplify the recruitment workflow.
Chief People Officer, Ann Jadown selected HireQuotient’s EasySource to support these recruiting requirements, noting the immediate transformation in her recruitment workflow during her executive interview:
“I used to spend significant time sourcing and earlier had needed a team (sourcer) to close the positions. EasySource has been transformational since I can now put things on autopilot and it builds funnels on its own every day.”
Highlighting the speed and precision of EasySource’s AI candidate discovery module, Jadown added
“The fact that the tool can produce a niche talent pool within a day truly amazed me. By simply putting in vetting criteria, I was able to get a very specific talent pool.”
Furthermore, the platform’s ability to drive conversion rates through hyper-personalized, candidate-specific outreach proved crucial in securing passive talent:
“The outreach customization is very smart; it uses AI to tailor the outreach to the candidate by pulling from their profile and the job description to create human-sounding language. It makes candidates feel special by helping them understand why they are a strong fit for a particular role.”
Ann added further that,
“EasySource’s suite of AI agents does everything from sourcing, screening, reach outs, qualification, interview scheduling, and all the way to onboarding the candidates. Utilizing the platform end-to-end reduced our time to close positions by 65%, saved us 70% of time which was getting utilized in manual tasks and not to forget $50,000 direct cost savings.”
She says, “I was surprised to start working directly with Smarth, the Founder & CEO, right away after signing the contract. Working with him twice a week showed that he really cared about ensuring I knew the product inside and out to get the best results. I also viewed our frequent meetings as a way for him to get feedback on what I was finding with the tool and to discuss my “wish list.” As we interacted, I would see the results of my feedback in the form of new product technology or features. You do not normally see that when working with an AI recruiting tool or any HR tool. It meant a lot to me that he cared about making adjustments to the product based on my feedback to provide even better results.”
Market Scale: The Economics of Hiring in the North American Retail and Media Sector
The retail and media sector represents a massive pillar of the North American economy, employing over 15 million workers in the United States alone. Data published in the U.S. Employment Report and Bureau of Labor Statistics projections demonstrate that while the sector controls approximately 10% of the total national workforce, it struggles with an ongoing labor deficit and volatile retention dynamics.
Research from the Gartner Hype Cycle for Retail Technologies indicates that associate experience and frontline recruitment technology have transitioned from administrative utilities to core drivers of enterprise business value. Replacing a single frontline retail worker costs between $3,500 and $10,000 when factoring in recruiting expenses, basic onboarding, and lost productivity during position vacancies according to workforce management studies. For mid-market and enterprise retailers suffering from 60% annual churn, these talent acquisition friction points translate into millions of dollars in eroded gross margin. The ability to deploy automated semantic sourcing and instant pre-screening represents a strategic necessity to protect operational continuity and profit margins.
CEO Vision
The measurable ROI delivered for EnsembleIQ reflects a broader market trend across frontline and retail-adjacent industries in North America. Industry leaders such as Restaurant Technologies Inc. (RTI) – one of the largest technology and service providers in the retail and foodservice space – alongside organizations like Alliance Building Services, Arc Health, and W3 Insurance, are deploying HireQuotient to streamline their high-volume and specialized talent acquisition.
Commenting on the market traction and the strategic integration with Paylocity, Smarthveer Sidana, Founder & CEO of HireQuotient said,
“We are thrilled to solve the persistent challenges of frontline and specialized hiring across North America. Seeing enterprise leaders in retail and media achieve extraordinary efficiency – such as closing roles 65% faster while saving 70% of manual effort – validates the transformative impact of EasySource. As we expand our footprint and deepen our presence through Paylocity’s customer base, we are excited to bring this agentic recruitment capability to thousands of frontline employers, helping them automate hiring, cut direct costs, and secure exceptional talent.”
About HireQuotient
HireQuotient is an enterprise AI HR technology company building autonomous HR solutions. Its flagship platform, EasySource, acts as an AI co-pilot for recruitment teams, automating candidate discovery, credential verification across state license repositories, multi-channel engagement via voice, text, email, and does everything until onboarding. The startup specializes in frontline industries, including but not limited to healthcare, building services, construction, manufacturing, insurance, retail.
Contact
Communications Manager
Kunal Agrawal
HireQuotient
[email protected]
A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/035fb47f-01f6-4fcc-875f-f6b9308b63b5
