Scaling a multi-site seasonal hiring programme for a growing UK retailer

A multi-site UK retailer needed to staff store teams across dozens of locations ahead of a seasonal peak, without its small in-house recruitment team being overwhelmed or quality slipping at any one site. The business turned to Alliance to run the seasonal hiring as a single RPO programme.

Hiring at pace across many sites at once carries its own pressures, and this brief had three in particular:

• Volume: hiring demand spiked sharply across many sites at once, all needing to be staffed before the peak hit.
• Consistency: the in-house team couldn’t screen every candidate to the same standard at that volume.
• Speed: store managers needed people in post fast, not weeks into the peak.

Alliance ran the retailer’s seasonal hiring as an RPO programme, sourcing and screening every candidate to one consistent standard regardless of which store or region they were hiring for.

The same four-step process we use for every Alliance RPO programme applied here — brief us, we search, you interview a shortlist, you hire — giving the retailer’s HR team one point of accountability instead of coordinating separate recruiters across sites, and flexing in scale as demand at each site became clearer.

• Store teams reached full headcount in time for the seasonal peak.
• Time-to-hire fell within Alliance’s typical RPO range of 40–70% faster.
• One screening standard held across every site instead of inconsistent results from juggling multiple agencies.

This is a representative scenario, not a named case study. Client details are withheld to protect confidentiality.