How Select Technology Group cut their time to hire by 83% across 50+ retail sites
TLWR summary: Managing hiring consistently across dozens of retail locations is hard enough without every site doing it differently. That’s exactly the position Select Technology Group found itself in: a fast-growing retail technology group with stores scattered across Ireland and the UK, each one recruiting in its own way, with no shared process to keep things consistent or under control.
Since bringing recruitment together under Cezanne Recruitment (then called Occupop), the group cut its time to hire from six weeks to just one, while saving tens of thousands of pounds and euros a year.
At a glance
- Location: Multiple locations across Ireland and the UK
- Industry: Retail technology and electrical
- Company size: over 650 employees across 50+ locations
- Average yearly hires: approx. 200
- HR team size: 3 members
- Results: 83% faster hiring, £25,000 annual savings on recruitment costs, 80% time saved on HR admin, 50% reduction in staff turnover.
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The challenge: fast growth, fragmented hiring
Select Technology Group is Irish-owned and operates a multi-channel portfolio connecting well-known technology brands with retail, business and education customers. Its Select stores handle Apple sales, service and repairs; Blink 24 operates as the group’s distribution arm; and DID brings over 55 years of experience in home appliance retail. With such a large presence, it comes as no surprise that the Group helps over 10 million customers every year… but that reach also brought its own challenges.
That scale is exactly what made recruitment such a headache for The Group. Every store was left to hire in its own way; with no shared process or oversight from head office. The result was inconsistency from site to site, hiring managers duplicating effort, and a recruitment process that couldn’t keep pace with a business adding new locations and hitting 4 million-plus customer interactions a year.
The numbers made the problem hard to ignore. On average, it was taking six weeks to fill a single vacancy, and with roughly 200 hires a year across the group, that was simply unsustainable. That considerable delay added up fast, both in lost productivity and in rising recruitment costs from agencies and job board spend.
Martine Samuel-Maher, who led HR at Select Technology Group, put it simply: “We needed to stop the madness. We needed something that wasn’t just a band-aid but a real, lasting solution.”
The solution: one process, every location
That’s where Cezanne Recruitment software came in, replacing a patchwork of site-by-site processes with a single, centralised recruitment software solution that gave hiring managers across every store the same tools and the same visibility, regardless of location.
Rather than each site running its own recruitment in isolation, Select now manages hiring through one shared dashboard. That’s meant CV review and interview scheduling can be delegated confidently to hiring managers on the ground, while HR retains oversight of what’s happening everywhere at once – a shift that mattered given the team responsible for HR and recruitment across the whole group numbers just three people.
If you’re keen to make cost and efficiency savings across your recruitment processes, check out our article: Cost-effective approaches to streamline recruitment and reduce hiring costs
The result: faster hiring, lower costs, better retention
The headline number is the time it now takes to hire. What used to take six weeks dropped to just one, an 83% reduction that’s let the business respond to staffing needs far faster than before. That speed hasn’t come at the expense of cost either:
- Ireland: over €15,000 saved annually on recruitment costs
- UK: over £10,000 saved annually in recruitment expenses
- Staff turnover in Ireland: halved, pointing to better-matched hires and stronger retention
- HR admin time: cut by 80%, from five days down to one day per recruitment cycle, freeing the HR team to focus on strategic work rather than paperwork
The centralised dashboard has also made it possible to manage recruitment consistently across every site, something that simply wasn’t achievable when each location was left to its own devices. On top of the efficiency gains, candidates have noticed the difference too: every applicant now receives timely, appropriate feedback, including those who weren’t successful, which has strengthened Select’s reputation as an employer in a competitive retail job market.
In their own words
“Cezanne Recruitment software* has been a game-changer for Select Technology Group. With our operations spread across Ireland and the UK, managing HR and recruitment efficiently was a challenge, especially with just one person at the helm until recently. Thanks to Cezanne Recruitment, we’ve streamlined our processes, delegating the review of CVs and the scheduling of interviews to our hiring managers. This has greatly enhanced the efficiency of our hiring process, allowing us to promptly respond to all applicants, including those not selected. Acknowledging every application is crucial for us, as everyone deserves a response. I can’t recommend Cezanne Recruitment highly enough.”
– Martine Samuel-Maher, Group People Operations Manager at Select Technology Group
* Originally calleds Occupop
Case study originally published in 2020.