In high-volume retail hiring, a 40% attrition rate might be written off as industry standard. Andrew Porter, Group Resourcing Director at Entain, refused to accept that.
When Andrew joined Entain, the retail resourcing team was processing close to 163,000 applications a year to fill around 5,000 roles… with a team of seven people. On the surface, the operation ran.
But underneath, a relentless churn of hiring, onboarding, and replacing was quietly draining the business. Some roles were being filled two or three times a year. Shop managers – already juggling solo-staffed stores, regulatory compliance, and the emotional complexity of a betting shop environment – were spending enormous amounts of time inducting people who wouldn't last.
The root cause was a hiring process built on CVs. For roles that required no industry experience, where the minimum age of 18 meant most applicants had little professional history to speak of, the CV told you almost nothing about whether someone could handle a complex, regulated, customer-facing environment. It filtered for familiarity, not potential. And with 163,000 applications flooding in from anyone searching for a retail job, the team was buried — wading through an endless mountain of applications with no meaningful signal to guide them.
Entain's retail arm is not a typical high-street shop. Colleagues handle significant amounts of cash, operate under the scrutiny of the Gambling Commission, and are often required to intervene sensitively with customers showing signs of problematic gambling. Some shops are solo-staffed. The behaviours needed — influencing, adapting, organising, processing — aren't things a CV can reveal, particularly in an 18-year-old applying for their first proper role.
Andrew knew the process had to change. But with a small team, a heavily regulated environment, and a simultaneous global ATS migration to manage, the solution had to be something that could work at real scale — consistently, quickly, and without alienating the shop managers who depended on it.
"I failed to understand in any other industry where a tool that's been around five or six hundred years is still deployed today... you can't possibly screen 162,000 CVs. It's meaningless." — Andrew Porter, Group Resourcing Director, Entain
Entain needed a new front end to their hiring process that would do what CVs couldn't: identify candidates with the right behaviours for complex, regulated retail roles; at a scale of tens of thousands of applications, with a team of seven people.
Specifically, they needed to:
The solution also had to work for shop managers. Giving them confidence in the process and the tools to carry it through in person, without being left to interpret it alone.
Before changing anything, Andrew did something that turned out to be critical: he went to the shops.
Within his first six months at Entain, he visited three stores in his local area — two different brands, different setups, different staffing models — to understand at first hand what the role actually demanded. That immersion shaped everything that followed. The insight from the shopfloor was then blended with the expertise of Arctic Shores' business psychologists, who worked closely with Entain's retail teams and people partners to define what great performance actually looked like in a betting shop environment.
The result was a task-based psychometric assessment — configured around the five behavioural traits identified as most predictive of success in Entain's retail roles: interacting, influencing, adapting, organising, and processing.
Crucially, unlike traditional question-based aptitude tests, Arctic Shores' neuroscience-based tasks assess how candidates naturally think and behave — not what they've been trained to say. That distinction matters enormously in a role where the ability to handle a difficult customer conversation, prioritise under pressure, or stay composed in a solo environment can't be faked.
The assessment, taking around 30 minutes, replaced CV screening and telephone sifting as the first step in the hiring journey. Candidates who completed it received feedback; hiring managers received a comprehensive report. The process integrated directly with Entain's new ATS, ensuring results were available within normal workflows without adding friction for recruiters or store managers.
Entain's candidate journey now looks like this:
Apply > Arctic Shores assessment > Recruiter discussion > In-store interview > Outcome
The in-store interview itself was also remodelled — rebuilt around structured, evidence-based scoring tied to behavioural criteria, with mandatory hiring manager training, weekly drop-in "pit stops" for ongoing support, and dedicated recruitment guides available in every store.
The change management piece was handled just as carefully as the technology. There was scepticism — removing the CV feels like removing a comfort blanket, and not every hiring manager hires often enough to feel confident in a new format. Entain addressed this through relentless communication, regular check-ins, and a hiring manager of the month programme that celebrated those who embraced the new approach and delivered great results through it.
"I think what we're looking for is the raw ingredients. We switched to a model where you prove to us that you have the right behaviours... and that's been a really big mindset shift for everybody." — Andrew Porter, Group Resourcing Director, Entain
The transformation of Entain's retail hiring process has delivered results across every dimension that matters: efficiency, quality, experience, and the bottom line.
Efficiency: an estimated 9,000 hours of screening time saved
By replacing CV sifting and telephone screening with the Arctic Shores assessment, Entain's seven-person team reclaimed an estimated 9,000 hours of screening time in a single year — time that previously disappeared into a process that yielded little signal.
Annual hires have fallen from around 5,000 to just over 3,000, not because there are fewer roles, but because the people being hired are staying longer.
Sourcing spend has dropped significantly too: with better quality candidates coming through and fewer vacancies to fill, Entain has been able to reduce its reliance on job boards — and the hundreds of thousands of pounds that went with them.
Quality: attrition cut from 40% to 25%
The most significant business outcome is the one most directly tied to hiring quality. Retail attrition at Entain has fallen from 40% to 25% — a reduction that, across a headcount of over 12,500, has a material impact on operational costs, shop manager workload, and commercial performance.
Unfilled vacancies affect opening hours, which affects revenue. Every person who stays longer is a person a shop manager doesn't have to recruit, train, and replace. Andrew is clear that this is a collaborative achievement — people partnering, onboarding, and management all play a role — but the hiring process is the starting point. You can't retain someone you shouldn't have hired.
Candidate experience: +53 NPS
Entain relaunched its candidate and hiring manager experience survey at the start of 2025, measuring satisfaction at every stage of the process. At the end of their first full year, candidate NPS stood at +53. To put that in context: anything above +20 is considered good, above +30 is very good, and above +50 is world-class.
"The experience from beginning to end was great. From the online tasks, to the people I spoke to and engaged with. Wonderful’’ — Entain Candidate
Hiring manager NPS came in at +36 — an excellent score for a harder audience to satisfy, and one that had been asked to give up the CV. That score is already trending upward.
‘’Overall, the new process is great, it’s a lot simpler and a much better experience for the candidates.’’ — Entain Hiring Manager
And the assessment completion rate among candidates tells its own story: 70–80% of those invited to take the Arctic Shores assessment complete it — a figure that surprised even Entain's team, and one that reflects both the quality of the experience and the self-selection effect of an engaging, behaviour-based process.
"Our candidate NPS at the end of last year was plus 53... that's world class. And for hiring managers it's plus 36. I couldn't be more happy and proud with that shift — it's six people plus a manager that delivers that experience consistently to every candidate and every hiring manager." — Andrew Porter, Group Resourcing Director, Entain
The retail transformation was always a proof of concept, not a destination. Having built the evidence base in one of the most complex hiring environments in UK&I retail, Entain is now extending the approach into its global Customer Care function — a business unit spanning multiple countries, with 15 different hiring processes that had never been harmonised.
The early results from that rollout are already echoing what happened in retail. A trial in India — a market with its own distinct challenges and application volumes — returned a 70%+ assessment completion rate and candidate satisfaction scores in the 90s. The model is translating.
Andrew's ambition goes further still. Entain is now exploring the use of task-based assessment for management roles in retail – a function that has never previously been assessed in this way – and looking at other entry-level roles across the wider business where the same principles apply.
The lesson from Entain's story is one that any TA leader managing high-volume hiring at scale should take seriously: the CV isn't just inefficient — it's actively misleading. When you replace it with a process built on behavioural science, designed around the real demands of the role, and supported through genuine change management, the results go far beyond a cleaner shortlist. They show up in attrition, in sourcing spend, in manager satisfaction, and in the experience of every candidate who walks through the door.
"If you're thinking about doing this, don't try to do a two and a half thousand shop retail network all in one go. Start with a proof of concept. Test and learn. Get the metrics. And then build from there." — Andrew Porter, Group Resourcing Director, Entain