From Wastage to Worth: Why Retail and Hospitality’s Smartest Hires Are Already in the Database
Walk into any retailer or hospitality group and you’ll find the same paradox. Hiring never stops — new vacancies open weekly — yet the systems holding years of candidate data are rarely used. For most employers, it’s quicker to post another advert than to look at the people who already applied.
Across the sector, that habit has created a quiet inefficiency. The average mid-to-large employer fills only one to three percent of roles from existing candidate databases. The other ninety-plus percent are sourced and screened all over again, even though the talent is already sitting in their ATS.
It isn’t laziness — it’s logistics. Data in most systems isn’t structured or searchable in a meaningful way. Recruiters don’t have the time or tools to make sense of it, and the process isn’t automated. So teams default to the quickest option: advertise, review, reject, repeat.
At Levlr, we’ve been looking closely at what happens when that cycle breaks. When employers start treating their historical candidate data as a live resource — enriched, re-engaged, and automated — the results shift fast.
The early data
Across early adopters, we’re seeing around 20% of dormant candidates reactivated within the first few months. Between two and ten percent of those re-engaged candidates go on to apply for new roles, and around twenty percent of those applications progress to interview or assessment.
That doesn’t sound dramatic until you scale it. Take a typical mid-sized retailer or hospitality brand with twenty to fifty live vacancies at any one time — roughly five hundred hires a year. If just ten percent of those hires came from reactivated candidates, that’s fifty people hired faster and more efficiently than before.
The ripple effect is tangible:
Around £50,000 saved annually in attraction spend
500 recruiter days freed up to focus on engagement and retention
Average time-to-hire reduced by ten days
Retention uplift of around ten percent among rehired candidates
Those fifty hires alone can change the rhythm of a recruitment team. Shorter cycles, lower cost per hire, and people who already know the brand and the environment they’re joining.
The road to forty percent
We often talk about a future where forty percent of vacancies can be filled directly from existing databases. Is that realistic? Over time, yes — but it’s a journey, not a switch.
In year one, a ten-to-fifteen percent database fill rate is achievable with automation and enrichment. Within two to three years, as data quality improves and behaviour-based matching matures, that can climb to twenty-five or thirty percent. Forty percent becomes realistic once the system truly learns from every application.
Even getting to ten percent matters. That’s where the economics of hiring start to change — and where the candidate experience improves most visibly.
Better for candidates, too
The people behind those applications don’t disappear. They’re often motivated, experienced, and still interested — they just weren’t matched with the right role at the right time. Reactivating them means fewer “thank you but no” emails and more second chances. It turns recruitment into an ongoing conversation rather than a one-off rejection.
For candidates, that feels fairer. For employers, it builds a stronger reputation and a warmer talent community.
A smarter use of advertising
When the database begins to deliver, advertising can shift from firefighting to strategy. Instead of chasing volume, employers can focus their spend on genuine skill gaps or future roles — bringing in new capability rather than repeating the same hires.
Recruitment becomes less reactive and more about balance: using automation to rediscover what’s already there while staying open to the skills of tomorrow.
From rejection to rediscovery
The retail and hospitality sectors thrive on people — adaptable, customer-focused, quick to learn. Those people are already applying; the data just isn’t being used to its potential.
Turning ninety-eight percent wastage into purpose and profit isn’t about squeezing candidates harder. It’s about recognising that talent doesn’t vanish when an application is declined — it just goes dormant until someone looks again.
When that happens, hiring stops being an endless search and starts becoming a cycle of rediscovery. And that’s when forty percent stops sounding ambitious and starts sounding inevitable.
