Best Applicant Tracking System for Retail
One ATS. All your hiring. From head office to shop floor.
Whether you're staffing up for peak seasons or filling specialized roles, Pinpoint provides the flexibility, control, and ease of use to streamline your retail recruitment process.
The ATS of choice for leading retailers
Retail recruitment in 2026 presents unique challenges
- Holiday hiring continues to slow: Seasonal retail roles in 2025 dropped sharply, with some markets reporting declines of up to 40%
- Retail vacancies hit decade-low levels: Retail vacancies fell to around 94,000, and the sector shed roughly 200,000 jobs through 2025
- Labour costs continue rising: Average retail wages increased more than 7% year-on-year, despite reduced headcount
- Time-to-hire is getting longer: Average time-to-hire has stretched to around eight weeks, driven by tighter budgets and higher applicant volume
- AI adoption accelerating: Retailers increasingly rely on automation to offset labour shortages and improve productivity
- Shift away from part-time/student labour: Up to 160,000 part-time roles could disappear over the next three years, pushing retailers to focus on more stable, full-time hiring models
Why retailers choose Pinpoint
Built for volume and agility
Retail recruiters need to move fast across high-volume roles and constantly changing staffing demands.
Pinpoint lets teams build role-specific workflows that keep every hire moving quickly, with clear steps and fewer manual handoffs.
One platform for every hire
Head office roles, retail store managers, warehouse staff—they all need different processes.
Pinpoint supports all your different workflows in one place, without workarounds or separate tools.
Retail-friendly candidate experience
Many retail candidates apply on mobile, and a clunky experience costs you talent.
Pinpoint’s mobile-first careers pages, with QR code access and no-login application flow, reduce drop-off and lift application volume.
Bring back your best seasonal staff
Seasonal hiring is unpredictable and time-sensitive, and great temporary staff can be hard to re-engage.
Pinpoint’s talent pools and CRM tools make it easy to tag, organise, and re-engage previous seasonal hires. Reach out with personalised messages and fill roles faster during peak periods.
Automation that saves hours
Retail teams lose time to repetitive tasks across multiple stores and locations.
Pinpoint automates candidate screening, interview scheduling, and bulk messaging - and uses AI to highlight the most relevant candidates, helping teams stay fast and efficient across all locations.
Onboarding that's not an afterthought
Retail onboarding can be challenging: store managers are rushed, steps get missed, and mandatory checks and training slip through the cracks.
Pinpoint streamlines retail onboarding with automated checklists, compliance steps, welcome messages, and store-specific tasks. Every new hire gets what they need, and nothing gets missed.
Pinpoint has brought a whole new level of efficiency to the team. Nothing’s getting missed. No candidates are being left to wait.
All your retail hiring, one powerful platform
From planning to onboarding, Pinpoint brings every part of the hiring process—and every stakeholder—into one place, so you can move faster, stay in control, and make smarter decisions.
Plan
Get less reactive and more proactive
- Position Management
- Job Requisition Management
- Reporting
Attract
Reach the right candidates, wherever they are
- AI Chatbot
- Branded Careers Website
- Job Board Advertising Software
- Employee Referral Software
- Recruitment Agency Portal
- Online Application Forms
- Sourcing Extension
- Multilingual Candidate Experience
Engage
Create a great experience for today’s candidates—and tomorrow’s
- Automations
- Talent Pool Software
- Candidate Profiles
- Candidate Communication Management
- Multilingual Candidate Experience
- Candidate Experience Surveys
Select
Bring every part of the selection process into the ATS for better decisions, faster
- Reference checks
- AI Custom Fields
- Interview Scheduling Software
- Video Interviewing
- Blind Recruitment Software
- Candidate Scorecards
- Offer Management Software
- Team Collaboration
- Hiring Workflow Management Software
Onboard
Personalize new hire onboarding at scale, with less admin
- Employee Onboarding
Built for how retail hires
How would I summarize Pinpoint in one sentence? Game changer.
We saw lots of ATS examples, and Pinpoint was our favorite from the beginning. We needed something so user-friendly that everyone in the business could use it.
No ATS is going to tick every box, so prioritize what matters to you. For us, it was candidate experience and making the process as easy as possible.
See why retailers choose Pinpoint as their ATS
Award-winning and highly rated
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Frequently asked questions by retail TA teams
What is the best applicant tracking system for retail?
The best applicant tracking systems for retail are those that support high-volume hiring, multi-location teams, seasonal surges, and mobile-first candidates. Based on independent review data and retail-specific capabilities, the top options include:
Pinpoint:
Pinpoint is built for mid-sized and enterprise retailers, and supports multi-site recruitment, fast screening, and retail-friendly candidate experiences, with automation that reduces manual work across stores, warehouses, and head office.
Workable:
Workable offers simple tools, fast deployment, and wide distribution to major job boards, making it a common choice for small or budget-conscious teams.
Teamtailor:
Teamtailor is used by retailers who prioritise candidate engagement tools, particularly for early-career or customer-facing roles.
Jobtrain:
Jobtrain offers accessible workflows, making it a fit for retailers that want a straightforward, easy-to-use system without much need for customisation.
Each platform serves different types of retail organisations, but retailers hiring across multiple stores or regions typically benefit most from an ATS that can manage high applicant volume, automate repetitive tasks, and deliver a mobile-friendly candidate experience, like Pinpoint.
What features should a retail applicant tracking system include?
A retail applicant tracking system should support the fast pace and high volume of store-level and head-office hiring. The most important features include:
High-volume job posting and sourcing
Tools to publish roles across major job boards, social channels, and retail-specific boards in one click, so teams can reach large candidate pools quickly.
Mobile-first applications
Retail applicants often apply on their phones, so a no-login, mobile-friendly experience is essential to keeping conversion rates high.
Automated screening and scheduling
Automation for filtering applications, sending assessments, and booking interviews helps reduce manual workload and fill roles faster.
Multi-location workflow management
Support for different hiring processes across stores, regions, and head office – while keeping everything aligned in one system.
Talent pools for seasonal hiring
Built-in CRM tools to tag, organise, and re-engage past seasonal staff, former applicants, and silver medallists ahead of peak seasons.
AI-powered assistance
Features like skills extraction, job description matching, and AI-assisted summaries help teams sift large volumes of applications without sacrificing quality or fairness.
User-friendly hiring manager tools
Store managers need simple, intuitive portals so they can review candidates, schedule interviews, and keep processes moving without extra admin.
Integrated onboarding
Automated right-to-work checks, welcome emails, checklists, and task management help reduce no-shows and speed up time-to-productivity.
Retail hiring brings volume, seasonality, and multi-location complexity. With the right features and capabilities, retail applicant tracking systems like Pinpoint can handle the challenges while delivering a great candidate experience.
How can an ATS help with seasonal hiring?
The right ATS helps retail teams manage seasonal hiring by automating the high-volume tasks that slow recruiters down. Instead of manually screening hundreds of applicants, chasing interview availability, or rebuilding a candidate pool every year, an ATS centralises the entire workflow.
The best ATS for seasonal hiring will:
- Build and reuse talent pools of past seasonal staff, silver medalists, and applicants who showed interest in previous peak periods.
- Automate early screening, using knockout questions, filters, or AI-assisted matching to shortlist qualified candidates fast.
- Speed up interview scheduling by letting candidates choose a slot based on live team calendars—reducing drop-off and back-and-forth communication.
- Send bulk updates and reminders, keeping large candidate groups informed without extra manual effort.
- Standardise workflows across all locations, ensuring stores follow the same fast, consistent process.
Pinpoint adds further support with built-in automation, talent pooling tools, and retail-friendly features that help teams fill seasonal roles quickly, without sacrificing candidate experience or overwhelming store managers.
Can an ATS manage multiple store locations?
Yes, many modern applicant tracking systems can support hiring across multiple store locations, but the level of flexibility varies widely. A retail-focused ATS should give you the option to centralize hiring from head office or decentralize it so individual stores can run their own processes—without losing visibility or control.
A strong multi-location ATS typically includes:
- Location-specific workflows so each store can follow processes tailored to their roles, hiring speed, and staffing needs.
- Flexible permissions, giving store managers access only to the candidates and vacancies relevant to their location—while protecting sensitive data.
- Central or distributed reporting, so people teams can monitor performance across regions, brands, or store groups, regardless of how hiring is structured.
- Consistent job posting and branding, ensuring accuracy across every store.
- Shared talent pools, allowing strong candidates to be considered across multiple locations when needed.
Pinpoint supports centralized and decentralized retail hiring with configurable workflows, granular permissions, and unified reporting—so every store can move quickly while your recruitment team stays in control.
Is Pinpoint suitable for both head office and store-level recruiting?
Yes. Pinpoint is designed to support both corporate hiring and high-volume store-level retail recruitment within a single platform.
Retail organisations often need different hiring processes for head office roles (e.g., finance, buying, HR) and frontline positions (e.g., store associates, supervisors, warehouse staff). Pinpoint allows talent teams to manage both without separate systems or manual workarounds.
Pinpoint supports both hiring environments through:
- Configurable workflows that adapt to the needs of different role types, from specialist corporate hires to rapid store-level recruitment.
- Granular permissions, ensuring store managers only see the candidates and vacancies relevant to their location while head office retains full oversight.
- Easy-to-use hiring manager tools, enabling busy store teams to review candidates, schedule interviews, and leave feedback without training overhead.
- Centralised reporting, giving people teams visibility into hiring performance across regions, stores, and departments.
- Automation and AI tools that reduce admin for both head office recruiters and store managers.
For retailers hiring at both ends of the organisation, Pinpoint offers the control head office needs and the simplicity store teams depend on.