How Safelite reduced unfilled vacancies by 30,870 days annually in hard-to-fill roles

Some roles are notoriously hard to recruit. Not because the talent isn’t out there, but because what candidates think the job is… and what it actually is? Two very different things. This is especially true for operational roles like warehouse operatives, field technicians, contact centre agents, and carers, where high turnover is often viewed as inevitable but it doesn’t need to be.

ThriveMap’s Realistic Job Assessments (RJAs) bridge that gap by giving candidates an immersive preview of the role while helping employers pinpoint best-fit hires. The result? Fewer vanishing acts. Faster hiring. Better retention. Happier ops teams.

Want proof? See how Safelite and Wincanton rewired their frontline hiring with RJAs; cutting no-shows, slashing attrition, and making hiring way more profitable.

What is a hard-to-fill role?

If you’re experiencing any of the following challenges:

Candidates drop out before or shortly after starting

You’re continually re-hiring for the same roles multiple times a year

Unfilled vacancies despite hiring efforts

… it’s likely you’re hiring for a hard-to-fill role. These roles often get stuck in a costly cycle of re-advertising, rushed hiring, and early attrition, draining time, budget, and morale.

These roles often appear in industries like logistics, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and other customer service roles. But what makes them truly hard to fill is a mismatch between business needs, role demands, and candidate expectations.

Fixing the issue: Safelite’s hiring transformation

Safelite, a leading auto glass repair service in the USA, faced a significant challenge: high turnover and prolonged vacancies in technician roles. Despite high hiring volumes, many candidates left within weeks: highlighting a gap in candidate expectations.

To address this, Safelite partnered with ThriveMap to implement Realistic Job Assessments – customised pre-hire tools that simulate a ‘day in the life’ while evaluating candidate fit.

Candidates responded favourably to the assessment, with 91% expressing that it enhanced their overall hiring experience. The commercial impact? 30,870 fewer days of unfilled vacancies each year.

“ThriveMap is a total game changer. We needed a tool that assisted us with our entire recruitment process, from selecting people that met desired behaviours to fully supporting the hiring managers so that they could recruit with confidence,” said Abby Zimmerman, Talent Acquisition at Safelite.

This approach led to:

• $1.1 million in cost savings through reduced attrition
• 60% increase in new hire diversity
• 34% reduction in time to hire  

How Wincanton’s reduced time-to-hire by 90% in their hard-to-fill roles

Wincanton, one of the UK’s largest logistics firms, faced similar challenges in hiring warehouse operatives. Candidates often left soon after starting because the job looked one way on paper and felt completely different in reality.

Wincanton tackled its hard-to-fill hiring challenges by introducing immersive, Realistic Job Assessments (RJAs) that aligned candidate expectations with the realities of the role. These assessments brought the job to life, resulting in significant improvements across key hiring metrics:

• 📈 50% increase in top-of-funnel candidate conversion through better engagement and clarity upfront.
• 🎯 150% increase in job offers from the same talent pool, enabled by automated scoring and faster decision-making.
• 🌟 91% of candidates rated the experience positively, with 9% neutral and 0% negative feedback — a clear indicator of improved candidate experience.
• ⚡ Time to offer reduced by 96%, from up to four weeks down to just 24 hours, driven by real-time assessment insights.

“Our pre-hire assessment has completely changed our approach to engaging with candidates. It provides them with early insight into the role expectations with the ‘day in the life’ videos and immersive job-relevant questions. It also provides line managers with robust, unbiased hiring decisions with minimal time invested. We’ve demonstrated the link between using the assessment and retaining new hires in their first 6 months, saving significant cost.” said Jo Pick, People Director at Wincanton.

Predictive, immersive hiring for hard-to-fill roles: Use Realistic Job Assessments

Realistic Job Assessments are customised digital assessments that simulate a “day in the life” of the role while testing candidate fit.

These assessments:

• Set clear expectations: Candidates see what the job actually involves: shifts, decisions, priorities, before they accept.
• Measure performance: Built-in assessments evaluate whether they can handle the demands and make good decisions.
• Support better decisions: Hiring managers receive a data-backed view of who is most likely to succeed.

By focusing on how someone responds to the actual demands of the job, not where they’ve worked before, you open up talent pools and reduce unconscious bias.

ThriveMap assessments are built to level the playing field:

• Every candidate sees the same experience
• Evaluations are role-specific, not generic
• Judgments are based on behaviour and situational fit, not CV filters

This is how you build diversity without compromising quality.

Want to fix hiring for your hard-to-fill roles?

ThriveMap helps you create role-specific, Realistic Job Assessments that help to give candidates realistic expectations of the job – ideal for hiring hard-to-fill roles in any industry.

Whether you’re hiring at scale, we’ll help you:

• Set accurate job expectations
• Improve diversity and fairness
• Identify best-fit hires faster
• Cut recruitment waste 

See how it works.

Get a demo or create your account and start building your first smart assessment today: thrivemap.io/get-started-now