Pandora sells more than 112 million pieces of jewelry a year, roughly three per second. Keeping the people who sell them has been the harder problem. Byron Clayton, the company’s chief people and planet officer, shared the big number attached to solving this problem. He said it’s worth 200 million euros in measurable value, already embedded in the P&L, with attrition representing 75% of that target.
Start with the store manager
Most companies struggling with retail attrition start by looking at the candidate. Pandora started by considering the store manager, and that decision, Clayton said, changed everything.
“The store manager is the most important role in our value chain,” the company’s chief people and planet officer told attendees during his keynote at HR Tech Europe 2026, held in Amsterdam this month.
A survey of 2,000 store managers revealed that 30% of non-selling time was spent on people administration. Recruitment alone was consuming 12 hours per week per manager. While these employees are essential for the company’s success, Clayton said, “they were being consumed by people administration.”
A proposed solution was to remove the store manager from the hiring process entirely and let recruiters make job offers, but Clayton said this wasn’t the right direction. “Effectively to make a really bad process super efficient with no ownership,” he said. “This was a recipe for disaster.”
The fix required being precise about the real problem. Pandora wasn’t struggling to attract candidates, because the brand is strong and applications flow in. The issue was overwhelmed managers making decisions from unmanageable applicant pools.
How hiring tech reduced attrition
Pandora built its answer around a virtual recruitment assistant called Olivia, developed with AI recruitment platform Paradox, and layered in predictive candidate assessment technology from Harver. “Bringing two different, unique pieces of technology together is what created the right solution to meet Pandora’s needs,” said Clayton. “It’s improving the experience for the manager, but also for the candidate.”
Paradox handles the operational load, including screening, scheduling, onboarding documents and 24/7 candidate communication. Harver brought predictive fit modeling grounded in data from 500 of Pandora’s own top-performing store associates.
The profile that emerged surprised the team. In the U.K., for example, some of their strongest performers had backgrounds in food and beverage or the National Health Service, not competing retail chains. “We had some real aha moments,” Clayton said. “The traditional candidate pool is not the right one.”
Today, Olivia is live now in the United States, Canada, the U.K. and Ireland, with 20 more countries lined up. About 75% of applicants are screened out automatically before a manager steps in for the interview and the final hiring decisions.
The impact on the business
The new approach garnered serious business outcomes. Recruitment administration fell 64%. Time to hire dropped from 38 days to 15. During Q4, the critical six-week window when 40% of Pandora’s annual business occurs, the company can move from application to start date in under five days. Attrition fell 25%. Candidate satisfaction reached 9.7 out of 10.
Additionally, sales per labor hour increased 4%, a metric Clayton’s team quantified as $35 million in additional value in the U.S. alone. “We have become magicians,” Clayton said. “We are creating time.”
In an exclusive interview with HR Executive after the keynote, Clayton shared further about what he calls “the deal.” Pandora has moved away from the implicit employment contract toward an explicit one, particularly around mobility.
“So, I think in the new world of work, employability becomes a much different thing,” he said. “We’ve stopped talking about career paths, and we’ve started talking about careers.”
If a store associate wants a genuine career path at Pandora, the company will invest heavily in their development. In return, they agree to be open to future opportunities. For associates who are students or using the role as supplemental income, the conversation is different but equally direct. Clarity on both sides, he said, is where retention actually begins. It also determines where Pandora directs its development investment.
So, what comes next for Pandora? “We are scaling digital leadership development. We’re investing in internal mobility. We’re introducing AI-enabled scheduling,” says Clayton. “And we’re using technology to improve decisions in the employee lifecycle. But most importantly, we’re keeping our teams focused on creating value, beginning with the customer.”
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