Shoe Station Group Gave Its Store Managers Their Day Back With Fountain. Time to Hire Fell to 6 Days.

The 420-store footwear retailer moved requisitions, interview scheduling, and pipeline analysis onto Fountain, and now uses Cue by Fountain for reporting work its talent and management team once did by hand.

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Footwear retailer Shoe Station Group today said it has taken hiring administration off its store managers across more than 420 stores. The retailer runs its hiring on Fountain, software built for companies that hire at volume across hundreds of locations. Time to hire fell from about 14 days to 6, and applicant drop-off fell from roughly 60% to 35%.

"Our stores are the No. 1 driver of our business," said Rob Tant, manager of talent acquisition at Shoe Station Group. "Fountain has put a lot more time in the manager's day. It puts them back out on the sales floor."

Before Fountain, store managers ran hiring by hand. They scheduled their own interviews, conducted their own phone screens, and spent days trying to reach candidates. Requisitions now open automatically, and applicants reach store systems within minutes. Candidates book themselves an interview with the store manager, and an offer letter can follow within minutes.

What moved was the administration, not the judgment. Fountain is designed so the software handles the scheduling, the chasing, and the paperwork, while the manager still meets the candidate and still decides who joins the team. Managers are no longer tied to a desk to hire the people they need.

"Our managers aren't spending two, three days playing phone tag with candidates," Tant said. "Because Fountain was built with a mobile application in mind first, that's really put our stores in a position where they can communicate via text."

"Our time to hire was about 14 days," said Stacey Lloyd, senior manager, talent acquisition at Shoe Station Group. "When I looked at the metrics, we were down to 6 days. That's been tremendous."

The same shift, one layer up

The talent team had its own version of the same problem. The answers it needed were spread across reports that had to be pulled and read one at a time.

"Previously, we'd have to pull four or five different reports just to get to one thing that might lead to a solution," Tant said. "With Cue, I can quickly run a report that's going to suggest: ‘hey, here are the areas that have the biggest opportunities in your overall pipeline health.’"

Pipeline analysis is one of the jobs Shoe Station Group has entrusted to Cue. Cue does the work and brings back what it found. The hiring team decides what to act on.

"So many HR leaders I speak with want their managers more strategic and less operational," said Sean Behr, CEO of Fountain. "Almost none have been able to change what actually lands on a manager's desk. Faster software never did it, because speed leaves the work in the same place. What is different now is that the work itself moves. The manager approves instead of performing. Shoe Station Group's managers got their day back.”

Fountain runs hiring end to end for frontline employers, opening the requisition, communicating with applicants, scheduling interviews, and issuing the offer, with candidates able to move through it on a phone. Cue works across that whole process rather than alongside it; teams hand it work they would otherwise do by hand, and it does it.

About Shoe Station Group

Shoe Station Group, Inc. is one of the nation’s largest omnichannel family footwear retailers, offering a broad assortment of dress, casual and athletic footwear for men, women and children with emphasis on national name brands. As of August 12, 2026, the Company operated 422 stores in 35 states and Puerto Rico under its Shoe Carnival and Shoe Station banners and offers shopping at www.shoecarnival.com and www.shoestation.com. Headquartered in Fort Mill, SC, and with distribution and support operations located in Evansville, IN, Shoe Station Group, Inc. trades on The Nasdaq Stock Market LLC under the symbol SHOE.

Press releases and annual reports are available on the Company's website at investors.shoestationgroupinc.com.

About Fountain

Fountain is the AI-native platform for managing the global frontline workforce. Through Frontline Superintelligence, businesses can 10x their team, 10x their speed, and 10x their talent to unlock step-change efficiency and operational impact. Companies using Fountain today have processed millions of frontline hires globally, and early AI deployments are helping teams reduce hiring timelines by up to 30% while increasing candidate engagement rates significantly. Frontline Superintelligence is a multi-agent execution layer that coordinates autonomous workflows to transform workforce management into an active operating system.

With a modular architecture and consultant-level agents embedded directly into workflows, Fountain is reinventing how companies source, hire, and manage millions of workers across logistics, retail, restaurants, healthcare, and staffing. Instead of tracking workflows, Fountain runs them.