Following the January 2026 launch of Bowy, time-to-hire across Hunkemöller’s Dutch store network dropped from 18 days to 4 days, compared with a retail industry average of 24.6 days cited from DHI Hiring Indicators. Game-based assessment completion rose above 80%, replacing a video format with markedly lower completion rates. Daphne Koning-Olde Dubbelink, Global Recruitment & Employer Branding Manager at Hunkemöller, called speed “the biggest operational win” and added: “But it’s speed without compromising quality. We’re giving time back to our teams so they can focus on their people.”
According to the case study, Hunkemöller, Europe’s leading lingerie brand with 900+ stores across 19 countries, had seen video assessment completion rates decline for years because more candidates were not comfortable recording themselves. Store managers absorbed the fallout by manually screening CVs, chasing candidates for availability, coordinating interview slots across calendars and keeping communication organised across email, WhatsApp and their ATS at the same time. The company set out to rebuild the whole candidate journey for its 180+ stores in the Netherlands.
Koning-Olde Dubbelink described the old process this way: “Our old process created friction,” and “Candidates no longer felt comfortable with the video assessments, and many simply didn’t complete them.”
Bowy is Hunkemöller’s AI recruiter, powered by Scotty AI’s orchestration platform. The moment someone applies on the Hunkemöller career site, Bowy sends a WhatsApp message, then handles initial outreach and pre-screens the candidate through a natural language conversation by text or voice. Equalture’s game-based assessments replace the one-way video recording; success profiles are built by letting existing top performers play the games first, so the matching criteria reflect what predicts strong performance in a specific retail role. Once the assessment is complete, Bowy takes the results, updates Workday in real time, schedules the interview in sync with Outlook calendars, sends reminders and handles rescheduling.
Rianne Jellema, Head of Customer Success at Scotty AI, said: “In high-volume retail, the challenge isn’t just the conversation, it’s the operations behind it. Systems often don’t talk to each other, and store managers don’t have time to chase candidates. Scotty AI enables Bowy to not just chat, but to act: syncing with calendars and systems of record to keep the process moving end-to-end.”
Bowy engages candidates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week across the 180+ Dutch stores. The source says the platform is built for multi-location deployment and that the architecture is designed to scale beyond the initial market.
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