How Ulta Beauty Achieved Nationwide I-9 Compliance

ULTA BEAUTY BACKGROUND
Headquartered in Bolingbrook, Illinois, Ulta Beauty is the largest beauty retailer in the U.S., operating out of 1,300+ stores across all 50 states. With over 25,000 products from more than 600 established and up-and-coming brands — including the Ulta Beauty Collection (its private label) — the company’s one-of-kind assortment of cosmetics, fragrances, skin and hair products, and salon services has earned the American beauty retailer countless recognitions. The most recent acknowledgments (2021) include: Forbes Best Large Employers; Forbes Best Employers for Diversity; Forbes Best Employers for Women; Diversity Inc. Noteworthy Companies for Diversity; Fast Company Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Retail.

THE CHALLENGE

A manual process that couldn’t scale

Ulta Beauty is the largest beauty retailer in the U.S. But its I-9 compliance process was almost entirely manual — and growing unsustainable.

Key pain points:

• No ATS Integration — When Ulta adopted a new Applicant Tracking System, they needed I-9 management to connect seamlessly, eliminating duplicative entry and compliance gaps.
• Time-Consuming Re-verification — The company regularly re-verifies many temporary authorized associates, making manual I-9 tracking tedious and prone to error at scale.
• No Centralized Visibility — With 1,300+ locations and a lean HR Compliance team, there was no simple way to track compliance status, generate reports, or prioritize improvements.
• Outdated I-9 Accumulation — Thousands of I-9 forms had outlived their retention period with no automated way to identify and purge them, creating unnecessary legal risk.

THE SOLUTION

Four reasons Ulta Beauty chose Tracker I-9

Deployed in 2020, Tracker I-9 stood out across four critical dimensions.

1. Easy-to-Use, Intuitive Features
Tracker’s automated purge report allowed Ulta Beauty to identify and eliminate outdated I-9s in bulk — replacing a task that previously required hunting down forms one by one.

2. Centralized Visibility Dashboard
A single real-time dashboard lets HR Compliance managers monitor activity across all 1,300+ stores — checking case status, guiding hiring managers, and taking informed next steps.

3. Configurable Interface
When Ulta discovered that manually entered start dates were generating false compliance violations, they configured Tracker to automatically flag and correct nearly 1,000 I-9s per month.

4. Hands-On, Direct Support
Rather than a tiered help desk, Ulta Beauty got a dedicated contact who understood their business — providing real-time answers to both minor and major questions.

THE RESULTS

Compliance that runs itself

By integrating Mitratech I-9 with its ATS, Ulta Beauty transformed I-9 compliance from a constant burden into a seamless, largely automated workflow.

Whenever information is updated in the employee system, data is instantly fed to Mitratech I-9, creating a digital audit trail of key information.

Automatically captured updates include:

• Change in General (Store) Manager
• Employee email address update
• Hiring manager location change
• Multi-store access requests

ACERCA DE MITRATECH

The compliance partner built for scale

Mitratech es un socio tecnológico global de probada eficacia para los profesionales de los ámbitos jurídico, de riesgos y cumplimiento normativo, y de recursos humanos que buscan maximizar la productividad, controlar los gastos y mitigar los riesgos mediante la profundización de la alineación operativa, el aumento de la visibilidad y el fomento de la colaboración en toda su organización.

With Mitratech’s proven portfolio of end-to-end solutions, organizations worldwide are able to implement best practices and standardize processes across all lines of business to manage risk and ensure business continuity.