Ulta Beauty

The Challenge: Before the Mitratech Makeover

A Manual Process Stretched Across the Country

Ulta Beauty’s I-9 process used to be almost entirely manual, and the scale of the business made every inefficiency compound.

• Manual re-verifications: The company re-verifies many temporary authorized associates on an ongoing basis, which made Form I-9 organization and tracking time-consuming and tedious.
• Decentralized data and limited visibility: With well over a thousand locations to oversee and a lean HR Compliance team, there was no central view of what was happening store to store.
• System incompatibility: When leaders selected a new Applicant Tracking System, they needed an I-9 management system that could integrate with it directly rather than sit alongside it.
• Insurmountable administrative burden: Day-to-day operations alone were enough to make process improvement feel out of reach. Identifying where compliance could improve, and deciding what to prioritize next, required data the team didn’t yet have.

The Solution: Building a Better Base, Integrated with the ATS

Four Differentiators That Made the Decision

When Ulta Beauty selected its Applicant Tracking System, Mitratech I-9 came recommended as a compliance integration, and it delivered what the retailer wanted in an end-to-end I-9 management platform. The team deployed Mitratech I-9 in 2020, and the decision came down to four differentiators:

1. Easy-to-use, intuitive features: Operating with a small but mighty HR Compliance team, Ulta Beauty needed a platform that was straightforward and proactive. The company had accumulated many I-9 forms that had outlived its retention policy with no simple way to find and remove them. Mitratech I-9’s purge report capability gave the team a simple way to locate and eliminate outdated I-9s, saving HR managers the time of tracking them down one by one.
2. Centralized visibility: Operating in all 50 states, Ulta Beauty needed real-time insight into every store. Tracker’s dashboard gave HR Compliance managers an easy way to assist General Managers with hiring, check case status, oversee compliance, and take informed next steps.
3. Configurable interface: The team discovered that when hiring managers entered a start date manually, it was sometimes recorded as the date the offer letter was presented, which is not how it should be captured in retail. Because it appeared the I-9 was not completed on day one, Ulta Beauty was seeing a high volume of I-9s out of compliance. They configured Mitratech I-9 to flag and update close to a thousand I-9s a month with incorrect start dates.
4. Hands-on support: Ulta Beauty didn’t want another help desk that would escalate requests through a tier system. The team wanted a direct point of contact who understood how the business works and what onboarding looks like at each location, which is the guided support Mitratech I-9 provided.

Long-Wear Results: Compliance That Runs in the Background

By integrating Mitratech I-9 directly into its ATS, Ulta Beauty turned I-9 management from a manual burden into a process that largely maintains itself.

A Live Digital Audit Trail Across Every Store

• Whenever information updates in the employee system, that data feeds instantly to Mitratech I-9, creating a digital audit trail of key information. Captured updates include a change in General (Store) Manager, an employee email address change, a hiring manager location change, and access requests spanning multiple stores.

Close to a Thousand I-9 Corrections a Month

• The configured start-date flagging process catches and updates close to a thousand I-9s per month that would previously have appeared out of compliance, correcting a systemic data-entry issue at scale rather than case by case.

Paper Stacks Replaced with Digital Records

• Mitratech I-9 replaced stacks of paper forms with digital I-9s, enabling advanced reporting, removing the risk that comes with manual I-9 management, and laying the groundwork for further process improvements. The HR Compliance team has recovered significant time and energy as a result.

Mitratech is the trusted HR technology partner to the world’s leading employers. More than one million customers rely on Mitratech’s HR-first, AI-powered platform to drive smarter hiring decisions, workforce compliance, and regulatory readiness across the HR function. From background screening and employment eligibility to applicant tracking, onboarding, and law monitoring and alerting, Mitratech combines intelligent automation with on-demand HR expert services so teams can move faster, stay compliant, and reduce risk at every stage of the employment lifecycle. 

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Learn more at https://mitratech.com/human-resources-compliance/.