Real-Time Visa Data Helps Make Rostering Easier Across Every 7-Eleven Location

→ The Challenge

Cameron Smith is the Safety and Wellbeing Chapter Lead and People Risk Product Owner at 7-Eleven Australia. His team oversees workforce compliance across 750+ stores and more than 9,300 employees. Approximately 6,300 of them hold temporary visas with conditions that must be tracked and are often subject to change.

For example, a student on a subclass 500 visa can usually only work 48 hours per fortnight while their course is in session. Most visas expire and can also be cancelled for non-compliance, visa conditions change depending on various circumstances, and subsequent visas are issued.

Without proper processes in place, a store manager building a roster has no way of knowing that the student they just scheduled failed to meet their study obligations and lost their right to work as a result. Multiply that by 6,300 visa holders and the complexity can feel unmanageable without a system built on automation to handle it.

Accessing additional hours above the 48-hour per fortnight cap requires collecting and verifying documentation to confirm course dates and status — a process that, done manually, consumes a lot of time for most organisations.

CheckWorkRights automates that verification, making it straightforward to access additional hours with confidence and without the manual overhead.

→ The Solution

Every new hire verified before they hit the schedule

When a new candidate reaches the screening stage in Paradox, Sev’s (Paradox’s AI hiring assistant) sends a secure CheckWorkRights link via SMS and runs a real-time VEVO visa check, as well as other relevant checks as needed. No login needed. The results push back into Paradox, Workday and through to UKG (7-Eleven’s downstream rostering system). If a new hire hasn’t satisfactorily completed the required checks, CheckWorkRights flags this in UKG, so that managers can’t roster them.

When CheckWorkRights identifies a student visa holder, it automatically requests the extra documentation they need to provide, like a Confirmation of Enrolment or relationship evidence, and captures a course commencement date, which is in most scenarios the earliest date they can legally start work. That information flows through to UKG.

With 300 new hires every month, every person enters the rostering system verified and ready to go. HR teams and store managers don’t need to manually track compliance details or rely on memory.

Part of why this works at scale is where the compliance logic lives. In most integration builds, IT teams program the rules around who can work, under what conditions, and for how many hours directly into the rostering system.

With CheckWorkRights, 7-Eleven’s rostering team doesn’t manage the rules, they just receive a status so that they can readily comply with those rules.

→ The Strategic Impact

Compliance managed by exception

The team now manages its rostering system without the unnecessary manual tasks involved.

“We can now concentrate on only the non-compliant cases that the system surfaces,” he says. “A key benefit of CheckWorkRights is that it just works in the background.”

“We know who doesn’t have a visa with work entitlement to start with, who does, and if there are any restrictions on hours.”

The store managers don’t see any of that detail, they just see who is available. Every shift is filled by someone who can legally work it.

For Deanne (People Platforms, Chapter Lead), a signal of success has been the drop off in support tickets for visa queries. She pulled up the numbers while we were talking. Before CheckWorkRights, right to work and VEVO queries were running at around 60% of all HR support tickets. Last month she looked at the same report and found 28 queries across a workforce of more than 9,300 people.

“We went from visa queries being one of our biggest support issues to barely registering,” Deanne said, “The difference has been night and day.”