In the retail industry, staffing, recruiting, and hiring can be thoroughly challenging. Creating an accountable, highly motivated team of the right personalities is beneficial for sales, but it can be tough to achieve. So what types of people do you want to look for, exactly? What should the interviews be like? What about after hiring, what should the onboarding process be like? Or how do you measure performance? These are some of the many questions that highlight just how difficult hiring in retail really is, and below we take a closer look. As an experienced talent sourcing agency, Canduit Connection strives to make your recruiting life easier from start to finish, and then some.
Conduct Unconventional Interviews
Think of the typical, stale, closed-office-door interview. Now don’t do that. Group interviews are a great way to mix things up with retail job seekers. When you have a group, you immediately create an environment for some of the stronger personalities to take charge and stand out. Another unconventional tactic is to walk the sales floor during the interview—see how comfortable they are interacting with people and the atmosphere. You want the job interview to be much more like a conversation than an interrogation. The retail industry thrives off of personability, customer service, and experience. Keep that in mind when devising your interview process.
Hire For Personality
Skills, industry knowledge, and how the business operates can all be learned. Personalities are innate. You want to find job seekers with the ideal attitude, and avoid spending excessive time and resources searching for the resume with the perfect background. An optimal retail employee will be patient, team-oriented, empathetic, passionate about the brand, good with people, and coachable. The rest you can teach.
Establish a Performance Rubric
In today’s job market, there are plenty of people to choose from, so be sure that you have a method of measuring performance in case your employees aren’t delivering. You need to establish an effective performance rubric to improve retention and preserve your brand. Spend some time developing rules of conduct, expectations, proper procedures, goals, some form of evaluation across the board, and perhaps even rewards. Retail employees perform much better in competitive environments and when given incentives.
Work With a Trusted Talent Sourcing Agency
To achieve optimal results, and properly navigate the challenges of hiring in retail, you may want to work with a trusted talent sourcing agency. You might not always have the time and resources to implement these strategies yourself, or filter through an abundance of applications from an overzealous job board. Not all retail businesses can afford an applicant tracking system (ATS) either. The right job placement agency can handle a lot of these things for you, significantly simplifying your retail hiring process. Staffing services from Canduit Connection offer a range of benefits, some of which are specifically tailored to the retail industry.
Simplified Talent Sourcing With Canduit Connection
Canduit Connection specializes in connecting targeted job seekers with employment opportunities in growing businesses with high labor turnover. We are dedicated to simplifying and streamlining the talent sourcing process to make hiring easy, affordable, and effective. Canduit Connection has transformed the modern recruiting experience to develop a people-focused approach that promotes lasting partnerships and long-term business growth. Contact us today to build a connection and take the next steps.