Recruiting top retail employees won’t increase your workforce quality

Top performers are the employees that produce more value than what they are paid. Conversely, a bottom performer will cost the company they work for more than what they can sell or contribute to the bottom line.

A goal with recruiting is often to find a way to duplicate the top performers in a business. It’s a logical goal as your top performers are the ones who will yield a higher ROI for your business. If you can somehow build an organization that is loaded with top performers, then your business is going to boom, right? However, this is often a difficult task that leaves Hiring Managers feeling that they are settling for a mediocre candidate that may not initially appear to rank in the top percentile.

Contrary to this belief, recruiting to duplicate the top percentage of your business is not necessarily a best practice. What really needs to happen is companies need to stop hiring the employees that cost the business more than what they earn. These bottom performers have a huge negative drain on an organization. Make incremental improvements to your workforce by replacing your bottom performers with individuals that will perform at a higher level. This will lead your organization to experience a positive uptick in your overall workforce quality.

How do I increase the quality of my workforce?

There are many ways to increase the quality of your workforce, but inevitably it starts with recruitment. If your organization is not sourcing the best candidates, comprehensively screening and interviewing them, and monitoring their progress, then your recruitment and onboarding process is not setting that employee up for success from the moment they apply.

There are 3 important elements to consider when hiring a new employee:

1. Candidate Sourcing – If you aren’t looking for candidates with a multi-pronged sourcing strategy, then you’re missing out on quality candidates. A help wanted sign and a basic job board posting is no longer enough attract a serious job seeker. Organizations should be taking advantage of strategies involving email campaigns, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, and social media, just to name a few.

2. Assess and Interview – Once your candidate sourcing engine is running, your efforts need to be focussed on assessing and interviewing your candidates.Mindfield’s internal statistics found that roughly 30% of all candidates are screened out during a behavioral assessment. This means that if you aren’t using an assessment tool, you’re wasting your time interviewing roughly one-third of the candidates who applied.When conducting phone interviews and in-person interviews, a standardized interview template and script is necessary. To establish a consistent set of interview criteria, the same questions need to be asked. This will allow you to monitor the progress of your process and adjust as you learn more about what the key requirements an employee at your organization must possess.

3. Hire and Review – Once you’ve interviewed your top candidates and selected your next employee, it is very important to record all data and insights that brought the candidate through your doors and eventually onto your payroll. Your recruitment progress will never advance if you can’t track where you’ve been, so accurate data will eventually be the key to improving your employee base.

About Mindfield

Mindfield is a Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) solutions provider that partners with companies to create powerful hourly workforces. Our solutions combine professional recruiters, simple to use technology and a data-driven hiring strategy that promises to improve the quality of your hourly workforce. This approach focuses on tying business outcomes such as sales performance, tenure, and engagement to the selection, hiring and measurement of quality candidates.