Retail businesses are comprised of many moving parts that must work together daily to meet customer demands and expectations. Store sales depend on it! While every department of the business will face its own unique challenges, those of the recruitment and staffing teams could be argued to be the most significant. Without the right people in the right positions, sales will drop and customer service will suffer.
Retail Store Managers are often tasked with the job of recruitment, which includes sourcing candidates, screening them for fit, and conducting interviews. More often than not, they do not have formal recruitment training or the proper tools in place from head office to effectively recruit quality candidates on an ongoing basis. This doesn’t even take into account that recruitment is only a small portion of the daily tasks they need to perform when looking at the overall success of the location they are responsible for.
When looking at an outsourced recruiting solution for retail companies, there are several benefits that will help to save time, reduce recruitment costs, and lower turnover for your store.
1. Candidate Quality
Store Managers that are pressed for time, and do not have the proper tools and processes in place to source and screen candidates on a consistent basis may sacrifice candidate quality in order to fill a position.
By outsourcing your recruiting, you immediately have access to a professional recruitment team and the people, processes and technology associated with a successful recruitment program. By utilizing these tools, you will be able to formulate a candidate profile before you even talk to the candidate, and screen out candidates that will never be a good fit. Candidate sourcing strategies, behavioural assessments, interview templates, and recruiting technologies are all a part of the package and will result in better quality candidates.
2. Recruitment Scalability
It’s no secret that holidays and certain times of the year attract shoppers and make your store busier. Naturally, an increase to the number of staff required to run your store at an optimal level needs to increase as well. In 2016, 49% of retailers planned to hire seasonal workers in Q4. This can be very difficult to accomplish when maintaining a consistent pipeline during the quieter months is already a challenge.
Scaling your recruitment efforts up or down to handle seasonality can become a reality. Your outsourced recruitment partner will custom tailor a recruitment program to help you open your next store, support ongoing recruitment, or successfully hire on a project basis. In most cases, this will simply be a function of your contract and will not effect the monthly cost of your program.
3. Predictability
Depending on the type of retail company you work with, losing a great employee can be a big deal resulting in a loss of sales, increased overtime, and/or additional expenses to effectively run your business.
Working with an outsourced recruiting company is 2-fold. First off, recruitment budgets become more predictable. Normalize the cost of annual recruitment evenly over the course of the year, regardless of demand and recruiting seasonality. This is done through providing a costing model based on a pre-determined number of monthly hires, thus allowing you to know what the cost of your program will be monthly and annually.
Secondly, performance becomes much more predictable. By standardizing recruitment and screening processes, your business can better forecast employee performance from the moment they are onboarded.
4. Business Focus
Retail Store Managers who find it hard to make time to fill open roles, and who maybe have a perpetual stack of resumes to look through, may not be as thorough as they would like when it comes to recruitment. Stress can quickly accumulate when you don’t know where your next quality hire is going to come from, as the resumes that are dropped off randomly at your front desk just never seem to wow you. It should also be noted that recruitment is only one hat a Store Manager wears. Retail Store Managers also deal with ongoing shrinkage, late deliveries, a voicemail box full of complaints, and scheduling that needs to happen, just to name a few.
Outsourced recruitment will allow you to reduce the recruitment stress. Simply open your job request (often a templated solution taking minutes, if not seconds) and wait for qualified candidates to be presented to you, thus freeing up more of your time to build your store and grow your business.
5. Employment Brand Perception
Competition in the retail space is cutthroat in this day and age. The light that customers shine on your products and brand will influence their buying decision, but also whether they would consider working for you. The employment brand for a retail organization falls heavily on your reputation and the value proposition you have towards your employees. What was the recruitment process like in the eyes of your applicant? This experience can be a first impression with a candidate and should not be taken for granted.
Employing a recruitment strategy that crafts messaging and strategy around the candidate experience, and clearly communicates your corporate culture and values, will enhance your employment brand. Employment brand is also influenced by your current workforce. Engaged employees are often the result of a quality recruitment process. An outsourced recruiting partner will work to understand your business and communicate your culture and values, thus enhancing your employment brand.
About Mindfield
Mindfield is a Recruitment Outsourcing solutions provider that partners with companies to create powerful hourly workforces. Our solutions combine a recruitment team, 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.
