How to Overcome Challenges & Recruit for Retail in 5 Steps
Meaghan has provided content and guidance for indie retailers as the editor for a number of retail publications and a speaker at trade shows. She is Fit Small Business’s authority on retail and ecommerce.
Brigitte is a retail specialist and staff writer with brick and mortar management experience. She is versed in retail sales analysis, merchandising, and buying with an emphasis in retail sales and marketing across platforms. She has a BA in writing from Washington University, St. Louis.
This article is part of a larger series on Retail Management.
As you know, the team of associates that supports your retail business is essential to its success. However, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the US has faced a staggering labor shortage that has made recruiting eligible candidates a massive challenge for retailers nationwide.
With the right plan and hiring strategies, however, you can overcome these challenges and staff your retail business adequately. This article will walk through five steps for a successful retail recruitment strategy.
Step 1: Identify Your Hiring Needs
Before you begin your hiring process, the first thing you will need to do is identify the roles that you need to fill. Typically in retail, you will be looking for part-time and/or full-time sales associates, seasonal staff, a manager, and possibly an assistant manager.
Assistant managers are great to have, but operations with a small staff and physical storefronts typically do not need them. In my experience, it is a good time to bring in an assistant manager once your staff size reaches 10+ for a single location or when there are 3+ people on the floor at any time.
Your need for part-time, full-time, and seasonal sales associates can be difficult to pin down. How you break down your hours between full- and part-time associates and managers will depend on who you can hire and the size of your operation and budget, as well as how you ultimately want to hire.
- With full-time associates, you get a lot of dependability but will have to offer benefits. They are also harder to come by but easier to maintain than part-time associates.
- Part-time associates, on the other hand, are typically easier to hire but can be less dependable and typically offer less flexibility for scheduling.
- Seasonal associates are essential to keep your store running smoothly during the busiest times of the year, but they can be less dependable than even your part-time staff and might also expect seasonal perks, like holiday pay.
Did you know?
According to predictions from the National Retail Federation, retailers will hire between 450,000 and 600,000 seasonal workers in 2022. There were nearly 670,000 seasonal hires in 2021; however, some of this hiring may have been pulled into October as many retailers were eager to supplement their workforces to meet increased consumer demand.
To get a more precise measure of your needs, I suggest making a mock schedule for the week (including sales or events). Fill out that schedule, and determine the number of hours you need people to be on staff. Don’t forget any ecommerce-related tasks you need to fill.
Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday SALE | Saturday | Sunday | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Opening Shift (9 a.m.-5 p.m.) | 3 people (24 hours) | 3 people (24 hours) | 3 people (24 hours) | 3 people (24 hours) | 6 people (48 hours) | 4 people (32 hours) | 4 people (32 hours) |
Closing Shift (5 p.m.-10 p.m.) | 3 people (15 hours) | 3 people (15 hours) | 3 people (15 hours) | 3 people (15 hours) | 6 people (30 hours) | 4 people (20 hours) | 4 people (20 hours) |
Ecommerce | 1 person (2 hours) | 1 person (2 hours) | 1 person (2 hours) | 1 person (2 hours) | 1 person (4 hours) | 1 person (4 hours) | 1 person (2 hours) |
In the example above, there is a total of 356 hours of labor to fill your schedule. You might break it down like this:
- 1 manager (40 hours)
- 1 assistant manager (40 hours)
- 5 full-time associates (200 hours)
- 6 part-time associates at 15 hours each (90 hours)
- Total hours: 370
Based on the mock schedule and projected staff docket above, it might be tempting to think that you will only need that projected number of associates to keep your store consistently staffed. This, however, is not the case.
In retail, you should have excess part-time staff so you aren’t short-staffed due to vacations, sick days, or lack of availability. In my experience, we strove to hire about 40 hours of excess part-time help for when we were missing a full-time associate or a few part-time associates. This helped us strike the right balance of reliable staffing and the ability to offer consistent shifts to all of our workers.
Remember, you do not want to overhire, as you will only be able to provide your part-time staff with limited shifts. Overhiring will create a frustrating and financially untenable situation for them.
This would mean, then, that you might need:
- 1 manager (40 hours)
- 1 assistant manager (40 hours)
- 5 full-time associates (200 hours)
- 9 part-time associates at 15 hours each (135 hours)
- Total hours: 415
You should also consider hiring additional seasonal workers in the summer and during the holidays to accommodate higher traffic, greater staffing needs, and more travel and vacation. You can learn more with our guide to Hiring Seasonal Employees.
You can use our free schedule download below to create a mock schedule for your store so that you can identify your needs and start creating a hiring plan.
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In addition to determining your staffing needs based on store hours, you should also consider your budget. One of your biggest recurring expenses is going to be payroll; in fact, a widely cited stat says that retailers should be spending somewhere between 10%–20% of annual revenue on payroll. To avoid overhiring and skyrocketing payroll expenses, you should determine what you can reasonably spend based on your projected annual revenue before you begin the hiring process.
The first thing you should lay out is how much you will pay your salaried workers. This will be based on the competitiveness of the market you are in, the level of experience you are looking for, and your revenue. From there, you should set your hourly wages, again based on your industry and job market. With those numbers set and a general idea of how much you can spend on payroll annually, a little bit of math will make it clear just how many people you can hire without sacrificing your bottom line.
The retail CEOs we polled stated that finding qualified employees is just as difficult as navigating the competitive hiring environment….The solution? You might need to give a more enticing wage than the other retailers in your neighborhood if you truly want to differentiate yourself from the competition and swiftly snag the best retail applicants.
Consider obtaining the correct retail talent working in your store as soon as feasible instead of worrying about how $2 per hour per employee would influence your bottom line when it comes to payroll. This will enable more sales (and more revenue) today and could save you money on replacing problematic recruits in the future.
–Matthew Magnante, Content Writer & Strategist at Fitness Volt
If you run into a large discrepancy between what you can spend based on your annual budget and the amount of staff you need in-store, you will need to balance the books somehow.
You have three options here:
- Take a realistic look at your scheduling plan and whether it is really necessary to have such a large staff.
- Ask yourself whether you have set your wages too high and look to your competitors and what they are offering their employees.
- Create a plan to make more money. If you are paying your employees fairly and need the large staff to man your sales floor, your revenue will need to grow to make ends meet.
Need to calculate how much you will spend on payroll? Check out our guide to calculating payroll costs.
Step 2: Create an Appealing Job Posting
Once you have assessed the roles you need to fill, it is time to write a job description that will help you attract great candidates. You should take this step seriously and sincerely try to create roles that are appealing and will make people want to work for you over the competition.
A recent study from Software Advice found that competition for qualified candidates is one of the top three challenges in retail recruitment.
In this step, we will look at how you can write an attractive job description, meet modern workers’ rising expectations, and find candidates in less obvious places. You can also get more information in our guide to How to Write a Job Description + Free Template.
Write a Comprehensive & Honest Job Description
A job description explains the duties and requirements of the positions for which you are hiring. A thorough job description will help put everyone on the same page regarding expectations, benefits, and perks, helping you to avoid misalignment in the future and disgruntled or unprepared employees.
For retail roles, there are typically 10 areas you should cover in your job descriptions:
Area | What to Include |
|---|---|
Required Skills and Experience | Clearly define the experience and skills you expect candidates to possess for the position. |
Availability | List the expected weekly hours and any necessary holiday, weekend, and evening availability. |
Customer Service | Cover customer service responsibilities, including assisting customers daily and complying with customer service policies. |
Computer/Technical Skills | List any technology-related requirements, such as conducting transactions using point-of-sale (POS) software, running reports, and conducting inventory management. |
Cleaning | Detail responsibilities for keeping the store clean, organized, and well-stocked. |
Brand Representation | Clearly explain the expectations associated with representing your brand. |
Policy Compliance | Be clear that you expect full policy compliance from employees. |
Work Environment and Culture | Explain the work environment, including whether the role is team-based or solo, the team activities involved, and attitude and tone expectations. |
Wages and Benefits | Be clear about the hourly rate and salaries in your description and define PTO and other benefits that you provide. |
Perks | Promote your employee perks, including discounts, time off, schedule flexibility, and other benefits. |
The specific items under these job areas will be different depending on the role you are seeking to fill and your unique business needs. This list, however, is a great checklist to make sure you don’t leave anything out and provide a thorough and accurate job description.
It is important to be upfront in your job description about the less glamorous parts of working a retail job. While your job description might be more enticing without it, being honest with applicants will prevent employees from feeling blindsided by the realities of their job and will create more job satisfaction.
Use the templates from our guide to writing a job description to make writing job descriptions easier.
Another way that you can work to overcome the competitive job market and attract good candidates is to offer flexible schedules and perks. While you can demand certain amounts of time from your staff, one of the biggest things that will draw people to retail jobs is the ability to have flexible work schedules that can accommodate their personal lives.
You can include something in your job description like “accommodating scheduling as long as you provide two weeks’ notice” or “we will work with your schedule as best we can.” Do not mislead candidates and make bold promises, but try to include something that shows that you will work with your staff’s personal schedules to the extent possible. In my experience, as long as you have excess staff and a strong team environment, most people can get the time off they need without sacrificing store coverage.
Did you know?
In the recent Software Advice study, dealing with candidate work-life balance expectations was another top retail recruiting challenge.
While in an ideal world, you would be able to find the perfect candidate with the exact experience, skills, personality, and availability you are looking for, the current job market makes that untenable. If you want to overcome the challenge of finding skilled candidates and actually fill the positions you need to fill, you will need to expand your job requirements and criteria.
Expanding what you are looking for in a candidate allows you to cast a wider net but does not mean you have to sacrifice overall performance. Say a candidate applied to your store with event planning, customer service, and project management experience. If you required all job candidates to have retail, POS, and managerial experience, you would pass up on a candidate with great potential. Also, looking beyond the most obvious resumes will allow you to enter a less competitive hiring arena.
Step 3: Promote Your Openings
Once you have set your candidate criteria and written an enticing job description, you can post your listing for potential applicants to see or promote your opening in various ways. You want to be sure that you do this strategically to reach the right audiences and track down the best potential employees.
Here are a few things you should consider when posting or promoting your open position:
In simpler times, you might have put your job in the local paper and called it a day. With technology and new loci of entertainment popping up every day, placing a newspaper ad is no longer enough to reach people and find a person for the job. These days, you have to consider a plethora of different recruitment channels:
- Job boards: Places like Indeed or LinkedIn get a lot of traffic and are a popular place for people to start their job hunt.
- Social media sites: Consider posting on your feed and running social media ads to catch the attention of scrollers and attract talent via social channels.
- Your business’s website: You should post your job listing on your business’s website so that anyone that comes to your site sees that you are hiring.
Ruby Jane included a “We’re Hiring” tab prominently on their website to capture people that are already familiar with the brand and exploring the website. (Source: Ruby Jane)
- Physical postings in your neighborhood: Put out flyers so that local traffic sees your posting.
- In-store flyers: Post your listing in your physical store for your customers to see you are hiring. In my experience, the best places to put in-store job flyers are in your fitting rooms (if applicable), at the checkout counter, anywhere there is seating, and on mirrors. These are all places where customers are paused.
- Word-of-mouth and staff promotion: Ask your staff to promote your position among their friends and family and use your own network for word-of-mouth promotion.
- Employee referrals: Ask your staff for recommendations of qualified candidates. They know what their job requires, so they will have a good idea of who would be good at it and capable. You can even offer cash rewards for successful referrals.
- Local newspapers/online publications: Post your listing in your local paper and online publications to help capture more local traffic and awareness.
- Local events: Attend local events and promote your openings with posters and word-of-mouth. This is a great way to connect with people who are already engaged in your neighborhood.
I would suggest placing your listing in as many recruitment channels as you can. If this is not tenable, prioritize job boards and in-store promotion. Job boards are where some 50% of people start their job hunt, and in-store promotions allow you to reach people you already know are interested in your brand. From there, I would consider how effectively each channel would work to reach your ideal candidate.
For example, at my store, we looked for people who cared about fashion, had a more boho style, and were sweet and confident with customers. We found that the best way to reach this particular group and, by extension, attract strong candidates, was to run ads on Facebook and Instagram because that was where our particular fashion-focused audience was easiest to reach and tended to congregate. Consider where you can access your ideal candidates and focus your job postings in those locations.
Another thing you can do to make retail recruiting more effective is to utilize recruitment marketing. The objective of recruitment marketing is to increase the number of viable applicants.
Businesses use recruitment marketing strategies to find, attract, engage, and nurture talented candidates for open positions—anything that will make your company more visible and thus attract more applicants. Here are a few examples:
- Brand marketing: If you can make your brand more appealing, you will be able to attract better talent.
- Digital marketing and advertising: When you spend money on advertising, you will gain more recognition and be able to reach larger audiences and attract job candidates from a larger pool of talent.
- Social media marketing: Leverage social media to engage with people and attract candidates.
Most small business owners will do their recruitment marketing in-house, but if you are doing a large hiring push, consider hiring a recruitment consultant such as Robert Half to help streamline the process and delegate this task.
Another thing that you should consider as you are posting your job is how easy it is to apply. Anything that makes the job application process easier for potential candidates will increase the rate of application.
Some things that you can do to make the application process easier include:
- Uploads: As opposed to requiring applicants to fill out a resume and cover letter form, simply require applicants to upload their own resumes. Most people already have a resume prepared, so requiring them to rewrite what they already have is frustrating and can be an application deterrent.
- Consider waiving cover letters for part-time positions: While they are helpful to give you a better sense of your prospective hire, cover letters, especially for part-time positions, are cumbersome for applicants and can be a waste of time for hiring managers.
- Create a QR code for in-store applicants: For people who learn about your job while they are shopping for you, it is helpful to include a QR code on your job flyer so they can apply on the spot or at least have a clear plan forward once they get home.
- Offer phone interviews: Make it easy for candidates to schedule their initial interviews by offering to do them over the phone.
- Check your mobile application: Be sure that your application form works for mobile devices to maximize how easily people can apply.
- Keep physical resumes in-store: For in-store shoppers, have resumes they can fill out while they are shopping.
- Provide a resource for questions: On your job listing, include your hiring manager or owner’s contact information so that applicants can easily reach out with any questions or concerns.
Step 4: Interview to Find the Best Candidates
With your job listing successfully posted, you will hopefully receive a flood of applicants for your open position. Once you have sorted through your applications and selected candidates you think could be a potential fit, it is time to begin the interview process.
The interview is a great chance for you to get a better idea of your candidate and whether they would be a good fit for the job. Pigeon-holing yourself and looking for only one very specific person and counting out everyone else, however, is a strategy that, more than ever, will fail you. In fact, 35% of retailers cite finding skilled candidates as their toughest hiring challenge. Paired with the current labor shortage, it is clear that you have to be more flexible and look for adaptable skills in the hiring process.
Conducting interviews is an important part of the interview process and will allow you to get to know your candidate before you hire.
Step 5: Onboard to Set Up Your New Hires for Success
Onboarding is initial employee training where you provide new employees with a comprehensive understanding of their role and your business. Effective onboarding will not only help you to improve the efficacy of your storefront but it will also help you to retain your employees and get you out of the hiring cycle. In fact, a frequently cited stat says that effective onboarding can improve employee retention rates by 82% and productivity by 70%.
Did you know?
As the country heads toward a potential recession, 21% of small businesses are concerned they won’t be able to hire/retain staff.
For retail, there are a few key areas that you should include in your onboarding training:
- Customer service: Teach new hires how you want them to greet and interact with your employees when they are shopping, need help, or completing a purchase. You should also teach them about all of your customer service policies.
- Product knowledge: Train new hires about your products so they are equipped to answer any employee questions and sell your products.
- Computer procedures: Show your new employees how to ring up a sale, open company emails, use reporting tools, and any other relevant computer procedures.
- Opening and closing procedures: Guide your employees on how you should prepare the store for opening and closing each day.
- Inventory management: Show your employees how you organize your backstock, receive new shipments, and take inventory counts.
- Cleanliness and organization standards: Make sure that your new hires understand how everything is organized as well as the cleanliness standards they are expected to maintain.
- Employee policies and expectations: Be clear about what you expect from your staff as well as what they can expect from you.
If you want to learn more about the best ways to onboard your staff, you can check out these resources:
How to Onboard an Employee
Top Tips on How to Train New Employees
Here, we will take a look at a few retail training pointers that will help streamline your onboarding.
When onboarding your employees, you should provide them with reference materials, both digitally and physically. Writing down all your store policies and procedures will give employees something that they can look to throughout their time at your business and a sense of autonomy on the job. Having everything written down is also a great way to hold both you and your employees accountable.
In addition to giving each new hire their own personal onboarding materials, you should also keep an onboarding binder at your cash wrap. This ensures that there is always a copy of all shop procedures and policies whenever people need it.
You should design a sequential onboarding program that extends at least 90 days, at which time you can review their performance and officially conclude the onboarding period. Typically, onboarding stages look something like this for a retail employee:
Stage 1: Weeks 1–4 |
|
Stage 2: Weeks 4–8 |
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Stage 3: Weeks 8–12 |
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A very useful training tool that you can utilize when onboarding is checklists. Checklists will help you stay on track and have a clear picture of what your new employee knows already and what they need to review. This also provides a place where new hires can reference what they have learned, making it easy to identify topics they want to review.
I recommend using the written policies and procedures you provided to your new hires and their job descriptions to write your checklists. This will ensure that you cover every topic and prepare your employees for every aspect of their new role.
At the end of the day, most of what your associates and managers are doing is interacting with customers and maintaining your store as a team. You should be sure, then, that floor experience plays a big role in your employee onboarding process. I would recommend that floor time account for 90% if not more of the onboarding process. Little time should be spent training behind closed doors or off the floor, if possible.
This will ensure that at the end of their training, new employees can feel confident on the floor, working with your customers and the rest of your team, and doing store procedures along the way.
An associate helps a customer find a perfect sweater.
Meet the Experts
The hiring and recruitment information we outlined above were brought to you through the expertise of three of Fit Small Business’s top retail experts. Get to know them below.
 | Mary King has more than 14 years of hospitality experience, including interviewing, hiring and onboarding staff, and writing training manuals. She is intimately familiar with California labor laws and knows what it takes to create a healthy work environment for staff. |
 | Brigitte Hodge is a retail specialist with several years of retail management experience. Before joining Fit Small Business, Brigitte ran a store through the pandemic, bringing in new staff, training them, and learning the ins and outs of retail recruitment. She also has experience writing job descriptions and creating a work environment with extremely high retention. |
 | Meaghan Brophy has 10-plus years of retail experience, including creating job postings, interviewing, hiring, onboarding, and training for a variety of in-store roles. Since working in retail, Meaghan has 7-plus years of experience writing for and advising retailers. |
Bottom Line
Recruiting retail candidates can be a challenge, especially in this day and age. With the job market more competitive than ever and turnover rates reaching new heights every month, many businesses, especially those that rely on part-time and seasonal labor, are in the hiring process 24/7 to prevent running into staffing shortages.
Now more than ever, you have to be strategic with your retail recruiting process. This step-by-step guide can give you the tools you need to beat the competition and fill your open positions seamlessly.
You May Also Like…
- Our guide for starting a retail location
- The ins and outs of retail management
