How to Overcome Challenges & Recruit for Retail in 5 Steps

As you know, the team of associates that supports your retail business is essential to its success. However, COVID-19 and related issues have resulted in a labor shortage that has made recruiting candidates that are right for your brand a challenge for retailers nationwide.

With the right plan and hiring strategies, however, you can overcome these challenges and staff your retail business properly. This article will walk through five steps to a successful retail recruitment strategy.

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 or full-time sales associates, seasonal staff, a manager, and possibly an assistant manager. Assistant managers might be great to have but operations with smaller staffs and physical storefront typically do not need them. In my experience, once your staff size reaches 3+ on the floor at a time, it may be time for an assistant manager to step in.

Your need for part- and full-time 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 are able to hire, the size of your operation, your budget, and 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 flexible for scheduling.

To get a more precise measure of your needs, I suggest making a mock schedule that includes a sale or event. 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)

For the schedule above, there is 356 hours, so you would need that many hours of labor to fill your schedule. You might break it down like this:

One manager (40 hours)
One assistant manager (40 hours)
Five full-time associates (200 hours)
Six 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 that 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 two or three part-time associates.

This would mean, then, that you might need:

One manager (40 hours)
One assistant manager (40 hours)
Five full time associates (200 hours)
Nine part time associates at 15 hours each (135 hours)
Total hours: 415

Tip: 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.

Hiring the right number of associates is a delicate balance. You do not want to over hire as you will only be able to provide your part-time staff with limited shifts, creating a frustrating and financially untenable situation for them.

Budgeting

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 popular stat is that retailers should be spending somewhere between 12%-17% of annual revenue on payroll. To avoid over hiring 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 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.

If you run into a large discrepancy between what you are able to hire 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 really do need the large staff to man your sales floor, your revenue will need to grow to make ends meet.

2. Attract the Right Candidates

Once you have assessed the roles that you need to fill, it is time to attract great candidates. This can be done by advertising with a comprehensive and honest job description, offering perks and flexibility, and expanding your criteria to cast a wide net.

Your business must stand out from the competition to attract the best candidates. A recent study from Software Advice, in which it surveyed hundreds of retailers from across the country, found that one of the top three challenges in retail recruitment right now is competition.

Write a Comprehensive & Honest Job Description

A job description explains the duties and requirements of the positions for which you are hiring. One of the biggest things that you will want to ensure when writing your job description is that it is thorough. A good job description should put everyone on the same page regarding job expectations, as well as benefits and perks.

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 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 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.

Tip: Use the templates from our job description article to make writing job descriptions easier.

Offer Perks & Schedule Flexibility

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 as best you can. 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.

Expand Your Criteria

While in an ideal world you would be able to find the perfect candidate with the exact experience, skills, personality, and availability that you were 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. It does not mean you have to sacrifice overall performance. For example, say a candidate applied to your store with event planning, customer service, and project management experience. If you were requiring all job candidates to have retail, POS, and managerial experience, you would pass over a candidate with great potential. Not only that, but looking beyond the most obvious resumes will allow you to enter a less competitive hiring arena.

3. Promote Your Opening to Reach the Best Candidates

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 a variety of 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:

Choose the Right Recruitment Channels

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 so that you can 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.

This boutique made a “We’re Hiring” header that blends into their category pages for easy visibility without causing a disruption to any site functions. (Source: Ruby Jane)

Physical postings in your neighborhood: Put out flyers around your neighborhood so that local traffic sees your posting.
In-store flyers: Post your listing in your store so that your customers see you are hiring. In my experience, the best places to put in-store job flyers is 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 Instagram and Facebook because that was where our particular fashion-focused audience was easiest to reach and tended to congregate.

Consider Recruitment Marketing

Another thing that you can do to make retail recruiting more effective is to utilize recruitment marketing. Recruitment marketing includes the strategies businesses use to find, attract, engage, and nurture talented candidates for its open positions. The objective of recruitment marketing is to increase the number of viable applicants.

Recruitment marketing strategies include anything that will make your company more visible and thus attract more applicants, such as:

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 out a recruitment consultant such as Robert Half to help streamline the process and delegate this task.

Make It Easy to Apply

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:

Use 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 waving 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.

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 to be their toughest hiring challenge. That paired with the current labor shortage makes the moral of the hiring story clear that you have to be more flexible and look for adaptable skills in the hiring process.

Use interviews to not only learn about candidates but also to make an impression on them.

Utilize the Floor Interview

When interviewing candidates for any customer-facing positions, it is best to include a floor interview in your interviewing process. A floor interview comes after your initial conversation, where you have gotten to know the potential candidate and feel like they would be a good fit. During the floor interview, you invite the candidate back to work a mock shift, where you can observe how they work with your team and customers alike.

This acts as a final test for applicants, and if they demonstrate that they are personable and represent your brand well, it is time to hire.

Some of the things you should be looking for include:

Confidence approaching customers
Enthusiasm
Personability
How they keep busy during downtime
How they fit socially with your existing staff
Willingness to ask questions
How they are dressed/represent your brand

Seek Candidates That Reflect Your Brand

Another important thing you should consider when recruiting for retail is how the candidate in question reflects your brand. When customers enter your store, the majority of their interactions are going to be with your staff, and the impression they make will play a major role in shoppers’ perception of your brand. While you want to avoid being too narrow with your search, you should try and only hire people you think will represent your brand well and make a positive impression on customers.

Choose Attitude Over Experience

A commonly cited statistic in the world of retail hiring is that of people who fail at a position within 18 months of starting, 89% of them do so because of cultural or attitude issues, not technical skills or ability to do the role. In other words, when recruiting for a retail position, you should be prioritizing someone with the right attitude and personality over someone with the right experience. You can teach everyone the skills, but it’s the attitude that will make your staff flourish.

You can test personality compatibility and attitude by looking for attributes, such as:

Enthusiasm
Willingness to learn
Good communication skills
Strong problem-solving abilities
Emotional intelligence
People skills

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 common stat used in onboarding materials says that effective onboarding can improve employee retention rates by 82%.

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.

Provide Physical & Digital Resources

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.

Create a Training Program

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	Learning basic store procedures Introduce all policies There should be a manager on duty for all shifts during this period
Stage 2: Weeks 4–8	Learning about reporting Expected to adhere to all policies There should be other staff members on duty for all shifts during this period.
Stage 3: Weeks 8–12	Should have mastery over every procedure and skill Expected to adhere to all policies without reminders Begin to work solo shifts Potential assessment

Use Checklists to Track Progress

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.

Provide Lots of Floor Experience

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, as well as doing store procedures along the way.

Be sure to incorporate lots of floor experience in your onboarding training.

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.