The background
The Neiman Marcus Group is one of the most successful retail groups in the U.S., offering high quality clothing, accessories, jewellery, beauty and decorative home products for the affluent customer. The group comprises 35 Neiman Marcus Stores, 2 Bergdorf Goodman stores in Manhattan, 11 clearance centres and three major catalogue brands and e-commerce brands; Neiman Marcus, Horchow and Chef’s. Store operations alone total more than 5 million gross square feet and the NeimanMarcus.com web site offers visitors a personalised shopping service, and 5,000 upscale product depictions. In the financial year 2002, the group achieved nearly $3 billion in revenues.
SHL have been a solutions provider to Neiman Marcus for five years, working with them to ensure that their recruitment strategy contributes to the achievement of their business vision.
The challenge
Neiman Marcus has to recruit large volumes of staff for its stores and already used SHL to screen and assess candidates. SHL also administered a new sales associate survey (at the 45 day mark) and a departure survey. In these respects, Neiman Marcus had already established an efficient selection process and was creating and analysing data to understand its staff experience and predict and manage trends.
However, having invested in an HRIS (Human Resource Information System) platform, the group wanted to standardise their hiring process using an Internet solution that complemented their in-house system. In addition, they wanted to refine the selection process so that higher performing sales associates could be identified early on, and so that the likely tenure of each employee could be predicted. The store needed associates that could hit the ground running and who would not drop out within a few months of starting.
SHL and Neiman Marcus agreed that the measurable criteria for the project would be an increase in sales per hour per associate.
The solution
To address these criteria, SHL developed a criterion validity study for the Sales Associate position, defining the key competencies, attitudes and behaviours that applied to top performing sales associates with good employment tenure records. These key success criteria were then built into an assessment regime, with simple, easy-to-use decision-making reports that could be easily administered by store managers, minimising the risk of poor interviewing techniques.
SHL designed an online assessment and selection process that integrated with Neiman Marcus’s HRIS system. Candidates completed a job application on HRIS, which automatically transferred the candidate data to the SHL system. The SHL system loads a browser window in the HRIS and the candidate completes the assessment, and is then returned to the HRIS system. Hiring managers can then generate reports in real-time, comprising an interview guide and a candidate snapshot, enabling them to make a hiring decision on the spot.
The new sales associate survey and exit survey were also integrated into the internet-HRIS solution.
The results
Following the new selection process:
- Staff turnover was reduced by 18%
- Sales per hour per associate were increased 15.4% in comparison to where the system had yet to be implemented.
- The interview-to-hire cycle was reduced from several days to 24 hours.
Neiman Marcus is now using data from the surveys to identify specific trends in each of its stores, so that it can trace specific problems to their root cause and take steps to overcome them. This is an excellent example of how recruitment strategy can add both bottom and top line value to an organisation.