The Hiring Decision Your Store Managers Never Get To Make

Why some stores dread a new starter and others welcome one

This week, across hundreds of stores, thousands of seasonal hires are being decided, but in the rush to fill roles, it's easy to forget the impact of a bad hire on the shop floor.

Store managers experience this first-hand. When hiring is a revolving door, they brace themselves for a new starter because they expect to be fixing problems, overseeing every task, and second-guessing issues before they happen. All while risking store reputation and quality of customer service. In stores where hiring is done right, managers welcome the extra pair of hands to reduce the burden at a busy time. Neither experience is based on luck; they trace back to how the shortlist was built before anyone in the store met the candidate.

The hidden hiring decision

For most large retailers, the talent acquisition process starts with screening, and often a further decision on top of it, to determine who appears on the shortlist that is then provided to the store manager. The store manager has no choice but to choose from the shortlist that has been imposed on them, so when a hire doesn’t work out, what information the hiring teams get back is thin. A resignation, someone who “wasn’t the right fit,” a turnover number that keeps climbing. By then, the moment that really shaped the outcome —building the shortlist—is weeks behind you.

A shortlist built to predict performance produces people who show up reliably, handle customers well and keep up once the store gets busy. A shortlist that wasn’t tends to come up short on exactly those things, just as reliably. You see it in a stockroom nobody quite finishes tidying by the end of a shift, or a queue that backs up because no one steps in to help.

Poor-fit hires show up fast, in sales, in service ratings and in turnover. Seasonal peaks make it worse, because volume multiplies every weak decision.

Where frontline hiring breaks down

Madeline Laurano, Chief Analyst at Aptitude Research, has argued that frontline hiring “is not lacking tools, it is lacking intentional design.”¹ Her research adds a specific detail: screening is the single biggest point where frontline hiring processes break down, ahead of background checks and interview scheduling.

SHRM research² points to part of the reason, many employers accept a vendor’s claim that an assessment is valid without confirming it predicts performance for their own workforce. A tool built to move people through quickly can clear that bar with ease. Nobody checks whether it identifies the right people at all.

In retail, the stakes are even higher than other industries, with voluntary turnover sits at 26.7% annually³, and the skills that make retail employees effective on the floor are the ones other industries struggle to find in their own talent pools: coordinating others’ work, building team cohesion and generating new ideas. That makes your best people highly transferable, and highly poachable, so it lets the wrong people in, and the strong hires you do land are the ones competitors want.

Fast hiring is easy. Fast hiring that works takes proof

When hiring at volume, fast, across hundreds of stores you can’t personally oversee, could you prove that what your process measures predicts who will perform? Without that proof, you have no way of knowing whether your process is systematically selecting the wrong people and by the time it shows up in service, sales and turnover, store after store, it is too late and too costly to fix.

Validation is the proof. It confirms that what is measured connects to performance on the job. This provides the same validated read in every store, whatever the format, however fast it needs to move. Rigorous, validated science should decide who makes that list, not whatever gets through the process fastest. It doesn’t have to cost you the speed this season demands.

Get the shortlist right, and speed stops being the trade-off it feels like. See how you can hire with both accuracy and speed to find the best-fit talent that can improve service, sales, and turnover. Visit our Retail Hiring page for more information.

Sources:

¹ Aptitude Research (M. Laurano).  
² SHRM 
³Mercer workforce trends