January 2021 - 36

MANAGEMENT
HIRING IN
RETAIL
10 tips to find and
recruit superstar
employees.
By Francesca Nicasio
T
1
op talent should be a priority for all retailers. Having
outstanding people on your team can help you
sell more products, be more efficient, and most
important, serve customers better.
So how do you find these top performers? To answer
that, we looked into other companies' hiring practices
and talked to retail experts who've shared solid advice on
finding, attracting and hiring great people for your store.
Hire for attitude and train for skill.
We've given this advice before, but it's worth
repeating, because it truly is one of the most
important pieces of hiring advice that you can get.
Nearly all of the experts who weighed in for this article
emphasized the importance of looking for people with the
right attitudes.
" Take a tip from James Timpson: don't look at CVs or
resumes; hire on the basis of attitude, enthusiasm and
energy. Skills can be taught; attitude can't, " says Andrew
Busby, founder and CEO at Retail Reflections, a retail
consulting firm.
Cyrenna Dewhurst, a store manager candidate at Dollar
General, echoes this advice and says that she once hired a
candidate who, despite not having retail experience, had a
great attitude.
" I hired a woman once that had zero retail experience, "
she says. " She had been in the cleaning business. I just
loved her attitude - she was just amazing and even had
the best reasons why she would be better at this job than
anyone else. She tailored her resume towards why her
cleaning business would make her who I would hire.
36 | LAWN & GARDEN RETAILER | JANUARY 2021
" Long story short, I hired and trained her to become my
strongest ASM. She had integrity and a willingness to learn.
So refreshing! She's running a store herself now, too. "
2
Go beyond traditional interviews.
Now that you've identified the traits that you
should look for when hiring, how do you surface
these qualities in your candidates? People tend to put their
best foot forward during formal interviews, so it can be
tricky to determine whether or not someone truly has the
right attitudes.
A good way around this is to go beyond the traditional
interview process. Here are some ideas:
* Take a Walk on the Sales Floor
" One lesson for stores is don't confine your
interviews to the office, " says retail executive Don
Uselmann. He recommends that merchants bring
the candidates to the sales floor and watch how they
interact with department managers and employees.
Bill O'Malley, managing partner of Connector Team
Recruiting, echoes this advice.
" You can tell a lot about people as they walk a retail
building with you. How do they relate as they walk
the floor? How do they engage with people? Do they
smile? Are they polite?
Try to have a hiring manager at the store level speak
to every applicant. I have made, seen and witnessed
many great hires that were made because the hiring
authority took the time to meet someone at the
counter or in the store. "
January 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of January 2021
