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[THE PERSONNEL TOUCH]
The right fit
What criteria have been established for hiring store employees in your company? Do you have any criteria? In some companies the single criterion is a heartbeat. You hire the first warm body that wanders into your store and perform the “mirror” test—put a mirror under his nose and if you see his breath, hire him on the spot. Some companies would never admit to this, however, when you evaluate the results of these stores that’s exactly what is happening. So who’s to blame? The store operator, right? Not so fast. If your company has multiple locations, then you have to ask yourself, “What have you done to help store operators make better hiring decisions?”
Training and tools
It’s easy to lay the blame of a poor hire at the feet of store operators. After all, they hired the poor performer, didn’t they? Many people will agree that the most important decisions you can make on behalf of your store are hiring decisions. Forget products, equipment and services for now. The selection of who is representing your company to the buying public is the most important decision you can make. If your store operators don’t invest the necessary time and care up front in the hiring process, they will most certainly invest an inordinate amount of time cleaning up the mess left behind by a bad hire.
So the million-dollar question is, what kind of training, tools and support have you provided your store operators to help them consistently and successfully hire the right employees for their stores? Notice the emphasis on consistently and successfully. If you answered that question by saying, “Not much,” you’re not alone. The vast majority of store operator training is operations-based as opposed to soft-skill or people training. If your store operators have not been trained on how to conduct a successful interview and if they have no tools to help them develop their interviewing skills, then how can we honestly blame them for a bad hire? If you think that your store operators who have more than 10 years of experience should know how to hire by now, you could be wrong. It might just mean they have 10 years of bad habits. If your store operators have never been formally trained on how to conduct employee interviews in the first place, then they must have made it up along the way. And, if you’re not happy with the employees working in your stores, then it seems that your store operators’ ways of hiring aren’t working.
Hire for attitude, train for skills
All too often store operators hire employees who have prior retail work experience. Prior work experience can be good and bad. It’s good when they understand the fast-paced retail environment, your cash register system and the importance of not selling tobacco to minors. However, it’s bad when they bring their poor work habits with them. The best hiring principle to guide you is to hire for attitude and train for skills. You can teach new hires the basic operations of the store but you can’t train someone to be friendly, courteous and helpful to your customers if it’s not in their character already. There are so many companies, books, seminars, training videos, and so on,
that try to help retailers get the right behaviors out of the wrong employees. It doesn’t work! What does work is hiring the right job candidate in the first place. Someone who will fit into your company’s culture and complement your store operator’s management style.
More to come …
In my next few columns, I plan to focus on the three phases of the interview process: Pre-interview, interview and post-interview. I’ll provide a lot of how-to strategies and tactics to help you hire the right employees for your stores. The type of employees who will actually make you money. TR
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