Building a long term recruitment strategy for your company will take time and continuous refinement. As the talent landscape continues to change and the war for talent becomes more predominant, companies will need to build recruitment processes that are sustainable over time but also easily adaptable to changes within the market. Planning ahead on how your organization will attract and retain great talent in the long run will help you be a step ahead of the game. Every company wants to build and sustain a high quality workforce but to do so you must be willing to continuously invest in driving improvements to your recruitment processes.

How does your company drive a consistent candidate flow to your job postings?

Do you place a high priority on building out a great candidate experience?

As the competitive landscape for talent becomes stronger, how are you dealing with building a recruitment and retention strategy to win the war for talent in Canada?

Do you use reporting to identify areas of improvement in your retail recruitment processes?

Having on-demand access to hiring data allows you to report on key areas in your retail recruitment processes.  For example, reporting allows you to use the data you collect during the application process to see how many visitors you are attracting from a certain posting and how many of these visitors are being converted into candidates. The interviewing process helps you identify key numbers such as hiring ratios and the time and cost associated with these hires. Post hire data allows you to see a clearer picture of your overall recruitment process by looking at quality, engagement, turnover, and KPI results.

Here are 3 best practice areas to report on that will help in driving the most value for your business:

Applicant Reporting:

1)    Number of Visitors to Your Postings: This number helps you see if there is a substantial gap between visitors and applicants. It can help identify if there are areas to optimize to help turn these visitors into applicants (ie. posting more relevant content such as a blog, including employee testimonials, or improving your career site branding).

2)    Number of Candidates Applying: Knowing the number of candidates who apply will help you measure if you are reaching your targets, compare results to other postings or regions, and identify areas that may need additional resources to increase numbers. If the number is high, you can use the same style, template, and/or placement to help receive the same results for future postings.

3)    Applicant Conversion Rates: This helps you see the ratio of those applying in comparison to those visiting the site. A strong conversion rate is between 15-20%, however keep in mind that this number varies depending on industry, region, and how specific the job requirements are.

4)    Measurable Actions On Site: Knowing which pages are viewed most and what actions candidates are taking when on your site can help you see where you should focus your content and help you better understand what they are looking for.

5)    Sources of Traffic to the Site:  Knowing what is driving candidates to your website or careers page can help you find areas to optimize and point out which job posting sites are working best for you.

Process Reporting:

1)    Interview to Hire Ratios: This helps you see the quality of candidates who are being interviewed and whether they are being converted into hires. If this ratio is low, you may need to reassess your screening and application process to receive better quality candidates.

2)    Time to Hire: Being able to predict the time it will take for future hires in similar roles will help you allot that time into your expectations and goals. Also, if this number is high it can identify that there may be areas of improvement to consider (ie. broadcasting to more sites, investing in advertising, or using social media).

3)    Cost of Hire: This helps you break down what jobs are costing you the most and which may need fewer resources. If the cost is high you may want to consider new ways to promote the job such as social media or recruitment agency involvement.

Results Reporting:

1)    Quality of Hire: Quality ratings help show if the candidates are being converted into great hires based on success rates in their new roles.

2)    Engagement Levels: Engagement helps you identify if your employees are connecting with your brand and happy within your organization. Engagement levels ultimately affect turnover rates, so if levels are low you may need to reposition your employment branding and find areas to improve on to help build stronger retention rates.

3)    Turnover Rates: Breaking down turnover rates by region, store, role, or other specifics your business deems as important is essential. Turnover is costly so it’s key to identify where you have high rates and improve upon them to save costs and retain talent.

4)    Key Performance Indicators: Once you’ve established what defines success in each role you can measure employees’ performance based off this. These KPIs may include metrics such as customer services ratings or sales per hour, etc.

On-demand access to hiring data can allow retailers to report on key performance indicators such as conversion rates, hiring ratios, turnover rates and engagement levels. Each area holds great value and can help give strong insights into the quality of their retail recruitment processes and current employees.

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As a Retailer, how do you refine your candidate profiles? Once you’ve made hires do you implement any type of post hire quality check to ensure your recruitment processes are successful?

Using technology to execute business processes is more efficient, cohesive and allows companies to operate effectively from many different places around the world.  This is especially important when a business has multiple locations –documents, data and correspondence can be distributed throughout the company in real-time.

Siegel’s bagels has been a Vancouver staple for the last 23 years. Recently, founder Joel Siegel’s daughter has started her own venture with a new store, Rosemary Rocksalt. 

Do your engagement surveys give insight into how your staff are feeling and engaging with your brand – right this minute?

How are you measuring post hire performance of your employees? Many companies use candidate assessments to score, pre-screen and shortlist potential hires. However, some companies fail to realize that the data collected during these assessments can be of great value after a hire is made. If you are not currently measuring post hire employee performance, you may be wondering how accurate your assessments are and whether your turnover rates have improved since implementing an assessment. If you have been completing new hire check-ins you can see the vast benefits of collecting new hires’ data, measuring employee success rates and refining questions, which all ultimately help drive an overall better assessment process.  
 
Implementing candidate assessments into your recruitment process is an essential step in finding great talent. Assessments are used to evaluate a candidate’s knowledge, skills, abilities and potential cultural fit. The goal of using assessments is to help hiring managers predict if the candidate would be a successful fit for their business. The data collected on these candidates can then provide hiring managers with feedback on competencies and help predict future employee performance. Collecting consistent data over time is best practice for improving and creating an assessment that will be of the highest value to your business. Once a candidate has been hired there needs to be a Post Hire Quality Check completed 60 to 90 days after the start date. Managers can then follow up on their new hires abilities and evaluate if their assessment rankings are true to their current job performance.

Check out our High-Volume Recruitment Process Infographic on some more of our best practices for retail recruitment.

One Size Doesn’t Fit All
Defining the right assessment score for a perfect hire takes time and consistent refinement of the survey. Companies often fail to realize that having a successful assessment tool is not a one-time implementation. Assessments need to be continuously updated and refined based on follow-up data collected by hiring managers. Post Hire Quality Checks need to be continuously administered to make sure the assessments are accurate and expose any key areas of improvement. Often, hiring managers overestimate the value of assessments and fail to evaluate the quality of their hires based on their performance. Companies may set a scoring range of 0 to 100 but only review those who scored above 75, meaning they may only be hiring candidates who ranked highest on their assessment. But what about those who fall just below the line? It is essential to know how these top rated candidates are performing once they have been hired. Managers need to ask questions such as “are these hires sticking around once they have been hired?” or “do they have higher turnover rates compared to other employees?” Once you’ve asked these important questions you may need to adjust the scoring metrics and add in more relevant questions to your assessment.

Measuring Effectiveness
The best way to go about improving your hiring practices is to have the manager give quality feedback on employees’ performances once they have started working. Performance feedback should be based on what the business defines as key performance indicators (KPIs) of a great hire. This may include metrics such as sales per hour or customer service ratings.  The purpose of the original assessment is to define areas of effective job performance and cultural fit, so why wouldn’t you follow up to make sure these are being effectively measured based on actual performance in a work setting?

Improvement & Refinement
In order to improve your recruiting and hiring processes you need to implement ongoing analysis, improvement and refinement of your assessment tools. A short form survey should be distributed by the hiring manager to all new staff 60 to 90 days after their start dates. Questions should surround employee performance in the training phase, current performance, strengths, weaknesses and potential for growth. All these areas should help tie back to the original questions asked in the assessment to see if there is alignment and consistency between the two. Using an assessment tool, implementing a Post Hire Quality Check, and making the necessary improvements based on follow-up data is best practice for building successful recruitment processes to hire the best quality candidates.

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