When hiring people to keep your retail locations humming you need to fill roles fast, often at short notice. And in this crowded market, brands are all trying to nab the same talent. Doubly-so if you’re focussed on hiring in the 16-22 youth bracket.
The answer could be sitting right under your nose: Building a talent community filled with the 99% of applicants who DON’T get the job.
When attracting great talent, we can forget that for every successful applicant, there might be 50 who were great, but just not right for this role – maybe their availability didn’t match this time or they were better suited to another role. That’s a lot of great talent to leave behind. And worse, next time you need to hire someone, you have to start again with new job ads and signs in your window.
Why not gather up those great candidates and keep them warm, so when the right job comes available, they can leap onto the floor – without wasting time on advertising and screening.
How does a Talent Community work exactly?
If you’ve worked on a shop floor, the idea of a talent community should feel familiar. It’s the digital equivalent of that drawer full of resumes. The big difference is that an online talent community lets you pre-qualify these candidates so you know they’re all great prospects. Every time you or your store managers have a new role available, you can search and filter based on say, store location and vacant shifts. A few clicks builds an instant longlist.
Most importantly, you can nurture your talent community with emails or messages encouraging candidates to update their information and indicate if they’re still available. Imagine a searchable pool of profiles – full of the up-to-date information you need to make hiring decisions. No need to advertise every role, no need for your candidates to keep filling out new application forms and no more calling people only to find they’re not looking anymore.
Better for you and better for the candidate (which is also better for you again)
Your candidates are most likely people who also shop in your stores, buy your products and interact with your brand.
A fun hiring experience that also makes them feel respected and valued is important for your recruitment success, but also important for your bottom line.
A Talent Community invites candidates to register interest in working for your company, not just a specific role they saw advertised on Seek. They’re putting their hand up to say “I like your brand and I’m keen to work for you in any role that might fit me”. If they don’t get the first job, that’s ok. If they’re in the community, they’ll get another chance next time the right role comes up.
Some of the world’s biggest retailers are adopting this way of recruiting for high volume roles. At Weirdly, we’re helping brands like Target and Kmart build talent communities and speed up their in-store hiring with clever automation. Other brands are doing similar things with spreadsheets or CRM software.
Why? Because with a talent community, you have a bunch of great people who are actively engaged with your brand, just waiting for the right opportunity to crop up. It cuts the time to hire from weeks to days (or hours in some cases!). And most of all, it gets you better quality hires which, at the end of the day, is the really important thing.
- About the author: Keren Phillips is VP Marketing/Co-founder at getweirdly.com
