By Maggie Bayless

Industries in which employee turnover isn’t a problem may be out there, but retailing certainly isn’t one of them. Finding, hiring, and retaining good people are the biggest challenges facing retailers. Many owners and managers that I talk to are often discouraged by how hard it is — regardless of the economy. Perhaps the most frustrating situation is hiring a new staffperson, only to have them quit a month or two later. At that point, we’ve usually invested a great deal in terms of training but haven’t really recouped much in terms of productivity, which is certainly a negative bottom-line impact. Therefore, making improvements to your interviewing and hiring systems (and then making sure that your managers are trained in how to use those systems) is usually a very good bottom-line investment.

A good hiring system:

1. Identifies candidates who are a good fit for a specific position and for the organization overall.
2. Gives desirable candidates the information they need to decide if this organization is the place they want to work.
3. Avoids the act (or appearance) of discrimination by following a consistent, legal process with all candidates.

Recently, I’ve been working with Leah Trulik from our HR staff on updating the “Effective Interviewing and Hiring” class that we teach internally. Doing that work reminded me that hiring the right people is really the first step in an effective training program. In fact, if done well, the interviewing and hiring process itself is an opportunity to start training prospective employees on our organization’s systems and culture, as well as a way to increase the likelihood that there is a good fit between the candidate’s skills (and personality) and the organization’s needs (and personality). Following are three suggestions for ways to gather valuable information from job candidates but also to educate them about your organization’s systems and culture.

Documented Job Descriptions and Candidate Profiles
It is impossible to determine whether someone is a good fit for a position if the qualifications and expectations for the position have not been defined and documented. Therefore, developing a Job Description is the key first step in effective hiring. The more explicit you can be in defining the expectations for the job, the easier it will be for you (and for your potential candidates) to determine how well a specific individual might meet those expectations. If you have developed a training plan for the position with documented expectations for what the new hire needs to know and be able to do over the first several weeks on the job, this is an excellent thing to share during the interviewing process as well.

The Candidate Profile outlines the “ideal candidate” for the position. As with any other project, documenting your vision of success in hiring increases the likelihood that you will be successful. Taking the time to define the ideal candidate helps clarify what to look for on the application and in the interview, including success patterns in past work history and personal characteristics that are in line with your organization’s values.

An Application with Personality
Your application is often the first piece of “promotional material” about your organization that a job candidate encounters. What message does it send? What information does it solicit? Besides requesting the usual information about past work experience, our application asks a number of questions about service situations that the candidate has encountered in the past and how they handled them. The answers to these questions provide a basis for further discussion in the interview and put our emphasis on customer service right out front. We’ve also tried to incorporate Zingerman’s “look and feel” into our application so that it has more personality than a sheet torn off a standard pad of applications from the local office supply store.

Why take the time and expense to develop a customized application? Because we want to gather information that the standard applications don’t ask for and because we believe that our organization’s culture is a big selling point. Our organization is not like other organizations, so our application is not like other applications. Your organization is also unique. Shouldn’t your application reflect that? (To see a copy of Zingerman’s application, visit http://www.zingermanscommunity.com/jobs)

Interviews that Combine Assessment and Education
Obviously, an interview’s number-one objective is to determine whether the candidate is a good fit for the job — and for the organization. But we also want to sell our company by providing insights into why our organization is a great one to work for. An effective interview does both.

When possible, replicate the working conditions in the interview — the more realistic they are, the better. For example, if the job involves working in a noisy, crowded space, it doesn’t really make sense to conduct the interview in a nice, quiet corner. We learned this when we hired a number of bookkeepers that had a hard time working in the cramped, bustling office space on the second floor of the Deli. Not that having a quiet, spacious office isn’t more conducive to accurate accounting work; it is, but we don’t have that space to offer. We found it was better to get that issue right out front during the interview — therefore, we now conduct it at a table on the Deli floor.

Likewise, if the job involves coming in to work at 2:00 a.m. for a delivery shift, it makes sense to hold the interview closer to midnight than to noon. If the job involves a lot of phone work, be sure to conduct at least one interview over the phone. You get the idea.

The interview also provides a chance to model your organization’s management style and culture. For example, if great customer service, timeliness, and a friendly working environment are important parts of your culture, you’ll want to make sure to:

• Start the interview right on time
• Come to the interview completely prepared, having read the candidate’s application and developed questions specifically for him/her
• Offer the candidate something to eat or drink
• Introduce the candidate to key prospective coworkers
• End the interview by letting the candidate know what will happen next — and when
• Follow-up within (or before) that timeframe.

I can’t emphasize the importance of this last point enough — timely follow-up. The most attractive candidates are likely to be the ones who expect to hear back promptly — and who will have competing job offers. All the work we do to sell our organizations in the interview goes to waste when we don’t get back to candidates when we say we will. Even if the only news is “We haven’t yet made a decision,” reach out and touch base. Not doing so sends the message that our organization is at best disorganized and at worst, uncaring.

Is improving your interviewing and hiring processes really a good bottom-line investment? Most managers say they know within a few days whether a new hire is going to work out or not. But they also say it’s usually at least two weeks (often up to a month) before they actually terminate the relationship. Okay, let’s say the position pays $10/hour, including benefits, for forty hours a week. That’s $800 if they stay two weeks ($1,600 if they stay a month), not to mention the cost of management time, product waste, etc. So, if you can improve your interviewing and hiring systems enough to avoid even two or three mis-hires a year (and chances are it will be more), there’s $1,600 to $4,800 that can go towards your bottom line, instead of out the door with the terminated employees!