By Maggie Bayless

For most retailers I know, interviewing and hiring new staff is a critical aspect of their business, but is not one that they especially enjoy. Besides having to fight the year-round battle of high turnover, most retailers also must hire additional staff for the critical fourth-quarter holidays. Since holiday employees are with us such a short time, and because they are working exactly during the time when we expect (and need) staff to be at peak performance, how well we recruit, screen, and select them can significantly impact our bottom lines: Product quality, service quality, and financial.

Installing a good hiring system is the best way to increase your chances of effectively hiring staff for the holidays. But what if you just haven’t gotten that system in place and now it is time to start hiring your temporary holiday staff? Are you doomed to failure? Of course not. In fact, you’ve probably done all right in the past — otherwise, installing that hiring system would have been a higher priority. But following are some ideas that you can incorporate starting tomorrow to improve your interviewing and hiring processes and therefore, improve your bottom lines.

Role-playing
Interviewing effectively is a skill, and like all skills, it requires practice. Providing your managers with opportunities to practice their interviewing techniques by role-playing, either one-on-one with an HR expert or as part of a class, is the best possible way to improve interviewing skills without having to use job candidates as guinea pigs.

If you have Job Descriptions and Candidate Profiles, use them for the practice sessions. If not, then the manager can use the role-play to practice and perfect a clear, concise explanation of what the job entails. Make copies of a few old applications and after deleting the names, use them for the role-plays. In each role-play session, have the trainer play the role of the job candidate (using a duplicate copy of the application to help remember details of past jobs, etc.). As they say, “Practice makes perfect.” More practice will reduce the amount of time required for interviews. During the holidays, it is often necessary to interview many candidates in a short amount of time. Improving your interviewers’ efficiency and effectiveness is a good bottom-line investment.

By simulating probable work situations, role-plays can also be used during the interview to help establish whether the candidate is a good fit for the job. When I interview candidates for our ZingTrain division, I ask each person to role-play answering a telephone call from a disgruntled deli customer who’s calling to complain about the sandwich he/she had at lunch that day. Unfortunately, this is not an unlikely occurrence since our ZingTrain division regularly receives calls from people who are trying to call a different Zingerman’s business. If the candidate’s inclination is to apologize and figure out a way to help the customer, I know I want to pursue the interview further. If their first reaction is to say, “You have the wrong number; we don’t make the sandwiches,” I begin bringing the interview to an end.

Trial Shifts
Involving more that just the manager and someone from HR in the hiring decision can greatly increase the chances of a good fit between the candidate and your organization. Most managers know that the crew’s support (or lack thereof) can make or break a new hire’s success. So why not get some input from the crew before the hiring decision is made? Two ways that we’ve done that include having supervisors and/or frontline staff conduct the initial interviews and having candidates work a “trial shift.”

Typically, the trial shift is a two- to four-hour shift in which the candidate works side by side with a trainer in a position with no (or very, very limited) customer contact. We arrange trial shifts for candidates who seem promising during the interview process. The trial shift not only provides us with an opportunity to evaluate the applicant’s skills, but also a chance for the applicant to spend a little time in the midst of the environment they are hoping to join, to engage with their prospective coworkers, and to experience the physical space in which they might be working. After all, baking bread at home can be your passion, but standing over a bench rolling loaves with eight other people for hours at a time is a different experience entirely. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad experience, but it is certainly not what everyone who thinks they want to be a baker expects. It’s better for both the applicant and the business to find out at the end of the trial shift — rather than after the candidate is hired — that the match is not a good fit.

To make the trial shift most effective, decide in advance the one or two skills that determine the success of someone working this position. Remember that these skills may differ for someone who is working just for the holidays than for someone being considered for a permanent position. For example, our Mail Order production staff who assemble gift baskets year-round need to know what products go into each basket so they can pull them from inventory. For the holidays, however, we don’t expect the temporary staff to learn the contents of each basket because someone else pulls the product. However, the holiday production staff does need to know how to assemble each basket so that it looks just like the display sample. Therefore, gift basket assembly is the skill we focus on most during a trial shift for holiday Mail Order production staff.

Pre-tests
Pre-tests are a quick, easy tool that can save you money. If you use them, however, make sure that you use them for all candidates for a particular position. Otherwise, you risk the appearance of having discriminated. We have found the most effective pre-tests are those with approximately five key questions about the business:

1. What is our address?
2. What is our phone number?
3. What hours are we open?
4. What are the names of the founding partners/owners?
5. What is our signature product and why is it so special?

You get the idea — the pre-test will ask all the information that will make the employee’s life easier from day one because it’s information that customers just assume every employee knows. At the interview’s conclusion, give the candidate the list of questions (with the answers!) to study. Clearly explain your expectation that he/she must know the answers to those questions the next time you meet (usually a second interview or a trial shift) as knowing them is a prerequisite for being hired. The next time you meet with the candidate, either hand him/her a list of the questions (no answers, of course), or ask the questions and have him/her respond verbally. If they know all the answers, great! They’ve made a small but meaningful step towards learning all they need to know to be successful in your organization. If they haven’t learned the material, you have a clear indication that they are not a good candidate because if he/she can’t take the time to learn the answers to these simple questions that will help them be successful, it is doubtful that they’ll take the initiative to learn the many other things necessary to positively contribute to your organization.

The Smile Rule
The simplest tool is perhaps the most powerful of all. When interviewing for a service position, don’t hire anyone who doesn’t smile when you greet them to start the interview. Think about it. If they don’t smile at you, the person they are trying to impress in order to get the job, how likely is it that they will smile at your customers and coworkers at the end, or even the beginning of a long shift in mid-December? I’d say the chances are slim to none. Heeding the “smile rule” is a wonderful bottom-line investment. It costs you nothing, and can help you weed out prospective employees who are likely to have a negative impact on your service quality.

Although presented in the context of holiday hiring, all of these ideas may be used when interviewing for permanent positions as well. And while the “smile rule” may involve the least effort to implement, none of these ideas requires the expenditure of much time or any money. If using role-playing, trial shifts, pre-tests, and/or the smile rule helps you avoid even one mis-hire, any time investment you make will be paid back in spades as you will avoid the costs of lost training time, wasted management time, and probably, some service and product quality issues as well.