Talent management | How to survive the credit crunch

Richard Doherty, VP Operations (UK) at Jobpartners
This article was published in August 2008

Having the best people is a prerequisite for any retail organisation, no more so than in times of an economic downturn when the quality of each employee is now more vital than ever before.

As consumer spending decreases, retailers cannot afford poor performers so must pull out all the stops to find and recruit the best people around and maintain their margins. Despite this, many retailers fail to get the fundamental recruitment processes right, particularly in relation to their online channel.

Online recruitment is one of the biggest growth areas in the HR sector, providing employers with simpler and more efficient recruitment processes with genuine, tangible cost saving results to feed back to the board.

However, recent research from HR consultancy Hire Strategies revealed that only 40 out of the 100 leading UK retail sites it evaluated were considered good enough to attract candidates Retailers arenít just missing out on quality candidates, they also run the risk of damaging their company brand and losing valuable customers.

Online failings

In todayís ëconnectedí world, having an online presence is a must. Whilst many retailers have made significant investments in their e-commerce sites their career site is often overlooked. First impressions count, so just in the same way as an e-commerce site should engage with customers and promote the retailerís brand, a career site needs to promote the retailerís employment brand. And most importantly, potential candidates are potential customers. The candidate experience is crucial.

Often the difference between a good or bad career site can be down to navigation and process. The Hire Strategies research revealed that more than 40% of the retailers it assessed had little or no online application process at all, pointing to a lack of understanding of how people today search for jobs.

First, the process should be appropriate to the role that they are trying to fill. Retailers should not go overboard, particularly if it is for a job with limited career progression. Taking 35-40 minutes to complete an online form is excessive, especially when the candidate has no loyalty towards the company. And worse yet for any candidate is completing a form or assessment that goes into a seemingly black hole with no feedback. Overall poor process can reflect badly on the company and employer brand and can deter talented applicants.

Website accessibility is an issue that affects many sectors, no more so than in the retail sector where promoting workforce diversity does reflect on the companyís brand. The Hire Strategies research revealed that half of the sites it assessed had failed to achieve compliance targets. Career sites need to be more openly accessible to everyone. In addition to showing greater corporate responsibility, such an approach will widen the recruitment net and can lead to a better quality of applicants.

Finally, there is very little point designing a highly accessible and interactive career site if job seekers cannot find the site easily. If the career site is a microsite off the main home page the link to it needs to be highly visible and easy to find. Equally, the career site needs to be found easily using internet search engines such as Google, making search engine optimisation (SEO) extremely important. For those retailers wanting to maximise their online presence and outperform job boards and recruitment agencies for the best candidates, the benefits of SEO can often outweigh conventional advertising. With the increased popularity of Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, RSS feeds and social networking sites such as Facebook, ensuring online visibility is a necessity.

Benefits of online recruitment

Correctly deployed technology can certainly help improve the online recruitment process by increasing its speed and efficiency, and importantly at less cost.

Specific benefits of online recruitment include:

- Less money spent on traditional print advertising: Print adverts can be shorter with directions to the career site for more detailed information on the company and the job opportunity

- Building an ongoing talent pool: Career sites can provide applicants with the opportunity to apply for specific vacancies or register speculative applications. By retaining speculative applications, retailers can contact star applicants when an appropriate vacancy arises.

- Reducing administration: As all applicants are held on a single online recruitment system, they can be contacted by the simple click of a mouse which can significantly reduce admin time and costs

- Better candidate assessment: With online recruitment, retailers are potentially fishing from an ocean not a pond. However, with the right assessment tools retailers can quickly identify the best candidates in an efficient and objective manner

- Less money spent on recruitment agencies: Moving online means that not only can the company expand their recruiting sources, but better analyse their effectiveness to focus that precious recruitment budget.

Gain and retain

Attracting and acquiring the right talent is only the first hurdle in the talent management. The on-boarding experience sets the stage for the employer culture, and then once on board, employees need to be kept engaged.

The attrition rate within the retail sector is notoriously high, so it is important that the good impression that employees gained during the recruitment process is transferred throughout the full company experience.

Online recruitment should be the first stage of a holistic and integrated talent management strategy, whereby HR departments and line managers can identify performance goals, create development plans and agree to benefits and compensation with employees. Ultimately, an engaged employee leads to improved employee satisfaction resulting in enhanced business performance.

The emergence of social networking also provides retailers with an opportunity to deploy similar, corporate based networking tools internally to encourage greater employee engagement. Through the sharing of knowledge, news, goals or just catching up with colleagues, internal networks can create a real sense of community and can increase company involvement. This ultimately leads to greater employee engagement, particularly amongst graduates who are typically hard to retain.

A retailerís career site functions as a shop window for potential candidates and should be maximised accordingly. Those retailers with a comprehensive online recruitment strategy stand to benefit most of all in both their recruitment endeavours to attract and retain the right people, particularly in a difficult economic climate.

By Richard Doherty, Jobpartners