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It’s an ever-changing world, but the last few years have had most talent and human resources professionals on their toes — especially those within the workforce management for retail arena. All types of retail establishments, small businesses, stores and companies have had to revamp their hiring and retention strategies because of unprecedented candidate competition and new expectations.
Next year: rinse and repeat. It will be even more about optimizing your career site, implementing an applicant tracking system (ATS), identifying your best source of talent, ramping up remote hiring capabilities, using artificial intelligence and machine learning, utilizing skills-based hiring, requesting candidate feedback, and using talent acquisition strategies for better hiring in 2023.
First off, a successful workplace has always been about culture. More and more companies are incorporating work-life integration and employee wellbeing, promoting internal mobility, and aligning company values with employee priorities. Businesses, companies, shops, restaurants, and multi-store and outlets that are focused on implementing a better workforce management for retail experience are investing in technology that allows them to create a workplace offering balance and open communication for the foreseeable future.
These shifts will continue to shape human resource challenges next year, from keeping workers engaged in new work environments to weathering the tight labor market. Retail and other industry workforce leaders have had to get more agile in the last few years — and 2023 looks to be no different.
What’s the best way to transform your retail workforce management model?
Workforce Management for Retail Channels: Keeping Candidates Engaged
Maintaining candidate engagement is key, but it’s no easy task. You’ll see this particularly if you have candidates interviewing with other companies at the same time, or if you have an extensive hiring process.
This is why it’s so important to use the same communication channels your candidates do, which is where a smart workforce management for retail solution comes into play. Despite the fact phone calls often go straight to voicemail and emails get lost in spam folders, text-messaging technology (also known as SMS) can help cut through the noise. Traditional methods of communication like email aren’t cutting it anymore. You can often land a new hire by texting your candidates, which usually garners an open-rate in the 90 percentile range and an average response time of just 80 – 100 seconds.
Making the Journey More Automated: Workforce Management for Retail
Making a candidate’s journey engaging and personalized doesn’t have to be hard. Digital communications make it easier than ever to build out complex workflows that reach candidates when and where they are — with the right messages.
The bottom line is: even a lean human resources team — or one tasked with workforce management for retail — can automate manual processes to become high-touch when it comes to talent acquisition for your retail operation. What’s even better is, you can do this without sacrificing ongoing employee retention.
Consistent Messaging and Branding
At each stage of the candidate journey and your workforce management for retail expedition, all branding and messaging should be consistent to deliver a seamless candidate experience. Candidates won’t feel disconnected or frustrated no matter how many touchpoints are used or third-party applications they use.
You can use pre-designed templates for any type of communication to keep things consistent. Any member of your team can create professional-looking communications without having to be a designer or developer.
Make Application Paths the Quick and Smart Way
The process of filling out another application form or providing the same credentials can be exhausting for retail job candidates. Even though it’s not always possible, hiring teams can make an impact by streamlining and simplifying the application journey.
With the right workforce management for retail solution, you can create complex message paths with automated workflows based on previous interactions, qualification benchmarks, engagement levels, and more.
Don’t be Too Formal: Personalization is Not Impossible
It’s no longer possible to send out communications that aren’t personalized for the recipient in an era where every advertisement targets buying habits, geographic location, or some other particular detail. This is particularly true for potential hires who need to grow and feel valued.
When you’re dealing with a lot of candidates and roles, personalization can seem impossible. It doesn’t have to be that way. Using an automated communication platform, you can leverage data from set parameters — such as candidate names, job locations, and role functions — and design messages at scale so applicants don’t feel like just another candidate.
A High Priority for Every Employer
No matter what the scenario or type of retail business, being able to acquire and retain top talent and workers should be a high priority for every employer in the market for a workforce management for retail software platform. Whether it’s a new outlook on company culture, creating a better employee experience, or battling an ever-changing candidate field, the past few years have brought unique challenges in retail hiring.
However, this doesn’t mean you rest on your laurels when it comes to setting your hiring and retention processes up for success:
- Hiring stages. Every step of your retail hiring process can be seamless. You can find candidates, post syndication of jobs, an make sure qualified candidates know about your job openings. One-click posting to 20-plus job boards is at your fingertips with the right workforce management for retail solution, and so is publishing jobs on major job-listing websites.
- Referrals are powerful. You can get co-workers to refer job candidates, as well as make your careers webpage stand out and look awesome to attract candidates. You can also improve the candidate experience with customizable, mobile-ready careers pages.
- ATS (Applicant Tracking System). Using a powerful applicant tracking system to replace email and spreadsheets is key, as well as getting a better handle on your candidate pipeline. Recruiting stages can be customizable using default workflow tools to track candidates.
- Keep up to date. You can keep track of your candidate’s latest activities in real time, streamline redundancy, automate repetitive tasks, and trigger emails to assign tasks between stages.
- Candidate interviews. Testing within interviews was never easier than now. You can take your interview to the next level with revolutionary interview tools.
- Manage guided interviews. Make interview guides that are customizable and mobile-friendly to help interviewers ask insightful questions. Also, scheduling interviews is easy, and so is viewing availability on personal calendars.
- Team up and compare candidates. Assessing prospective employees with candidate scorecards and assessments is key. So are e-signatures and job offers. You can eliminate unnecessary paperwork and save time by digitizing the entire job-offer process with workforce management for retail. Instantly create and send offer letters, and do it through easy-to-generate fields and digital communications.
- Keep track of every version of your offer template. You can maintain total observation and control of what’s happened with your candidate templates so you can go back and fix them if needed.
- Faster onboarding and offers with eSign. Streamline your offer acceptance and onboarding processes with complete digitization of the process.
- Keep learning and improving. Through analyses and reports, discover hidden inefficiencies and opportunities in your entire retail recruiting process. Make sure recruiters know about your job openings, and discover your process bottlenecks and where you can find the best candidates through those journeys.
- Keep compliant and make it yours. Prepare compliance reports for legal matters and fulfill reporting requirements. With customizable reports, you’ll have unprecedented access to your data.
VCS Software
VCS Software is your all-in-one solutions platform when it comes to workforce management for retail software — whether your business, store, shop, restaurant, or multi-site retail operation is large, medium, or small. VCS Software provides the right solutions within human resources and workforce management — and so much more.