Winning the battle for talent in retail

The UK has seen the ‘biggest bounce’ in hiring confidence in 20 years, according to the Employment Outlook Survey by ManpowerGroup. The war for talent is on as retailers compete to hire the talent they need. The same survey reveals that talent shortages have doubled in the past two years, from 35% in 2019 to 77% in 2021. And the UK has the highest proportion of skills shortages in Europe and is one of the highest globally

This ongoing battle for talent is driving up wages as companies offer ‘signing bonuses’ in an attempt to find the people they need.

Fundamentally, retailers cannot operate without the right people with the right skills in the right place at the right time. They need people to deliver customer service and without that reputation and revenue levels are directly impacted.

Winning the talent race

Depending on what research you read the staff turnover rate in retail, prior to the pandemic varies somewhere between 15% and a heady 70%. Add a potential 31% of UK jobseekers would now considering working in social care, which means winning the talent battle is a business imperative.

Once you’ve attracted the people you need, onboarding them and keeping them longer term is the next challenge. You don’t need us to tell you how expensive it is to recruit, onboard and train and the strain on the business and HR.

There isn’t a silver bullet. However focussing on these areas is where retailers are winning the talent battle and seeing significant benefits across their business

1. Decrease the time spent recruiting
2. Reduce the financial costs of hiring
3. Reduced cost of onboarding and training new employees
4. Increased efficiency across the onboarding processes, enable staff to be fully contributing members of the team, faster
5. Training efficiencies. Increasing the pace of training and reducing the number of poorly trained staff who are not yet fulling contributing

In an industry that is heavily reliant on the under 25 and student demographic, the ability to accelerate the recruitment, onboarding and training processes and reduce costs is paramount.

Using technology to your advantage

Recruitment for a retail business can be tough, having to juggle numerous administrative tasks throughout the process. Using technology will solve the challenges highlighted above. And you’ll reap the rewards by reducing the time spent winning new staff. Technology also lightens the load when it comes to time spent managing your staff. Employee self-service is really winning out giving complete transparency and accessible from any device.

Technology can really help automate the search, onboarding and training processes. It will also remove keying repetition by using the same candidate information all the way through to employee status. The significant win is reducing the elapsed time through the process, enabling you to select and onboard new staff fast. And that’s what everyone want: both employer and employee.

And when there isn’t enough time in the day to get everything done, because you are short of staff, rely on technology that really does work.

Solving the key HR challenges for Retailers