HR focus on attracting right employees and keeping them happy
Attracting the right candidates is among the biggest challenges facing retailers as they seek to keep costs under control and manage their businesses through a period of great change as digital comes more to the fore. By Glynn Davis
This was a theme referenced in a number of the speakers’ presentations at The Retail Bulletin HR Summit in London last week and is particularly tough to deal with for the faster growing retailers. Among them is Boohoo.com that has been hiring at a cracking rate – 481 people were added in 2014 and 283 have so far joined the fashion retailer this year.
Recruiting the right people
Paul McNulty, resourcing manager at Boohoo.com, told delegates that in 2013 the company sought to both reduce the costs of recruiting and to improve its success at hiring the right people by improving its recruitment website, by making it more truly reflect its retail site and branding.
Around 70% of hiring was done direct and 30% through agencies, with an average cost per hire of £1,352. To change this McNulty says: “In 2015 we launched a new site that linked to our consumer brand and we focused on direct and in-house recruitment. We needed to convey the right messaging as well as our brand values.”
Working with ePloy a new site has been developed to include more visuals, videos and conversations with existing employees. At the back-end it has tracking and CRM capabilities to better handle the journey of candidates.
This has had a significant impact on the company and helped it attract 2,000 applications per month on the back of 23,000 job searches every four weeks. This has resulted in 94% of recruitment now being sourced directly by Boohoo.com and the cost per hire has been reduced to only £288.
Another fast-growing brand Yo! Sushi has also felt the strain of attracting the right calibre of people as it continues to expand its estate and has the objective of increasing the level of promotions filled internally from 70% to 80% over the next 18 months.
Suresh Banarse, people director at Yo! Sushi, says: “We’re continually running out of people as we expand. And as recruitment costs get cut then we have to think through our [recruitment] campaigns more carefully.”
Effective recruitment campaigns
The company’s recent ‘Feel The Yo!’ campaign was part of a “recruitment brand re-boot” for it to convey the message of “what we’re all about and how to then attract the best people”. It involved using Instagram to find the faces of Yo! Sushi (from its employees), with the selected images then used on recruitment advertising and various collateral in the restaurants.
Banarse says the most important part of the exercise was to deliver the brand’s personality and promise as well as: “Needing to understand who you want to recruit, involving your team (like at Pret A Manger), bringing in like-minded people, promoting a culture of opportunity and looking up to good competitors.”
The latter point is very important, according to the managing director of The Innovation Beehive, MOK, who suggests most people fail to look outside their organisations for inspiration. He cited his client British Gas who he took to visit Innocent drinks and Santander to gain ideas.
MOK outlined other aspects that HR would benefit from when developing their businesses such as: being clear about who they want to hire; having absolute customer empathy; being upfront about the company’s culture; recognising that innovation does not necessarily have to be blue-sky thinking; and having a rebellious streak.
Happiness is crucial
Retaining the culture has been of specific importance for Charlie Glynn, people director at Harris + Hoole, since Tesco took a stake in the coffee bar business. Simplistically it has involved employees wearing their own clothes to work, which she says has an impact on how happy they are. This is a more important measure for the company than employee engagement, suggests Glynn.
Debbie Moore, former HR director at Spirit Pub Company, suggests there is a correlation between happiness and engagement and metrics like Net Promoter Scores (NPS), retention and customer service. She reckons, therefore, that there is a business case for ensuring your employees are happy.
As well as wearing their own clothes employees are increasingly allowed to use their own digital devices in the workplace as technology and social media platforms become ever more important for HR.
Embracing technology
Kate Allison, head of HR at FitFlop, is a big advocate of using Yammer as an internal social media tool to connect people throughout the business: “I think you now need to mix social media with business. It brings people closer together and has helped us build links between our locations around the world. It’s also invaluable as an on-boarding tool. As well as the company giving common sense guidelines on Yammer the most popular use is for [employees] knowing what other FitFloppers have been doing at weekends.”
Richard Doherty, senior director of product at Workday, agrees technology is becoming increasingly important as HR navigates its way through many different challenges. For one thing it enables retailers to collect data and to act on the insights that can then be generated from the information.
Utilising data
“Analytics is the biggest competitive advantage that our customers have – provided they have a single platform solution with a single version of the truth. Most organisations are on this journey,” he says.
Until now HR had not had the support of data for decision-making, unlike their company’s financial department, but things are starting to change – prompted by a variety of catalysts such as a desire for simplification and a need for businesses to move quicker.
One of the uses of this data is for retention as it can give a recommendation on those employees that are more likely to leave. “These systems are about enhanced decision support through recommendations that can be acted upon,” explains Doherty.
But care has to be taken that the technology does not get in the way of human interaction. Helen Hyde, personnel director at Waitrose, says the company installed a new appraisal system but over the last six months they have been simplifying it with a ‘let’s talk, not type’ philosophy.
Don’t forget human interaction
She says one of the advantages of the structure of Waitrose’s parent company John Lewis is that it involves lots of layers of management and that this enables plenty of personal communication whereby people’s aspirations are clearly known. And there is also a clear path for them to progress along because there are no big leaps onto the next step.
However, she fully understands that technology is a great enabler and that partners at John Lewis now have access to all work-related materials and product information via the internet.
“Our content has all moved online and is available on mobile. We’ll need to be more productive if we’re going to be paying partners £14 [as a result of the Living Wage], which will involve using technology more effectively. We need to make sure we leverage this in order that it is fun and engaging for our partners,” she says, in the knowledge that happy and engaged employees lead to happy, more satisfied, and higher spending customers.
