Turnover for many businesses can be a real headache. You take the time to post job ads, review job applications, set up interviews and then conduct the interviews. Your new hire starts and within a couple of weeks they quit. It happens far too many times and it is a pain. Why did the person quit? Did they have a propensity for job hopping already and you missed it on the job application? Did they start stealing from you and got enough money or merchandise and quit before you caught on to their schemes? Perhaps it was a young employee on their first job and they wanted more weekends and night shifts off so they could “hang out” with their friends. All of these are reasons for high turnover in retail stores especially. Lose too many people at once and it can cripple your business, stretch the staff you currently have and it may potentially lead to more employees quitting.
On the other end of the spectrum there are the businesses that are very careful, almost to the extreme. They go through the same hiring procedures, posting the ad, contacting applicants and conducting interviews but they add an additional step. They conduct a background check before making a job offer. Sounds good right? Making sure you aren’t hiring someone who will steal from you or threaten others in the workplace. Here’s the catch, hire the wrong background check company and you may be losing great employees because pre-employment screening is taking too long to conduct. Thoroughly vetting a prospective new hire is fine, but if that candidate has to wait too long for results they may decide to go somewhere else.
I know of one retailer that conducts pre-employment screenings but in some of their stores they have a problem with retention rates. In one instance the management team was reduced to the store manager and an assistant. The assistant left the company and only the manager and a skeleton crew were running the building. The store manager was trying to get new managers on board as soon as he could. He was working 7 days a week and personnel from other stores were going up and helping to fill in as managers on duty so the store manager could get a break.
Reportedly the store manager had a department manager candidate to hire and attempted to get the background check expedited to give him some help. The request was denied and it took several additional weeks for the positions to begin to be filled. I heard through a third party that the manager was close to quitting due to the staffing problems at this store and the failure to get critical jobs filled. Several weeks later the person the manager wanted to fast track was cleared and hired for the store. While this was an extreme situation, consider how close the manager came to leaving the company.
What about the chance the district level manager or higher took with the candidate. The position was not an extremely high paying job and there are plenty of other opportunities with similar or even better pay. It would have been easy for the candidate to just find another place to work with the length of time the background check was taking.
Not having a pre-employment screening on candidates is foolish. You are gambling with your business and profitability if you bring on the wrong person for your staff. Hire the wrong Background Check Company that doesn’t recognize the value of timeliness when conducting your checks for you and you risk the loss of potentially very strong candidates. It is important to find a company that understands the challenges retail owners and managers face every day. From taking steps to grow profits, combating theft and fraud, to retaining the best people to work in their stores it can be overwhelming. Give Loss Prevention Systems a call to discuss background check options with people who understand the challenges of the retail industry. Proper hiring and operating profitable stores go hand in hand.
The retail industry is facing many challenges.
Retail shelving along with store design has a huge impact on shoplifting losses. Typically a shoplifter likes and needs privacy even if only for a moment. So why not keep that in mind when designing or remodeling your store. Your shelving and isles can work for you by simply considering several factors.
Growing up did you ever do something dumb and your mom or your dad would ask you, “What were you thinking?” Having lived in south for the past 32 years I have learned of the local colloquialism when someone does something stupid, “Didn’t your momma teach you better?” Unfortunately, as a young boy I did a lot of dumb things making me wonder if my brain developed a lot later in life than most people. For example, I had a propensity for walking behind batters warming up to go to the plate for my father’s teen baseball teams. I ended up with more than one fat lip from my stupidity…obviously not learning the lesson the first time. I had a fascination with electrical outlets and wires and old rotary dial telephones…I won’t go into details but no they didn’t work when the wires were pushed into the outlet, I was not injured but I had one very busy guardian angel.
Loss Prevention Officers and Managers catch shoplifters and dishonest employees. That is a common perception and in some stores it may be a true picture of what Loss Prevention departments do, with the additional caveat that they may have uniformed people who conduct receipt checks. If this is all that the department does it can be hard to sell store managers on the value of having them on staff if the budget for them comes directly from the store. It is even more difficult for small, independent retailers to justify hiring a Loss Prevention Officer although if the store is in a high crime area they may contract a security guard. There was a time when there was an “us versus them” mindset between store managers and Loss Prevention teams. Over time some larger companies have focused their Loss Prevention teams more on operational issues. For example, I worked for a company that had Loss Prevention conduct food product out of date audits. Their position was that this was a safety issue so it fell to the Loss Prevention team. I had no problem doing the audits, but as I looked at the amount of out of date items I was finding I had to question what the freight team was doing when they were stocking. Who was auditing their work because there were a lot of FIFO (First In First Out) issues I was identifying that were causing out of date problems.
In the United States alone, there are over half a million shoplifting incidents everyday. The losses are in the billions and the deaths associated to shoplifting incidents are numerous. Whether you have a store policy where every shoplifter is prosecuted, or whether your store prosecutes only if the amount stolen is over a hundred dollars, the policies and procedures have to be crystal clear for every employee that works in your store.