Farm System
Headway's National Recruitment Center is more aggressive in finding those right candidates. "We go to places where others do not," Brown says. That means using web crawlers on social and professional networking sites like LinkedIn.com to find candidates who've worked in similar businesses, in addition to reaching specialized sites that connect with people who actually make careers out of seasonal jobs.
"We have over one million candidates in our database, and we're constantly looking at which clients can benefit from it," she says. "It's a very aggressive recruiting strategy." Last fall, Headway "touched" more than 62,000 candidates and hired more than 6,000 sales associates and managers for 597 Hickory Farms locations in 47 states.
Location-based search
An added benefit is Headway's Geographical Precise Sourcing (GPS) recruitment system technology, which locates candidates within a pre-determined distance from the retail location.
Once the right candidate has been identified, Headway handles the first and second screenings using a customized process developed in conjunction with the client. Headway then schedules interviews with a Hickory Farms hiring manager and manages the appointments, ensuring that the candidates know all the pertinent details of the job. Once they've determined that the candidates meet the qualifications they're looking for, Hickory Farms' managers make the hire. Headway then takes over again to handle the on-boarding.
Hickory Farms basically has an eight-week selling season; a wrong hire could significantly impact such a high-intensity retail location.
Previously, "it would take us three to five days to find a body, and we didn't know if it was the right body," O'Neill says. "In our business, as we get closer to Christmas, it really ramps up. For us to hire somebody and get them trained may take 10 days. Now, we have someone who's already been screened and gone through all of the needed HR training; all we have to do is train them to sell."
All Hickory Farms has to do is place a call and a replacement candidate is in the store, ready to go, within 48 hours: store management doesn't need to place an ad in the newspaper, interview candidates or wait on background checks. This doubtless had an impact on Hickory Farms' store leader turnover, which dropped from 35.7 percent in 2007 to 22.3 percent last year.
Quality candidates
Brown understands such dramatic one-year shifts. Store managers now can "focus on the core business versus trying to find the right candidate and bring that candidate on board. With recruitment outsourcing, retailers can select specific hiring activities that they might not have the depth, breadth or internal resources needed to accomplish as effectively as we can."
The other great benefits to Hickory Farms are the quality of candidates Headway delivers and its ability to recruit on a national level. "Many retailers still rely on individual stores or districts to handle all the recruiting," Brown says. "They may not have the recruitment power or tools to find the right candidates. We have new methods and resources that find better talent, faster and at an operational cost savings over their own efforts."
O'Neill suggests that switching to a program like Headway's requires buy-in from full-time employees. "They need to understand this is a new process and they have to let go of their old processes," he says. "The biggest ‘bump' we had was in going from a two-week pay cycle to a one-week cycle. You have to get the paperwork in quickly; there's no room to be late with it.
"But managers who have done recruiting in the past need to understand that they're no longer recruiting," he says. "We have to play to our strengths and let our partners play to theirs."
