What does your shop have in common with The Metropolitan Museum of Art?  Aside from a few items that you’ve kept on the shelf long enough for them to become antiquities, it’s probably the need to find the right person to fill every job.  We all know that excellent employees are necessary for excellent customer service, but it’s not always easy to find the right person to fill retail positions.  The best source for the kind of person who will love working in your store may be closer than you think — in fact, standing on the customer side of your checkout counter. 

 Like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, we start our advertising of open positions by posting a sign in the window or on the door.  We know that someone who loves shopping in our store is likely to love working there.  Another way to reach potential employees familiar with the store is to put a small flyer in each customer’s bag. That way they can pass the information along to someone who may be looking for a job.

 

Traditionally we’ve supplemented our help wanted signs with classified newspaper ads, but these have gotten increasingly expensive over the past ten years, and the print size has gotten smaller and smaller.  Recently we started also posting our job openings online using the free ads available on Craig’s List, and found that we got enough applicants that were were able to skip the classified ad entirely.

 

Craig’s list is a service that is provided in certain cities, so you should check to see if there is one available in your community. In most cases postings are free, and you can use their service to have e-mail responses forwarded to you so that your e-mail address is not made public. This helps prevent junk e-mails filling up your mail box.  

 

We choose to have applicants apply in person only, because coming to the store takes some effort on their part and confirms that our shop is the kind of place they’d like to work.  When applicants come in we chat with them for a few minutes and give them an employment application form, along with a short description of the job opening, the hours involved, and what the pay will be.

 

For an employment application form from Specialty Shop Retailing: Everything Your Need to Know to Run Your Own Store that can be downloaded for free and customized for your shop, go to www.specialtyshopretailing.biz and enter fig. 6.1.  (Note: this is a two-page form.)  Getting the most information you can about a potential new employee can help you make the right choice in selecting a new member of your staff.

 

Happy Retailing,

Carol “Orange” Schroeder