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.
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.
Police hear it all the time when issuing tickets, “Need to make your quota for the month?” Usually it is a false question with a false premise that has been perpetuated over time. While there may be some police departments that set quotas they are the exception rather than the rule. Loss Prevention departments go through similar problems. Some people think that Loss Prevention staffs are out to rack up numbers any way they can get them. Most L.P. professionals are simply trying to catch shoplifters who are stealing and they want to apprehend dishonest employees to stop theft, prevent shrinkage and it can serve as a notice to other employees that theft won’t be tolerated. For some L.P. personnel there is a perceived pressure to “get more shoplifters” and in other cases it is real. For the retailer that is not able to pay for a Loss Prevention Staff, their concern is simply to drive the bad guys somewhere else and get rid of a crooked employee before they cause too much damage. Sometimes this is done using electronic article surveillance equipment from a company like Checkpoint Systems. They don’t feel the same pressure to “apprehend” but there is a sense of urgency in minimizing theft opportunities (how to do that becomes another matter).
As a retail business, shoplifting, employee theft and lawsuits come hand in hand.
How many of you have done IT? You know the IT I’m talking about. You looked at an application, interviewed the candidate, had a bit of an unsettled feeling about him or her but hired them anyway. IT may be a few days, a few weeks or a few months later but IT becomes a reality, buyer’s remorse. You hired someone who turns out to be a dud. It may be they are calling out of work on a regular basis or perhaps they aren’t following directions on tasks you are assigning them. It may be that you think they are stealing money or merchandise from you. Whatever the problem you just wish you hadn’t hired this person. It is frustrating to make those types of employment decisions, but don’t feel like your small retail store is all alone because you have to make these hiring choices yourself. It even happens to big companies that have Human Resources departments dedicated to trying to hire and retain the best employees.
We make decisions each and every day that have consequences. We set our alarm clocks and when they go off we choose to do the right thing and get up so we have time to prepare for work properly, showering, grabbing a bite to eat, sipping a cup of coffee or two and saying good-byes to our family. It is possible we may choose to do the wrong thing, hit the snooze button and get that 5 extra minutes of sleep but there is a cost associated with it. That five minutes easily turns to fifteen minutes, showers go by the wayside, we grab the first thing we can find in the closet (or hamper), our socks wind up not matching and if we are fortunate we grab a cup of coffee in a travel cup and hope it doesn’t spill on us as we jog/stumble to the car. 
