After two years of the pandemic, the retail industry is slowly bouncing back to normalcy. Despite the lockdown extensions and the general shift in consumer behavior, the industry had managed to sustain and thrive.
On a macro level, the retail industry seems to be adding more jobs. The Current Employment Statistics (CES) show that employment in retail trade has increased up to 29,000 between January and April 2022.
However, there has been a change in hiring patterns. With retailers adopting new payment and delivery options to compete with eCommerce websites, the roles and responsibilities of the workforce have changed too.
Recruiters are increasingly using advanced software like SAP SuccessFactors to overcome these challenges. SAP SuccessFactors is a cloud-based comprehensive HR solution that can also be deployed on-premise to streamline HR operations and improve the employee experience.
Let’s look at how it helps resolve the common hiring problems.
How To Solve The Hiring Challenges In Retail With SAP SuccessFactors
Why move from ECC to S/4?
- Skills gap
The roles in the retail industry were typically customer-facing. However, the stiff competition from eCommerce and consumers’ preference for curbside pickups or hybrid ways of shopping such as buy-online-pick-in-store (BOPIS) has compelled retailers to rethink existing job roles. There’s more demand for order fulfillment and technology roles than a cashier’s. Understanding the new job roles and finding the right talent is challenging. Legacy HR tools are incapable of adapting to these changes. That’s where tools like SAP’s SuccessFactors come to help. SAP’s SuccessFactors offers a comprehensive recruitment solution that allows HR to perform ‘what if’ analysis, find skill gaps, and build a hiring strategy to find the right talent. It can distribute the job listings to more than 3,000 sources worldwide to help HR build a talent pipeline and choose the best candidate who closely aligns with its strategic goals. SuccessFactors can reduce the time to hire the right talent by 121%.
- Talent shortage
Retail is among the industries that hire many temporary and permanent workers. Although there are many jobs available today, 51% of retailers face trouble hiring store employees. In a fast-paced environment, retailers cannot afford to have unfilled positions. They need to accelerate the time-to-hire process to fill the positions quickly. One way to reduce talent shortage is by replacing legacy, on-premise tools with modern cloud-based tools such as SuccessFactors. SuccessFactors can reduce the time taken to fill positions by 48%. It eliminates the paperwork and over-reliance on disparate systems during the hiring process. It digitizes and streamlines the end-to-end HR process and allows retailers to manage the contracts, SOWs, payroll details, etc., through a unified system.
- Talent poaching
Talent poaching is a common problem in the retail industry. The workforce could leave and join the competitors for various reasons such as better pay, work-life balance, company culture, etc. Talent poaching shrinks the talent pool and makes it hard for HR to refill those positions. Apart from competitive pay, employees desire to feel valued. Human Resource Experience (HRX) is equally important. HR can leverage SuccessFactors to create a seamless experience for employees, from their first interview to onboarding, training, and exit interview. They can create a memorable experience throughout to ensure that they feel valued.
- High churn rate
According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, retail is one of the top industries when it comes to suffering high employee churn rates. This poses a hiring challenge because of the continuous need to refill and train new recruits from scratch. There’s always pressure to hire fast and in large volumes. To reduce the churn rate, HR must be able to predict and engage with employees at an early stage. SuccessFactors’ built-in predictive analytics provide real-time data of the entire workforce in a unified system. The visually represented data allows HR to identify potential issues, predict churns, and make actionable decisions to improve employee satisfaction. SuccessFactors has been able to reduce churn by 15%.
- Poor employee engagement
Most retailers struggle with engaging and retaining talent. Employee engagement is vital to prevent employees from leaving. The more valued the employees feel, the less likely they will leave the company soon. HR has to create an engaging environment for the employees from day one. SuccessFactors helps HR decrease the onboarding time by 74% by streamlining the process. It also facilitates goal setting and mentoring between employees and managers and allows the business leaders to identify the core competencies of the workforce through the centralized platform and coach them to grow in their careers.
Conclusion
In an industry that’s undergoing digital transformation, the HR function cannot be left behind anymore. They also have to transform to keep pace with the changing landscape and attract and retain top talent. SAP’s SuccessFactors can be the perfect solution for HR to achieve that goal. It can help the HR with:
- Automating their HR processes: Retailers can automate and streamline the HR operations such as payroll processing, compliance, leave management, etc., to support the HR and improve their productivity.
- Creating better employee experience: Retailers can create a seamless HR experience for their workforce from recruitment to exit.
- Managing a dynamic workforce: Considering that the retail industry always hires additional people, especially during peak holiday seasons, they need a centralized system that provides complete insight into the workforce and efficiently manages the workforce. SuccessFactors unifies the workforce data in a single platform and allows retailers to control the workforce across all locations completely.
- Analyzing and aligning the workforce with business strategy: SAP SuccessFactors also provide HR leaders with real-time access to workforce data that can be used to analyze productivity and employee satisfaction and find ways to engage the talent. Considering that the data is centralized, business leaders can access it to find ways to align the workforce with the overall business strategies.
Get in touch with a reliable technology partner to implement SAP’s SuccessFactors to transform the HR function.
