4 Retail Hiring Trends to Know
By Kelly Kurt and Samantha Oller on Sep. 27, 2016RICHMOND, Va. -- Higher wages, more flexibility: The CEO of a major job-search engine says the pressure is on retailers to up their employment game during the tightening labor market.
Peter Harrison, CEO of Snagajob, Richmond, Va., a job search engine that includes more than 500 c-store retailers among its more than 300,000 employer accounts, highlighted four trends that are shaping the labor market in an interview with CSP Daily News ...
1. Wages are under pressure
Snagajob conducts annual surveys of its more than 300,000 employer locations, mostly retail and restaurants, and has found a trend of rising wages for hourly workers.
“We’re seeing a lot of evidence of pretty substantial increases, even by—and I would say almost especially by—the smaller operators,” said Harrison.
There is also growing support among employers for increases to state minimum wages. In a recent survey, almost 90% of employers on Snagajob indicated support for minimum-wage legislation. Compare this to two to three years ago, when this figure was in the 40% to 50% range.
What’s the ideal minimum wage? Last year Snagajob asked workers and employers about different price points for an acceptable minimum wage. The consensus was around $13 “for what should be rock-bottom minimum now,” said Harrison, although this varied by region.
2. Workers are juggling schedules—and jobs
Many small and midsized employers are shifting their workforce to under the 30-hour minimum workweek that defines a full-time employee under the Affordable Care Act. While this may save employers some costs in terms of healthcare benefits, it can also increase the need to hire more employees to cover all shifts.
“They have to hire more people, they have to retain more people, they have each of those people for less hours, but that puts a further premium on being able to provide people the hours they want and some flexibility around those hours,” said Harrison.
Snagajob’s most recent survey of hourly workers who use the site found the top factor in considering a job was whether it offered enough hours (65.4%), compared with 64.7% who said pay was most important.
And not only is there a desire to get enough hours to work, but also to find hours that actually fit within a worker’s schedule, especially as more of them juggle multiple jobs.
3. Nontraditional competition is growing
Traditional retailers are increasingly competing with on-demand operators for workers, said Harrison. He cited the ride service Uber, which has spent millions of dollars to recruit new drivers.
“It’s also raising the bar in terms of what people expect from an employer,” said Harrison. “What people like about Uber is work where you want, when you want.”
C-stores and Uber may not be drawing from the same labor pool, he said, but they do overlap.
“Therefore, the expectation is increasingly being set that people will have more flexibility over their schedules or being able to pick times or manage them directly from their phone,” he said. “And if they can’t get the full 30 hours from one employer, [they want to] be able to more easily mix and match hours across multiple employers.”
Walmart is working on a scheduling app for its hourly employees that will enable them to pick their schedule via smartphone, a trend that Harrison said is just beginning.
“We are on the cusp of a real scheduling revolution where more and more of these will be apps,” said Harrison. “Think of it as Snapchat gone schedule swapping. Sort of mashing up a messaging app with a scheduling app.”
4. Job applications go mobile
It’s not just scheduling that is going mobile—so is the job application process.
“More and more of these workers just live on their phones and do everything on their phones,” said Harrison. “These employers are being challenged to make sure that everything about the hiring process works seamlessly on the phone.”
However, a lot of phone-based application processes today are difficult to navigate, he said, pointing out that 95% of people who start an application on the phone don’t finish it.
“We’ve got to get much, much better as an industry of making everything work first and foremost on a phone,” said Harrison. “If you’re trying to get a job at a 7-Eleven, they’re not going to be successful unless they make it a great experience on the (mobile) phone.”
In today’s tight labor market, it is critical for employers to move quickly.
“Two years ago it was OK if your application took two to three weeks from end to end. That’s not good enough anymore,” said Harrison. “We see a growing number of employers that are really looking to collapse that down to a day or two because if you don’t move quickly, your competition has.”