In just a few months, from early 2023 to late spring, the labor and hiring situation got much better at Altoona, Pennsylvania-based convenience-store retailer Sheetz, James Colino (pictured), director of talent acquisition, said in a recent talk with CSP.
Layoffs and less hiring in other industries, along with consumers spending less online and in restaurants due to rising costs, led to a rise in applicants for Sheetz.
Colino said Sheetz usually competes with “the Amazons of the world or other restaurants or other c-stores, but they’re just not hiring as many people as they were five or six months ago. So, we’re benefiting from that.”
He added, “Labor market participation numbers for the prime age groups are up over 83%, 84% right now, so there are more people in the workforce.”
A year ago, he said, “We were asking, ‘Where did everyone go?’”
- Sheetz is No. 12 on CSP’s 2023 Top 202 ranking of U.S. convenience-store chains by company-owned store count.
Colino thinks more people are picking up second jobs to earn money to deal with inflationary price hikes. “We’re seeing a lot more applicant flow from part-timers looking to take a second or a third shift,” he said. “Things are probably in better shape than they’ve been in a really long time for us.”
While Sheetz is in better shape, however, it’s still struggling in certain markets, he said, and isn’t fully staffed everywhere. Colino thinks it’s more difficult for a c-store in a higher-end market to hire because a typical hourly worker can’t afford to live right there and has a longer commute.
“I think of northern Virginia, for example,” he said. “Very expensive to live there, hard to maybe make a living on $18 an hour.”
Challenges of New Markets
Colino noted that hiring at the entry-level management level—supervisor or assistant manager—as one of particular difficulty for Sheetz and its peers. Complicating this is that c-stores are “all growing right now it seems.” Moving into new markets presents new challenges, such as figuring out a new labor market and “communicating our brand in enough time to recruit from the market so we can grow.”
The supervisor level, which at Sheetz is an entry-level leadership role below manager, is particularly tough to fill because it’s difficult to identify from a candidate’s resume if they have the interest to advance. “It’s also difficult if they have already managed people because for us, a supervisor doesn’t manage people, and so to anyone who is already a manager of people, it’s viewed as a step backward.”
This puts the candidate in between not having enough supervisory experience and having too much, Colino said. “That tends to be the dilemma.”
Colino said it can be tricky determining if someone is qualified for a job at Sheetz, and in the interview process looks at the candidate holistically. “They may have applied for a manager job or an associate job, but we’re looking at them as a potential supervisor,” he said. “If you just look at the whole candidate and the entirety of their experience and their ambition, we tend to find some people and put them in supervisor roles who may not have thought of themselves as a supervisor.”
The opposite also can be true, he adds. “We may have someone who was a manager elsewhere who we feel just isn’t ready to be a manager at Sheetz, or we don’t have the opening, and so we hire them into the supervisor ranks and then they proceed usually pretty quickly.
“We look at every applicant, not necessarily for what they applied to, but for what they could become.”
“But the main way we do it is to look at every applicant, not necessarily for what they applied to, but for what they could become.”
Colino said Sheetz is in better shape staffwise than it’s been in a long time—and getting progressively better. “We have fewer ‘critical stores’ at this point,” he said, which is determined using an algorithm to determine if a store is in bad shape from a staffing perspective. Factors used include overtime hours, the number of openings at a store, applicant flow.
Part of these better times are due to steps Sheetz has taken to clarify its employment brand, which it did about two years ago. “Anytime you’ve got a difficult labor market and a lot of competition, it’s really important for a company to differentiate themselves as an employer.” This clarification process included examining gaps in pay, benefits and vacation, and adjusting to be more competitive or even leading the market.
Easier to Apply
One effective move Sheetz recently made is making the application process more mobile friendly.
“We migrated our candidate experience from a desktop environment,” he said, after Sheetz found that about 80% of applicants were applying on a mobile device.
Colino said the entire recruiting industry is migrating toward making it easier for applicants to apply using mobile devices—and improving the overall application experience to reduce “choke points.”
This includes adding chat bots on the career site, shorter applications and automated interview scheduling. “They can just click a link, pick a time, and then connect,” he said. “It’s less about how do you advertise more, or spend more money, and more about how can you take that applicant pool and get more yield from them by making their experience better or faster.”
“We create a family-oriented environment. It’s not your family per se, but we call it our work family. And people just feel included.”
“I can spend more money to attract a million candidates, but how many of those candidates will actually finish my application process because it’s easy enough?” he asked. “Same thing with customers: You can bring customers to your door, but if it’s hard to do business with you, or your service takes too long or you know don’t have what they need in stock, you’ll lose those customers.”
The chat bot, Colino said, answers questions in real time regarding pay, benefits, if a uniform is supplied, the start date, benefits and more, moving someone from being on the fence and possibly exiting the application to getting their question answered and completing it.
Maintain Customer Experience
Elsewhere in technology, Colino said Sheetz is moving toward equipment enabling self-assisted checkout—but has been cautious to avoid diluting the customer experience.
“We wanted to make sure that asking you to check out on a machine versus dealing with an employee was the same great Sheetz experience that you would have either way,” he said. “That’s one of the things I would say has not had a huge impact in the reduction of employees because it’s not fully implemented yet.”
Over time, however, Colino thinks this technology will shift more employees on the store floor to ensure shelves are stocked, coffee area are clean and the customer is being taken care of “in different ways opposed to maybe taking their money from them and doing the transaction, which may not be a high value task anymore.”
“We’ve really done a great job over the years maintaining and building a great culture.”
Sheetz also has been helped through by being named to Fortune magazine’s Best Companies to Work For list, including in 2023. “Potential candidates see that,” Colino said. “We’ve really done a great job over the years maintaining and building a great culture, and it’s really helped us from a recruiting perspective.”
Getting on best lists—Forbes is another, Colino said—is enabled by the c-store chain’s leadership. “We create a family-oriented environment,” he said. “It’s not your family per se, but we call it our work family. And people just feel included. They feel like they have a voice, and they feel like the leadership really cares about them.”
Employee Incentives
One way Sheetz shows that care is by incentivizing and recognizing employees; incentives could be a cash bonus, a coupon, a pizza party or even a pat on the back. Sheetz holds competitions throughout the districts and regions, examining metrics such as friendliness and culture scores in stores. “They’re incentivized and rewarded for the work that they do every day,” he said.
Another method is holding in-person events, such as the annual Sheetz Fest, to honor employees who’ve hit milestones and received high praise. “We bring together anyone who has reached a milestone of five, 10, 15 or 20 years and celebrate them for two days,” he said. “We provide a bunch of activities—a comedian, a hypnotist, dancing, ziplining and an afterparty, for example—where they get to interact with senior leadership.”
Sheetz Fest South was held in Asheville, North Carolina, last year. “You could take a trip downtown to the arts district,” he said. “It’s a very well-organized event really centered around the employee and recognition and just again, that sort of family vibe that we're hoping to do.”