The Restructuring of the Hiring Process for Store Manager Candidates
Turkey’s Pioneer Supermarket Retailer’s Success with a Consistent Recruitment Strategy
Subcategory: Recruitment, Talent & Leadership
Award won: Retail sector
Overview
The success of Migros, which is among the top 20 companies in Turkey, is made possible through the use of the same standards and management in accordance with the company culture in 977 stores throughout 7 different geographical regions in Turkey. Our store managers aren’t only responsible for the profitability of our stores but also for making sure that the quality standards and the Migros corporate culture are put into practice. It’s for all of these reasons that the skills of store managers are critical in terms of maintaining the profitability and corporate sustainability of the rapidly growing Migros.
Since there is no academic program in Turkey for raising managers to serve the retail sector we must provide the vocational skills of retail to Migros managers ourselves. We meet 98% our administrative needs from internal resources as a corporate principle. With a 15% addition of new stores every year in line with our rapid growth strategy, our need for new administrators is constantly increasing.
Setting out from this critical fact Migros made a decision in 2011 to bind the hiring process for store managers to a standard procedure. This standardization has brought great qualitative and quantitative benefit to Migros by enabling the selection of the best qualified candidates for store management with objective assessment tools and by carrying out this selection process with their own hiring staff. This new system helped us to select the best candidate to strengthen our management levels and create a common management approach in our stores.
Impact
1)All candidates were included in the same objective assessment processes
2)By completing an average of 150 Store Manager hires per year in accordance with collective hiring criteria we were able to reduce costs by 63% and save time by using Migros’s own hiring staff, and the vocation skills of our staff was increased.
3)According to the assessments made in the first year out of the Store Managers who were included in the process 44% showed the expected performance and 46% high performance. Only 2% were considered to need improvement in competencies.
4)36% of the people who were hired by this process were regarded as “talent” who can be promoted within a year in strategic HR process.
5)Hiring the best candidates improved 31% turn-over of our Store Managers.
6)Scheduling all the hires in the region on the same period prepared the groundwork for a structured and joint training process and also provided the opportunity to standardize the orientation training.
Innovation
Before the transition into the year 2011 collective hiring process, candidates were hired in different regions on different dates and in smaller groups. This individual hiring caused more effort and more costs to be expended than the collective hiring. Also, the lack of standard measurement tools could result in not always capturing the same quality standard in candidates. According to this new procedure,
1) As a result of focus group studies conducted with our new best store managers, the DNA of our best managers was determined and a skill set including 13 different competencies was created.
2) New hiring advertisement content was prepared to emphasize these competencies and then published.
3) In order to reach the most suitable candidates, a five stage process including numerical and verbal aptitude tests, group interviews, competency based interviews and a personality inventory was designed.
4) As a continuation to the process a detailed presentation explaining the dynamics of the work and the sector has been prepared by our regional managers out in the field to be shown to the candidates who apply for positions.
5) In order to conduct this process more efficiently assessors have been selected from a team comprised of our regional sales managers in addition to our hiring staff.[/one_half_last]
Insight
We have structured a 3 step preparation process in order to overcome the difficulties because of the large scale hiring operation;
1-The first step was to ensure that our hiring staff was brought up to speed on how the hiring process was to be applied (training, motivation, etc.).
2-Secondly we selected the tools that could be adapted to the retail sector and would meet our needs and adapted them to our system
3-Finally, we sought out ways to diversify and use more efficiently the application sources we were using to reach the best quality and largest quantity of candidates in the limited hiring process time.
Inspiration
The main goal in retail is to achieve customer satisfaction and conduct a profitable operation. It is only possible to reach this goal by managing all of the stores according to the same standards and having a good understanding of the company strategies. The results that we have achieved in our newly designed process based on these facts have shown us that by selecting the right candidates, planning the process and standardizing it we can achieve success.
This hiring process has helped us to enhance our administrative positions, embrace company strategies in our stores and create a common management approach by selecting the most suitable candidates.[/one_half_last]