HR Retail conference: key insights & recap

HireVue had the pleasure of spending a week at HR Retail, sharing the strategy behind tech designed to make retail hiring successful. 

This year’s HR conference highlighted the importance of attracting talent, creating positive candidate experiences, and incorporating fast and engaging processes.

HireVue is technology built for retail TA teams. And when our customers are seeing 300% more candidate reach, 77% retention rates, and 4 out of the top 5 U.S. retailers are using our solutions, we know we have the solutions to help retail teams meet their goals.

Below are key insights from this year’s HR conference and the tech you can incorporate to up your hiring game. 

Retail is an industry of opportunity.

The retail sector is constantly evolving, driven by changes in technology, consumer behavior and market trends. This means the retail industry has some unique challenges but also some unique opportunities when it comes to attracting, retaining, and developing talent.  

Retail supports over 50 million American jobs and really powers the economy—it’s the nation’s largest private-sector employer and contributes $3.9 trillion to the annual GDP. 

HireVue offers a hiring and talent platform focused skills-based hiring to identify candidate skills and potential—and using that data to connect talent to opportunity. 

Retail offers a unique opportunity for candidates—as there’s so much opportunity within the industry to advance. When 25% of America’s working teenagers work in retail and so many management positions started in the stores before moving up—there’s countless opportunities. 

Ensuring you have the automated solutions in place that grow with your talent pool and meet them where they are is essential.  

Attract talent with positive experiences. 

Retail TA teams have a challenge when auditing their hiring processes—their candidates are frequently their customers as well. Ensuring you create a positive and engaging experience is key to not only showing you respect your candidates but value them as customers as well—a key aspect when most candidates will unfortunately not get the role. 

HireVue offers various automated solutions that offer speed, flexibility, and high engagement to your process. 

HireVue conversational AI offers a 24/7 hiring assistant so teams can unlock candidate potential with advanced matching capabilities—instead of tricky titles or confusing job descriptions. HireVue’s Hiring Assistant can help candidates unlock their potential by matching their skills with available job opportunities. Our advanced matching capabilities ensure that tricky titles or confusing job descriptions don’t slow down the recruiting process.

HireVue also offers text recruiting, so teams can send personalized SMS campaigns or 1:1 messages to instantly connect on last minute updates like interview changes or reference checks. Teams can also send text campaigns to keep new hires engaged and informed before they start. And the best part? Teams can text from the platform—not their personal phones. 

Plus, on-demand interviews and self-scheduling allows candidates to complete  interviews when convenient, which may be outside normal business hours, and schedule live interviews when most flexible. Adding flexibility to the process is an easy way to show you value your candidates as people. 

Attract talent by focusing on what they can do.

Retail teaches so many transferable skills. And when it comes to candidate potential, your first job is all about potential. Identifying the skills candidates have as they relate to specific opportunities is key to ensuring you have talent to last through today and tomorrow’s challenges.

HireVue Human Potential Intelligence offers AI-driven tech designed to unlock potential by assessing the skills and competencies needed for success. With an assessment for any job at any role, teams can find the most qualified candidates with the key competencies that are most critical for on-the-job success.

HireVue also offers Find My Fit, a brief assessment of candidate interests, personality, and background. The results are then compared to your organization’s open opportunities, recommending the roles that are the best fit for the candidate. By recommending roles based on the candidate’s skills and interests, it drives candidates to those roles that might be a better fit—helping expand the diversity of your talent pool in the process.

True or fale? Assessments make the hiring process longer (false!)

When it comes to creating an engaging and fast experience, there’s a thought that assessments simply take too much time. 

But we’re here to say that’s not the case! 

Assessments are a quick and easy addition to the candidate process that not only add data support to your hiring decisions but speed up time-to-hire with automation. 

The Virtual Job Tryout® is a powerful, science-based assessment that engages candidates in job-relevant exercises. They aid in reduced turnover and increase new hire retention while Realistic Job Previews give candidates a transparent introduction to the role’s opportunities and challenges. By giving candidates more insight into what to expect, they’re able to make more informed decisions on if they feel the role is a fit. 

When one leading retailer incorporated the Virtual Job Tryout® for it’s retail associate position, the retailer saw impressive results:

• 95% completion rate
• 100% of candidates recommend applying,
•  92% decrease in time-to-hire (14 days to 1 day) 

Ready to transform your retail hiring? Request a demo!