In four hours yesterday our online ad for staff for a new newsagency I am involved with generated 73 applications. What particularly interested me was that 17 of the applicants have current newsagency experience. This is a higher proprtion that I usually see. The pool includes some candidates with excellent resumes. We should find the team we are looking for.
i am about to start looking for 2 staff members in my small newsagency, as the employee that i kept on when i bought the store has moved on.
i am very concerned about hiring the right people, for a number of reasons.
i am in a small town, and if a new employee doesnt work out the customers could give me a hard time. for this reason i am thinking of hiring someone out of town.
this is my first business, so the responsibility of hiring and firing is foreign to me.
p
Peter,
While hiring in a rural situation has differences to our situation, our approach is to look widely for candidates, compare them to our core requirements list, cull and cull again to get to a list of no more than 10.
We then speak with the 10 on the phone and based on these conversations cull to 5. We interview these and hire.
In recent years we have tended to hire people without newsagency experience. That said, we recently went against this approach and it has worked out very well.
We are not keen on hiring from within our shopping centre – an employee from another business.
If I were in a very small town I would be inclined to hire outside the town as you suggest.
Can I ask why you originally looked for people without NewsAgency experience? And do you find that younger or older staff work better for you?
We first did this several years ago and benefited from fresh eyes – people with retail skills but not with newsagency experience.
We have nothing unique in our businesses after all.
While there are some roles which benefit from newsagency experience, most in the pure retail side of the business beenfit from excellent customer service skills.