You can’t fire you. Where to put a comma to the HR manager, or How to find the perfect employees in the fashion industry?

Everyone knows that it’s not easy to find a good employee. Especially if this employee is a salesperson. Especially in the fashion industry. Especially in the store of shoes, bags and accessories. Where to look for the perfect employees? Is there a place where the best sellers come from? Do I need to educate and motivate ourselves? Is gender, age, and job experience important? How to extend the "fuse" of new employees? Expert SR, business coach Maria Gerasimenko answers all these questions and shares her experience in selecting new employees.

So, let's start by creating a vacancy. Most of you consider this process not too important and save time and resources on it. And there are many arguments for this: “Why reinvent the wheel when there are thousands of such vacancies on the Internet?”, “My requirements for the candidate are the same as for Heels and Wedges, what else can you come up with?” ... So your vacancy becomes one out of a thousand, and candidates come to you who urgently need money and any work. Think: are you really ready to give these desperate people the most valuable thing - your customers?

In my trainings for sales staff I teach customer focus and sales, and at the same time I am convinced: customer focus is always more important than the ability to sell. Sales can be taught, but customer focus is either innate or not. In accordance with these requirements, I am looking for sellers.

Many of my customers, especially retail stores, complain about low job postings. And you re-read your vacancy once again and answer: does the potential employee really salivate from the desire to work in your company? Which of the two vacancies does it look more like:

Option 1 (vacancy of a well-known shoe brand, taken from the open source avito.ru. Spelling and punctuation saved):

For a permanent job in a chain store shoes R *** requires a sales assistant. We offer:

• GOOD WAGES (paid 2 once a month)
• Friendly team
• Good working conditions
• Free education
• Career
• Proximity to the metro (2 steps from the metro Mitino)
• Free training

Citizenship and work experience does not matter.

2 option (a women's clothing store vacancy compiled by the author of these lines for a real search for employees):

Is fashion your passion? Are you outgoing, smiling and cheerful? Do you burn with the desire to work with dresses, make shoppers happy and earn money on this?

Then, rather, take the phone and call us! These are the employees we are looking for!

We will teach you style, sales and merchandising (hanging and laying out goods).

This vacancy is a real chance to start your career in the beautiful and alluring fashion industry prospects.

What to do:

• surround our customers with love and care;

• Sell ​​good mood and awesome new things;

• to develop and learn a lot about the fashion industry;

• to get pleasure from work;

• smile a lot.

What qualities should our Sales Fairy have?

• be able to find in one dress more than 10 of pleasant features and advantages;

• be able to listen and hear the wishes of customers, quickly find a solution to these desires in our assortment;

• smartly work with 1С;

• effortlessly understand fabrics, models and styles;

• try to help others become at least a little happier.

What vacancy do you think will have more chances to “catch” a worthy candidate?

With this announcement, I managed to close 4 seller vacancies for 1 week. At the same time, I have some principles of work:

1. Never call the first candidate for the position of seller (accept only incoming calls).

2. Listen carefully to the candidate’s speech on the phone (smile, positive, lack of speech defects).

3. Ask 3-5 questions of fundamental importance to you by phone (I usually have biographical questions).

4. If the candidate’s answers to your questions “passed the control” - schedule an interview.

Where to look for sellers? This list is borrowed from Ilgiz Valinurov, president of the corporation of recruitment agencies Business Connection. Although, I think, you can add to this list ad infinitum:

• Friends, acquaintances.

• Prepared announcement.

• Social networks. Industry groups.

  

  Advertising

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• The program "bring a friend."

• Announcements in crowded places.

• Make friends with employees of competitors, customers, partners.

• Take a closer look at the people around.

• Universities, business schools.

• Own site.

• Conferences, seminars.

• Sites and media competitors.

• Email Newsletter.

• Press release.

• Exit interview.

• Open Day.

• Employment Service.

• Office ads.

• Internal resource, career growth.

• Return of former employees.

• Rumors.

So, suitable candidates at first glance! The next step is coming up - the interview. Now your main task is to learn as much as possible about the candidate in a short period of time: how sociable, customer-oriented, able to find a solution in unusual situations, how he reacts to criticism, what are his values, what is his psychotype and much more.

There are many methods to find out:

• projective issues;

• situational issues;

• Manfred Kets de Vries

• Conflict testing according to K. Thomas;

• Myers-Briggs testing;

• testing by M. Dukarevich.

All of these methods are publicly available on the Internet! I know that for many readers it will seem strange to be so picky and detailed about the selection of sales staff. Nevertheless, personal experience shows: the more attentive you are to the selection of personnel, the longer these employees will work in your company, and the more likely that this person is of your format, the ion will follow the goals and missions of your company.

Staff motivation

We will not theorize for a long time, I will share two life hacks tested on my own leather.

1. The most effective sales staff motivation system: a constant part +% of sales + KPI. The permanent part is paid for observing the internal routine and maintaining the right atmosphere inside the store. KPI (key performance indicators) are key indicators of store’s performance: conversion, check complexity, revenue (there have been times when KPI introduced repeated sales and product turnover rate, but in my opinion, this is overkill). The percentage of sales is paid by everyone, except for chain stores in which the seller does not communicate with the buyer. Therefore, the motivation power of “percent” begins to weaken after a week of work of a new employee. To extend the “spark” of material motivation will help the percentage of sales paid daily. Most stores pay 1,5-2% of turnover (the main thing is that the total monthly salary of all employees is not higher than 7,9% of turnover). In this case, the permanent part is paid twice a month. All fines are deducted exclusively from the permanent part.

For example, a seller receives a salary according to the scheme: 1500 rubles / exit + 2% of sales = 15 working days * 1500 rubles + 2% of sales. Of these, the seller receives 2% daily at the end of the day, this motivates to sell more every day. And he will receive 22 rubles in full only if there were no fines: he came to work on time, kept order, was in a uniform with a badge, all equipment was working, there were no quarrels, etc.

The third part of the salary, KPI - is paid once a month and only if the set plans for performance indicators have been achieved. Here I will also make a small remark: when setting up KPI plans, seasonality should be taken into account and made achievable.

2. Do you want to train your staff to sell without discounts, make them call, write and remember the trainings you completed? Then the promotion “Free Discount” for the staff is for you! In our stores, we spend it during warm-up discounts. The first week of the "warm-up", before you start discounts for buyers - spend it in a closed format, only sellers. During this period, the seller has the opportunity to give 30% discount to the buyer, or to put it in his pocket if he sells the goods at full price.

At first, my salespeople had mixed reactions. “That is, what discount should I make?”, “What discount would you make?” they asked. To which they received the answer: "This is a test for your professionalism and a real opportunity to earn money!" Bottom line: Earlier, at this time, we already began to make warming up discounts of 30% for buyers. As you know, the modern buyer is spoiled and does not react to this discount as much as the sellers, for whom this is a unique opportunity to make money. The employees who work for us are already great: they regularly call customers from the "golden fund" (the very 20% of our customer base that bring 80% of the profit), provide the best service and keep the stores in perfect order. And yet this promotion works wonders! They seem to have one more motor, and they just tear from place.