Retail is a tricky business, and especially so in the digital age. Employees are often on the front lines, face-to-face with consumers, working holidays, weekends, and, if lucky, even Crazy Uncle Larry’s 70th birthday party. Whether in stores or monitoring online activity from HQ control centers, the work is long, hard, and not for the faint of heart.
From experience, working in a store is like moving into a new home every day of the week, the only difference being, that when unloading your own personal U-Haul, you don’t have to stop and clean up an unexpected spill on aisle 9 or have someone berate you because you ran out of Advent calendars a few days before Christmas (true story).
Working online is similarly taxing. There the store never actually closes, the customer can always interact with you, and terms like “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday” conjure up memories of sleepless nights and large carafes of coffee with orange rings around their lids.
Put simply, retail is not for everyone. It takes a rare breed with a strong stomach for hard days and hard nights. Succeeding in the new retail age, therefore, requires finding people who share a passion for the sport, along with a few undeniable traits.
#1 – Being a Team Player
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Having interviewed over 1,000 people over a 20-year plus retail career, for jobs ranging from everything from sales floor employees to e-commerce executives, my all-time favorite question to ask in an interview is, “Tell me about a time someone became better at his or her job because of you?”
This question cuts to the heart of whether someone is a team player. It informs the interviewer of whether people look outside of themselves to make those around them better.
Rarely, if ever, are people in retail working alone. Someone nearly always depends on others to get his or her own job done. The question above applies to managers, employees working together laterally, introverts, extroverts, anyone.
The answers too can take many forms, from picking up a shift when someone is sick to staying late to help someone read a financial report.
But, all, when answered correctly, should indicate whether the interviewee is likely to put his or her needs before others because, lord knows, no one is going to survive in the age of Amazon by going it alone.
#2 – Experience
I learned the importance of this characteristic the hard way when I went to work in e-commerce for the first time. Up until 2013, I had only worked in stores or in traditional HQ merchandising and planning jobs.
While I thought e-commerce would be quick to pick up, holy heck was I wrong. While related, e-commerce Is VERY different from traditional retail. The metrics for success are different, the approach is different, and so too is how the end consumer shops.
If it wasn’t for the good fortune of being tutored by experienced mentors, i.e. people who embodied what was just described above, I would have fallen flat on my face. More importantly, had everyone been new at the same time, it would have been like translating the Rosetta Stone. Sure, deciphering it all might have been possible, but it would have taken a heck of a lot longer, and more than likely the business would have suffered in the interim.
Experience and practice, as athletes describe, is what allows teams and people to move faster, all of which is vital against a company like Amazon that moves at the speed of light.
#3 – Learning Agility
Unfortunately, experience is not always available nor is it correct to assume that it should be. Sometimes situations are new for everybody.
That’s where a third important element comes into the equation — learning agility.
Learning agility, as noted executive coach Kevin Cashman of Korn Ferry once described over lunch, is “the ability to succeed in first-order conditions.”
While experience is important, in today’s digital age, few people, if any, are experienced enough in everything because technology just changes too fast.
Therefore, innate curiosity about new things and an ability to retrain one’s mind to forge previously untraveled paths to success are paramount. Voice, text-based commerce, computer vision, etc. are all things that will change retail drastically over the next decade, and yet only handfuls of people really know how any of them work right now.
Soon that will all change, however, because smart companies will put people who embody these characteristics on the job and make it their jobs to understand what these ideas mean for the business and then let them walk on the tightrope of exploration without a safety net and any fear of failure. In a way, this is what Amazon’s “pizza teams” are all about — putting learning agile people on new ideas that could become something far greater than what informed, experienced minds could ever predict.
So, yes, screen for experience in interviews but also screen for the times when people have put themselves in situations that are off the beaten path, where the answers may have been unclear, and yet people still came out finding success on the other end.
Then and only then will hiring managers have the best of both worlds and a far greater likelihood of long-term success.
#4 – Aptitude Mixed with Love
Ability and aptitude matter, and certain jobs require innate skills. It is ludicrous to think that anyone can do any job. There are people who are good at throwing boxes, writing code, bagging groceries, etc. And, not only are they good at each of these tasks, but some people quite relish these roles as well.
Knowing when people really love what they are good at doing is like striking gold. Great questions to mine for this bit of information include: “Tell me about a time when you did a past job really well?” Or “Tell me when you found a way to do your own job even better?”
Good answers to these questions elucidate care, passion, and a willingness to learn and improve every day. Intelligence comes in a distant second to knowing how to do something and loving every minute of it.
#5 – Understanding the Job
This last trait is the most important. A potential hire can tick off all the boxes just mentioned above, but, when it comes down to whether the person actually wants the job in question, that can be a different story entirely.
As part of my responsibilities as a district manager for Target, I was responsible for staffing stores in remote locales like Casper, Wyoming and Kearney, Nebraska. Often the potential candidates would say they wanted the promotions that came with the jobs in these cities, but in reality they had no idea what the personal toll of such a move would be on them. I made the mistake of hiring people without taking these dynamics into account.
Saying you want something versus actually wanting it are two different ideas. And, as simple as the above example is, this dichotomy is often even more present when the pay and the stakes increase. Office politics, canceled anniversary dinners, etc. all come with the territory and all tend to surprise more than they delight from the get-go.
“I want the title” or “I want more money” are the phrases heard most often when people are asked why they want a promotion. The better question, however, is not “Why do you want a promotion?” but rather “What is it about the potential new job that most excites you?” or “What personal tradeoffs do you expect to make at the next level?” These questions cut to the chase much better, for if people haven’t thought through their answers ahead of time, chances are they won’t have the stomach for them in the long-run.
No matter if you are an entrepreneur, a cashier, or a c-suite executive, if you don’t understand and then ultimately want what you are getting into, then tough times are likely ahead for all involved.
Source: Forbes