The Paradox of the Shrinking Retail Talent Pool

Retailing success requires a highly engaged, skilled and productive workforce: the right people, with the right skills, doing the right things to contribute to the company's success. While recruitment challenges are nothing new, retailers are going to have more difficulty attracting and retaining the required workforce because the gap between talent supply and demand in the retail industry is growing.

Demographic changes in most industrialized nations—shrinking birth rates and an aging workforce—are one of the causes. Education shortfalls are another. Many recruiters complain that people entering the workforce are sometimes inadequately prepared—not only in mathematics, engineering and technology, but also in critical areas such as communications, writing and critical thinking.

In the future, companies will have to start looking to unlikely sources—customers among them—to address this talent gap. Companies will start outsourcing for talent, a significant portion of which will be mobile, moving from retailer to retailer. And the development of “communities of talent” will involve employees working for multiple companies, sometimes—thanks to open sourcing—simultaneously.

Accenture provides recruitment support to clients—through improvements in their internal recruitment processes to full-scale recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) for retailers that increasingly want a more complete end-to-end solution. Accenture’s recruitment outsourcing services span the entire recruitment lifecycle to help a client manage and create value across the hiring process.

Accenture’s RPO solution focuses on the management of administrative recruitment activities and provides a core technology platform to enable self-service capabilities for managers and candidates. This service lets managers focus only on high-value activities in the recruitment process, giving them more time for customer-facing work.

At the same time, candidates experience a compelling recruitment process that provides timely key information and access, making it easier for them to find and apply for relevant jobs.

With Accenture’s help the recruitment process can drive significant value:

• Return 30-plus percent of a store manager's time back to frontline activities.
• Reduce the time to fill open positions by 20-30 percent.
• Reduce new-hire 90-day attrition by 5-plus percent.
• Provide improved candidate quality and suitability.

Accenture’s RPO solution assists the client in finding the right people, with the right skills, to contribute to the company's business goals by focusing on four key areas:

1. Cost reduction: Accenture is able to help clients reduce costs in a number of ways, including the reduction of sourcing costs and the reduction of operational/administrative costs.
   
   
2. Process improvement: Accenture has developed standard processes based on years of experience working with clients around the globe.
   
   
3. Quality improvement: The introduction of high-performer profiles and competency and skill-based evaluations leads to higher quality candidates. Candidates receive self-service tools to access the process, resulting in a better candidate experience.
   
   
4. Risk mitigation: The risk of non-compliance is reduced by applying standard processes against specific regulatory requirements that eliminates actual and perceived discrimination. Accenture also provides recruitment reporting and analytics capabilities to help clients manage and analyze recruitment performance and regulatory requirements.

Contact us to find out how Accenture can help you achieve high performance in distribution.