It has never been easy to hire retail workers, and it has become more difficult due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite unemployment remaining relatively high, companies are having a difficult time finding candidates to fill open positions. While it is tricky to identify any specific cause, it continues to be a thorn in the side of many businesses.
For retail companies, it is especially difficult because retail jobs make up nearly 6.3% of the total workforce. Even with the increase in online retail and the increasing number of closing stores—which the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) states was expected to be around 2,500 stores in 2020—the number of unfilled positions persists.
Fortunately, companies that want to hire better retail workers have a powerful tool at their disposal–skills testing. eSkill offers a wide range of pre-employment retail skills tests that enable you to gauge a candidate’s abilities in vital job skills. Even better, eSkill’s Talent Assessment PlatformTM allows you to test both hard and soft skills so you can completely assess each candidate’s potential Job Fit.
Fully Customizable Retail Skills Tests
One of the biggest advantages of eSkill’s testing platform is its flexibility. To assess candidates, you simply choose from among 800 pre-prepared tests in the eSkill Test Library. Retail skills tests cover a wide range of aptitudes such as retail math, sales, and marketing skills and job-based tests that are specific to roles such as Retail Cashier or Retail Manager.
You can also create customized tests by choosing questions from existing tests and adding your own questions. Your tests can include multiple choice and true/false questions as well as open-ended written and video response questions.
Simulations are another useful tool because you can present employees with a real-life work situation and ask them to complete a series of tasks. You can see whether they arrived at the correct answer or not and can also observe how they handled situations and solved problems. This allows you to gauge their comfort and familiarity with situations they are likely to encounter on the job.
Assess Candidates’ Soft Skills with Retail Personality Tests
In addition to measuring a candidate’s hard skills, eSkill helps you to examine candidates’ “soft skills.” These skills are difficult to assess but are important because you need to be able to evaluate candidates’ communication abilities and understand their values and ethics to determine if they are a good fit for your company.
Incorporating retail personality tests can give you insight into how a potential hire will conduct themselves in the workplace. For example, customer service tests help you to evaluate whether a candidate understands how to deal with customers in a positive, productive way. Since this is important in a retail environment, it is best to confirm that candidates can do this well before you hire them.
Both retail skills tests and personality tests produce clear, concise reports that are easy to distribute to relevant stakeholders. You can review responses in detail and get a complete picture of the candidates’ skills. If a candidate’s overall score is not what you were looking for, but you see that they scored highly on the most relevant skills, you can determine any gaps that need to be filled through training.
Integrate Skills Testing into Your ATS Software
eSkill’s retail skills tests and retail personality tests can be easily integrated with popular ATS platforms and become part of your overall hiring process. You can administer skills tests to everyone who applies for a position by having them click on a test link or by sending an automated email message that invites them to take a test. In either case, you can watch in real-time to see who has taken the test and whose tests are still outstanding.
By adding retail skills testing into your application process, you can save your HR team hours of wasted time and effort. Before skills testing, HR representatives were forced to sift through hundreds or even thousands of resumes and applications to identify top candidates.
With retail skills testing, you can eliminate many candidates based on their test scores, including those who misrepresented or exaggerated their experience on their resume or application. Companies that use retail skills tests and retail personality tests have discovered that adding skills testing to their hiring process can save significant amounts of time and expense and help them improve hiring results.
Interested in Using Retail Skills Tests to Improve Your Company’s Hiring Process?
Learn how eSkill’s Talent Assessment PlatformTM can make your retail hiring efforts easier and more effective. Request a demo today.