Seasonal Retailer

Outcome in Brief

• Improved efficiency in operations, while reducing field staff turnover
• Enabled the retailer to increase their focus on sales merchandising, as well as reopening previously closed stores
• Saved employment & hiring costs

Challenge

Ineffective recruitment and selection methods, coupled with a heavy administrative payrolling burden, were limiting this client’s abilities to grow and stay focused on key sales initiatives. Specifically, the management team was overwhelmed by recruiting challenges, and was left with little time to focus on selling the business line or expanding to new locations. Because of poor quality hires and a lack of time to focus on sales and training, stores had been closed due to employee theft and a lack of sales.

Results

Headway’s solution through its Employer of Record program—implementing and managing all recruitment, payrolling and benefits functions, while ensuring regulatory compliance nationwide—enabled the client to focus on cash flow, inventory, sales and growth strategies, and fewer distractions.

The benefits to this seasonal retailer are as follows:

• Time and cost savings on recruiting and payrolling activities
• Better quality of retail staff
• Enhanced customer shopping experiences
• Retention was significantly increased
• Greater peace of mind, with regard to payrolling and contingent worker compliance, via Headway’s expertise and experience in all 50 states

As a result of working with Headway, the stores that had previously ceased operations were successfully re-opened.

The seasonal retailer extended an exclusive, multi-year contract to Headway for the majority of their nationwide locations for the renewed contract period. Headway’s Recruitment and Talent Acquisition Model provided them with a “one-source” recruitment and workforce management solution.

Recruitment was Critically Linked to Revenue

For this client, the selection of top-performing seasonal sales and customer service professionals is critical, because the performance of these employees over an eight to 12 week period impacts the financial success of the company for an entire fiscal year. In order to be successful they needed a two-pronged strategy: first, their managers needed to be set free to focus intensively on sales for these critical retail windows of seasonal sales; second, the entire recruitment process had to be turned over to Headway—to find a higher caliber of employee and lift the administrative burdens of recruiting and payrolling from their plate.

Additionally, the client was overwhelmed by the demands of adhering to differing regulatory standards and criteria for employee classification, taxation and payrolling in separate states. The client wanted to ensure that compliance with all state and federal regulations across the nation were being met. As the client described, the administrative task of focusing on these regulations was creating so much “noise” that the client was unable to focus on its core business strategies.

Solution

Headway’s solution for this client utilized a Contingent Workforce program which combines our Recruitment and Talent Acquisition and Employer of Record solutions. Recruitment and Talent Acquisition is a complete Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) solution that utilizes meticulous candidate sourcing, screening, selection and workforce preparation for each three month period leading up through their seasonal sales efforts. And with our Employer of Record program, we became the retail staff’s W2 and payroll provider.

Headway’s recruitment efforts initially covered over 84 nationwide locations for the client and moved to 600+ locations after the first phase of the program. Headway also took over the management recruitment function of these stores, selecting and placing the managers who would supervise more carefully selected sales and customer service professionals.

Rather than providing a “one size fits all” approach, Headway is a trusted workforce partner that provides flexible programs that adapt to your specific needs.

Headway Workforce Solutions offers nationwide, scalable recruitment and contingent worker services that add value by improving performance and productivity.