How to Find Employees
Welcome to the Material Retail Dumps podcast. If you've listened to us before, thanks so much for coming back. If it's your first time listening, welcome Material Retail Dumps is a short form podcast with briefly valuable content for independent retailers. As business owners, we don't have time for a 30 minute lesson with a ton of banter. We get straight to the meat of the topic and aim to give you actionable information and will help you optimize your retail operation and make more money every day. Welcome to Material Retail Dumps, episode 31. This is the first episode in a three episode series on employees. The first episode is gonna be on How to find employees. Second one is going to be around retaining employees, and the third one is gonna be around promoting employees. So let's jump right in. Everybody has been hearing about this employee shortage in the country, record low unemployment, the workers fighting back, anti work, remote work.
There's just so much out there kind of pointing to the fact that people don't wanna work and you know, it's really hard to find employees. So I don't really buy into all that. I think if you wanna find employees, you can find employees, and if you can't find employees, raise your wage a little bit. Um, so let's talk about a few ways to find employees. You know, we can keep it super simple. I think people tend to get a little overcomplicated. And generally speaking as an audience, you probably, you know, work in a retail store as a manager or you own a retail store. You're not exactly recruiting rocket scientists or looking for, you know, c e o of the next big company out there. You need to find engaged individuals who wanna make a little bit of money, believe in what you do and enjoy working for you.
How do we do that? The first thing I'm gonna recommend is if you need an employee, put a sign in your store. Put a sign in your window. Your best employees are gonna end up being your customers. Your best employees are gonna be the people. Or the easiest way to find employees are gonna be the people walking around in town. You never know who might be looking for a job, who might be looking for part-time work, full-time work, but you'd be surprised how often you have a help wanted sign in the window and someone just comes in and says, Hey, I saw the help wanted sign in your window. And at that point, you know, you have two options. You can play it cool and be like, all right, you can leave your resume and come back later. Or you can just give them an 10 minute interview right there.
And the interview doesn't really need to be a formal interview. It could just be a quick 10 minute conversation and you kind of find out a little bit about the person, why, you know, what kind of job they're looking for, what have they done in the past, what type of person are they? And you can get all those things from a quick 10 minute conversation. And from there you make the decision. The next way you can find employees is by just putting it in your social media. Um, social media can be used as an extension of the windows in your physical store. Put a post on Instagram, put a post on Facebook. If you have a LinkedIn, put a post on your LinkedIn. And again, you'd be surprised how many dms you get, even if it's someone just looking for a, you know, one day a week part-time thing cuz they're in college or something like that.
Like, you would be shocked how many people you find and you know the same story. You can either ask 'em to come in for an interview, ask them for their resume. You could just go back and forth via DM a little bit and, uh, you know, you, you could get so much out of a person and learn so much from a person just based on that conversation and you know how quickly they respond and things like that. Um, the third thing that you can do is you can put a post on a job board. So like Indeed or a ZipRecruiter or something like that. You know, I really don't like this method, um, because you end up with just getting a lot of junk in your inbox. And a lot of people who are looking for jobs, the people who are on these job boards tend to be looking for jobs often.
And, uh, it's not so great. The last thing that I recommend doing is finding it from existing employees or friends and family. And this is going to be the best way to find employees because when an employee recommends someone to you or a family member recommends someone to you, they're kind of putting their neck out there. They're not gonna recommend someone that they think is bad, they're not gonna recommend someone dishonest because then it's a little bit on them. Now, it's not technically on them if you hire someone and it doesn't work out, but, but they'll feel bad about it and they'll be a little embarrassed employee and family referrals. One thing that could really push employee and family referrals to the next level is by giving a little bonus. You know, if you refer me an employee and I hire them, I'll give you $200 or I'll give you a $200 gift card to my store or I'll give you anything.
And it's just, people are just excited. Quick, easy way to make money. Everyone knows someone who needs a job and it's easy. Couple quick tips about, uh, you know, job listings, wherever you're putting it, whether it's friends and family, whether it's in your store, whether it's on social media, put the hours that you need someone put the amount of money you're willing to pay and just be as specific as possible. If you need someone on Sundays, just put help. Wanted Sunday afternoons, 12 to eight, $18 per hour. This does a couple things. Number one, it weeds out people who don't fit your schedule. So if you need someone on Sundays, then that person can only work Saturdays. You're just wasting everybody's time if you don't put that information there. The other thing is it makes it easy for that person to make a decision and say, okay, this works for me, let me apply really quickly.
And in this day and age, people are very impatient. People wanna know things right away. They wanna know, what am I getting into, what is this opportunity and should I work there? And once you hire the employer, and remember, we're gonna do a whole episode of retaining employees. Once you hire this employee, it's very important to just keep a very close eye in the first two weeks. The first two weeks of this employee is going to be where they put their best foot forward. Now obviously, you have to understand that they don't understand your full business. They don't know your policies, but what they do do, what they do know is how to come to work on time, how to be respectful to you, how to be respectful to your employees, how to be respectful to customers. If you have an employee on their second day of the job, they come late or they try to leave early or they keep going on their cell phone, it's only gonna get worse from there as they get more comfortable.
You know, if you're, you have a new employee that makes a mistake and rings something up wrong or makes a mistake and you know something happens, you know, you can't blame them for that. They don't, they don't know better. You know, basic professionalism is what you really need to be looking for and someone who's kind of willing to learn and you know, at that point, you, you probably know you found someone good, um, and you could just kind of keep investing in training them and and retaining them. Well, that's it for this episode. Stay tuned for the next episode where we will talk about retaining employees. Thanks so much.
