Finish Line Improves Employee Retention and Drives Sales Performance
The Finish Line, Inc., operating under the Finish Line, Man Alive, and Paiva brand names, is one of the nation's largest mall-based specialty retailers. Finish Line is publicly traded on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the symbol FINL. The company currently operates 670 Finish Line stores in 48 states and online, 67 Man Alive stores in 16 states, and six Paiva stores in five states and online. With over 13,000 employees, Finish Line is one of the nation's leading footwear retailers.
Store managers need help to make better hires
Friendly and capable employees are essential to retail success. While customers certainly care about price, they also want and expect a certain level of product knowledge and service. For a company like Finish Line, whose employees help customers select and try on shoes, it's critical that employees are able to quickly establish a rapport with customers and provide product guidance. Identifying these skills in a potential hire is no simple task.
Store managers wear many hats — managing sales, ensuring customers are happy, and keeping costs in line — so it can be hard to devote enough time to properly identify applicants most likely to meet job expectations.
As Mike Marchetti, executive vice president of store operations puts it, "Running a store can be very demanding, and our managers have only a limited amount of time in which to get it all done. The additional responsibility of thoroughly screening each applicant sometimes resulted in bad hires."
He adds, "We know an experienced salesperson is able to give better customer service, which increases sales. In retail, where the turnover rate is generally higher than in other industries, it's hard to ensure you have enough experienced salespeople to help you achieve your revenue goals."
With hundreds of stores across the nation, Finish Line knew that it needed to make its hiring process more efficient and enable store managers to improve the quality of their hires. The company turned to the Kronos® Talent Management Division (formerly Unicru®) for help.
Finish line benefits from selecting the best employees
Finish Line decided to roll out Workforce Acquisition™ (formerly the Unicru hiring management system) to its retail stores nationwide. Its corporate office wanted to provide better tools and support to its management staff, free them to succeed as salespeople and managers, and reduce hiring costs at the same time. Because Kronos specializes in working with distributed environments, Finish Line was able to deploy the solution across the entire enterprise in a few months.
Electronic applications — both in-store and online — and sales and dependability assessments enable Finish Line to consistently identify and select the most suitable applicants for its retail positions. By establishing criteria managers should look for in a job candidate, Workforce Acquisition eliminates a lot of time managers used to spend looking through applications. Instead of sifting through hundreds of paper applications to find qualified candidates, managers receive pre-qualified candidates and an interview guide to help them qualify the applicants even further.
"By standardizing the applications nationwide, Workforce Acquisition gives our managers a more structured way in which to go through the interview and hiring process," said Marchetti. "As a result, we've been able to teach our associates to be better interviewers." In addition, the managers' paperwork burden has been greatly reduced.
Hard cash savings and manager productivity rise
Finish Line has seen continuous year-over-year improvement in critical metrics like employee turnover, time spent per interview, and sales per associate since implementing Workforce Acquisition.
In a one-year period, over 300,000 candidates applied for employment at Finish Line, with 75 percent of them applying online. Using Kronos' assessment scores, the company was able to eliminate approximately one-third of applications that did not meet the basic hiring criteria. Finish Line estimates that it saved 60,000 store manager hours by automating the administrative aspects of the hiring process and not having to interview those candidates who did not meet the basic hiring criteria.
Furthermore, those who do get hired are staying on the job longer. For example, the average days of service for a store employee was up over five percent in a one-year period. Finish Line has also seen a nearly 10 percent improvement in retention company-wide. This translates into hard cash savings as the costs associated with sourcing, interviewing, and hiring more employees has dropped.
Cost savings are a tangible and important benefit, but even more important are those benefits that help drive business results. This is evident in the increase in sales per associate by approximately 20 percent. "People who stay longer are better at driving sales," says Marchetti.
In summary, he says, "Workforce Acquisition enhances the skills that our managers already have, unburdens them from paperwork, and enables them to make better hiring decisions."
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