While the quantity of convenience-store employee applicants has grown in the past couple of years, the consistency of candidates is not always up to par with expectations, retailers told CSP. Inflation has remained a challenge, making it even more difficult for retailers to balance increasing prices and wages.
But there are some bright spots.
While hiring has remained challenging for convenience-store chains since the pandemic, Loop Neighborhood Market, a Fremont, California-based convenience-store chain of 132 stores, is seeing more candidates come through its recruiting portal than in the past years, said Pervez Pir, president of retail.
- Loop Neighborhood Market is No. 54 on CSP’s 2024 Top 202 ranking of U.S. convenience-store chains by store count. S&S Petroleum is No. 61 and Bazco Oil/Chillbox is No. 172.
“The hardest part is really identifying the right candidate that will help us grow sales and our brand,” Pir said. “We need to do a better job of having consistent questions and assessing the candidate the same way store to store. Today, we have each team leader interviewing potential candidates, but the interview style, questions and assessment are different store to store, which leads to inconsistent hiring practices.”
Loop is not alone in finding minimal-quality candidates as of late.
"The main challenges in hiring today include a scarcity of skills, with 17% of talent leaders citing a lack of qualifying skills and 15% citing a lack of qualifying experience as significant barriers." -Amanda Hahn, chief marketing officer at HireVue
“The main challenges in hiring today include a scarcity of skills, with 17% of talent leaders citing a lack of qualifying skills and 15% citing a lack of qualifying experience as significant barriers,” said Amanda Hahn, chief marketing officer at HireVue, a human resources management company based in South Jordan, Utah.
Inflation has been another obstacle.
“Wages have increased the last several years and are sometimes outpacing sales increases,” Pir said. “To hire talent, we have to increase pay to be competitive.”
It’s important to be flexible with the candidate, said Christina Smith, human resources and payroll manager at S&S Petroleum, a 110-store chain based in Mukilteo, Washington. While some applicants will take more time to fill out an application and have several interviews, others, especially the younger generation, teens to age 30, want to get hired right away. Retailers shouldn’t be so stringent on following the same exact process every time, she said.
Flexibility varies in those age 30 to 50 depending on the person and their level of sophistication with technology, she said. People 50 and older are often set in their ways and prefer traditional interview protocols.
“Sometimes people prefer to text you instead of making phone calls or emailing,” she said.
In recruitment, S&S goes to area churches, which might have job boards or career nights. It also recruits from veterans associations and employment agencies and works with retirees seeking a part-time job, Smith said.
For corporate roles, Loop offers a paid internship for third-year college students. The human resources team visits colleges to discuss the program with students, who can then apply for each department.
At New Haven, Michigan-based Bazco Oil, which runs 37 Chillbox convenience stores, hiring and staffing is going “absolutely fabulous,” said Marquita Tharpe Williams, human resources director. The chain has hired 100 employees this year for new and existing roles.
"We try to make our onboarding experiences as simple as possible and really play into the fact that a lot of our applicants are of a younger demographic." -Marquita Tharpe Williams, human resources director at Bazco Oil
“We try to make our onboarding experiences as simple as possible and really play into the fact that a lot of our applicants are of a younger demographic,” she said.
This means using technology, including a scannable QR code that directs the applicant to the application and several mobile apps.
“It’s a quick and easy turnaround, which always helps in getting someone in the door and actually getting them into the position,” she said.
While Chillbox has some turnover, “I am proud to say our retention rate is up 21% from the same time last year,” she said. “I know it’s going to sound very much like a cliche, but I really do believe that we try to treat all of our employees, from the customer service reps to cashiers to the store management, like family.”
Employees care about what the store means to the customer and the community.
“People want to work at a place that has a purpose,” said Jeff Lenard, vice president of strategic industry initiatives at NACS, Alexandria, Virginia. “If you work a typical eight-hour day, you’re spending more time with coworkers than you are with your family. So, it becomes really important for employers to offer meaningful work.”
Training Is Key
Appropriate training is important to increase retention, Smith from S&S said.
“The biggest issues I see are when people are frustrated because they don’t feel they were trained properly,” she said.
A manager might correct an employee for a mistake, but that employee might feel they weren’t trained in the first place—or were told to do it one way by one manager and now another manager is telling them to do it a different way, she said.
S&S currently is improving its training program to be more consistent. It’s important to adhere to the program and ensure a manager doesn’t skip some pages depending on how quickly they need to get somebody into a role, she said.
For example, in June, the manager of an S&S in Blaine, Washington, was feeling the pinch of being down an employee and was going to rescind the approved vacation of a different employee. Even with the shortage, Smith told the manager to allow the employee to take the vacation, warning that canceling the vacation would most likely spur the employee to quit.
“Managing people is more important than the actual job part, because that’s how you keep your employees,” Smith said.
Another way to retain employees is through company culture. Loop recognizes birthdays, anniversaries, good work and accomplishments on its internal website.
“We also use this portal to give out Team Loop points where the employee can spend these points [on] Amazon or other vendors on the site,” Pir said. “We also visit sites and hand out Team Loop points when we see good behavior that supports our values. Furthermore, we recognize tenure by giving out plaques, monetary rewards and highlighting them in our newsletter.”
Bonuses and Rewards
S&S also strives to make positions more attractive, Smith said.
The chain rewards employees on their birthday and other holidays with gift cards, while managers receive Christmas bonuses and branded items. In addition, employees with school-age children get to take home backpacks.
“They really like that, and so we try to do things to show we appreciate them,” Smith said, adding that they aim to keep the perks affordable and balance them against unrealistic wages.
“The key is to define what you do best and integrate that into your employment strategies,” said Lenard. “Authenticity might be an overused buzzword today, but authenticity will never go out of style.”
There are also retention bonuses at SunStop, starting at $25 for cashiers, $300 for store managers and up to $500 for district managers. Employees receive an anniversary certificate, too.
Chillbox offers its employees perks including free drinks and food and performance bonuses and rewards them for referring quality hires.
“We try to give them as much as possible,” Williams said, adding that Chillbox’s starting hourly wage is at least $14, while Michigan’s minimum wage is $10.33.
Another strategy Chillbox has found successful is promoting heavily from within.
"Employees can see their colleagues moving up the ladder, and I think that that’s an incentive for them." -Marquita Tharpe Williams, human resources director at Bazco Oil
“Employees can see their colleagues moving up the ladder, and I think that that’s an incentive for them,” Williams said, adding that word of mouth is a valuable hiring tool.
Williams has found that employees 25 and older, up to the mid-50s, come more from the $50 referral program, while those 18 to 24 come more from QR codes and other tech-related areas. “I think that’s because of the ease of application,” she said.
The best hiring tip she can give, however, is a retailer should ensure they have something to offer beyond pay.
Lenard said the way a retailer sells a position is important.
“Think about the difference between saying you are hiring for a cashier vs. saying that you are looking to hire someone to help run a $10 million enterprise and that you will learn customer relations, inventory management, public relations and some other skills,” he said.
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