National Seasonal Retailer

Adaptive Payroll^® and Adaptive RPO^SM provide a powerful "one-two" punch for improving a national retailer's results

Outcome in Brief 

• Improved efficiency in operations, while reducing turnover
• This enabled the retailer to increase their focus on Sales, as well as reopen previously closed stores

Challenge

Ineffective recruitment and selection methods, coupled with a heavy administrative payrolling burden, were limiting the 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, stores had been closed due to employee theft and a lack of sales.

Results

Our Adaptive Payroll^® and 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 with few distractions.  The benefits to this client are summarized 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 our success, the stores that had previously ceased operations were successfully re-opened.
• The client extended an exclusive, multi-year contract to Headway for the majority of their nationwide locations for the renewed contract period. Thus,  our Adaptive RPO^SM Model enabled us to create a “one-source” recruitment and workforce management solution for the client

Recruitment was Critically Linked to Revenue

For this client, the selection of top-notch seasonal sales and customer service professionals is critical, because the performance of these employees over an eight-week period determines 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 eight week 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.

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 our Adaptive RPO^SM recruitment and workforce solutions model.  Adaptive RPO^SM is a complete Recruitment Process Outsourcing model that utilizes meticulous candidate sourcing, screening, selection and workforce preparation efforts for each three month period leading up to the seasonal sales efforts. 

Our recruitment efforts covered over 84 nationwide locations for the client.  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.