How Do You Find A Good Retail Recruitment Agency?

How Do You Find A Good Retail Recruitment Agency?
There are lots of retail recruiters you could choose to find the talent you need. So how do you make sure you’re picking the right one for you? Here’s the ZD take.

We’ll let you into a secret. You don’t have to use retail recruiters to find talent. You can do it yourself. Lots of our clients do.

How come our clients are clients if they’re doing their own retail recruitment? Good question, and we’ll get to that in a minute.

But you can do your own recruitment. You can run your referral schemes. You can boost the headcount in your HR team and hire every single post internally if you really want to.

The thing is, we know you have that option. So step one in finding a good retail recruitment company is this: go with recruiters who acknowledge that you could choose not to use them, because chances are they’ll work harder to give you reasons to stick with them.

Once you’ve got that sorted, here are a few other ways to thin out the field.

Opt for niche recruitment specialists

Most ZD recruiters have had a previous life working with other recruiters. Chat with them, and you’ll find there’s a recurring story they tell.

You see, many recruiters are mass market. They may run a retail recruitment department (if you’re lucky) but that will almost inevitably be playing second, third or even lesser fiddle to legal, accounting, finance or digital recruitment.

Retail recruitment comes way down their list of priorities. But when you choose a niche recruitment specialist, retail (or whatever other niche your preferred recruiter specialises in) isn’t an also-ran. It’s their bread and butter. It’s what they’re best at. And that instantly makes them a better choice.

Choose retail recruiters who’ll fit the way you work

In the intro to this post, we mentioned the recruiters who choose us as clients, but who are also doing their own recruitment. Those two things can be true at the same time because we stay flexible.

Lots of customer-facing businesses do their own recruitment. It’s just that there’s a limit. They’re not about to scale up the HR department for a temporary surge in recruitment needs so, while they can happily handle the day-to-day, they need help with volume hiring exercises.

Or maybe they need a hand with key appointments. Or they want support with bits of the recruitment process, like initial sifts or running assessment centres.
Some retail recruitment partners aren’t interested unless you’re asking them to do it all. A good retail recruitment agency delivers the scale and depth of recruitment you need.

Choose recruiters who know your world

It’s one thing to be an experienced recruiter. But hiring a store manager or head of buying isn’t like hiring a partner at a law firm or a data analyst.
It’s a little like the niche recruitment point we made earlier – it pays to choose people who know your world.

Our people know luxury retail, retail ops, or fashion and beauty buying because they’ve been buyers, managers or brand ambassadors.
And without exception, all of them will say what a difference that experience makes to hiring your retail talent.

Look for trusted recruiters

We’ve been recruiting across the length and breadth of the UK for more than a decade. Some of our clients have been with us for pretty much all of that time. Ask them why, and they’ll tell you it’s because we get results.

But they’ll also tell you we take the time to understand their business and keep understanding it as the business adapts. They’ll tell you we make hiring less painful. And they’ll tell you we’re good people to work with.
It all adds up to being a trusted recruiter.

Check the reviews

Yes, this one’s obvious. But it’s important to consider what those reviews are really saying. We post some of our reviews on our website. They are totally, utterly, hand-on-heart genuine. But how do you know that?

We always recommend searching more widely and looking for independent verification. The more reviews you can find, the better. Just as you would when shopping online, always check to make sure the reviews haven’t arrived in one great big dump on the same date (bot alert!).

Read a few of them too, to ensure they actually sound like a human being wrote them.

At time of writing, for example, Trustindex, the independent review aggregator, shows 1,069 reviews for Zachary Daniels, with an average rating of 4.9/5.

Why our clients partner with us

Our clients choose Zachary Daniels because we do all of the above. We’re a niche recruiter, specialising in retail. We get results.

Our reviews are amazing (if we do say so ourselves). And we tailor the way we work to fit exactly what our clients need, and then we adapt as those needs change.

Sound like the sort of retail recruiters you could do with getting to know? We’re ready to help. Talk to us now.