How do I recruit staff for my charity retail operation?

We know that it’s tough to recruit staff just now for everyone – including for charity retailers.

Our survey

We recently conducted a survey amongst our clients that told us the following:

It’s a real struggle to recruit to all paid posts just now, but especially Shop Manager roles, with 50% of respondents saying this was an issue for them
This impacts in many ways on the retail operation, including:
- Having to close for one or more shifts
- Team members becoming disgruntled at carrying extra work
- Retail strategies cannot be achieved
- Retail sales are lower than forecasted
- There’s less time to recruit volunteers
Respondents feel the top 3 reasons for the shortage of good applicants are:
- Increased competition from hospitality and other sectors for staff
- Terms and conditions of roles they are advertising
- Worries about retail job security from potential candidates
To counter the challenges, charity retailers are trying the following:
- Creating retail placement roles such as Kickstart roles and interns
- Recruiting less experienced candidates into development roles and training them to reach the role requirements of the post
- Increasing salary rates
- Offering non-financial incentives (e.g. employee assistance and/or wellbeing programmes)
- Having an always open application process

Free recruitment support

To help you meet your recruitment challenges, we’ve created a free webinar with our People, Governance & Interim support Associate, Anne Webb.

Anne talks you through ways to attract and retain good staff in the light of the current situation – you can watch the webinar here.

Charity Retail Association People Conference

Also – don’t miss the Charity Retail Association People Virtual Conference on 1st – 3rd February. We’re proud sponsors, alongside our friends at Shopiago and Team Kinetic, and will be delivering sessions on staff retention and Equity Diversity and Inclusion.

Jayne will also be chairing a session on out of the box thinking on recruitment, featuring bloggers Lucy Smith-Butler and Phoebe Boateng, alongside successful charity retail recruiters from White Rose and Acorns Hospice.

We look forward to seeing you there – and don’t forget to reach out to us if you want support with your recruitment. We’re here to help.

More About Us

The Charity Retail Consultancy helps charity retailers and other non-profits (including museums and galleries) develop their retail operation, improve their product offer and people, and improve their profitability.

The Charity Retail Academy provides online & face to face training developed by charity retailers, for charity retailers. We work in partnership with the Charity Retail Association to deliver Charity Retail Learning to their members and beyond.

The Charity Retail Coach offers a first class executive coaching service via our Associate, Dan O’Driscoll.

To find out more or to speak to us about how we can help you, please get in touch:

hello@thecharityretailconsultancy.co.uk

Jayne – 07598 243210

Vicki – 07985 574904