A hiring standard for every store
Give the people who hire a consistent way to assess applicants for the role.
Your business hires retail staff all year, and each store manager may do it their own way. For most, that means a pile of applications, a few CVs read quickly, and an interview. A CV mostly shows how well someone presents themselves on paper. It says very little about how they will handle a busy Saturday.
A screen that every store uses gives you one hiring standard across the business. A consistent way of hiring helps you keep good staff longer, and it lifts the standard customers get at the counter.
What the applicant does, and what you get
Ten to fifteen minutes online, and a report and shortlist back the moment the applicant finishes.
The format is a situational judgement test. Instead of asking people to describe themselves, it describes something that happens in a store — a customer wanting a refund the policy doesn't allow, say, or a queue building while a delivery waits — and asks what the applicant would do. The situations are built around four things that decide how someone performs on a retail floor: solving problems, following store policy, handling pressure, and using initiative when there is a sale to be made.
That matters because of who reads the result. Your store managers aren't psychologists, and a personality profile asks them to turn a score into a judgement about a person. A situational judgement result needs no translating. It shows how an applicant said they would handle situations the manager will actually face next week — which also tells the manager exactly what to ask about in the interview.
It goes out in your business's name, with your application form and your branding, not a testing company's. And because the shortlist is ready as soon as someone finishes, a manager can call a strong applicant the same day, before a store down the road does.
Measured against your own stores
Applicants are compared with the people already doing well in your stores, not with retail staff in general.
Most screening tests compare an applicant with a norm group — a large sample of people in similar jobs somewhere else. This one is calibrated on your business. Performance results and other key measures from staff already working in your stores are used to validate the screen statistically and set local benchmarks, and each applicant is scored against those.
What makes someone good on the floor of a discount chain is not what makes them good in a specialist store, and the research on situational judgement tests finds they predict performance best when they are built around the actual job. A benchmark drawn from your own staff is built around the actual job by definition.
Hiring against that standard lifts average sales per staff member, keeps people longer and makes them more productive — and it takes less time and money to fill each role.
Your applicants aren't measured against retail staff in general. They're measured against the people already doing well in your stores.
What happens once the results arrive
The hiring manager makes the decision. Our psychologists make sure the screen is asking the right questions before they do.
Before the first applicant sees it, one of our psychologists works through your stores with you: which situations matter most in your stores, what your performance data says a strong hire looks like, and how strong an applicant needs to be to make the shortlist. You have that conversation once, at the start, and it is what makes every result afterwards mean something.
From then on, reports go to the person doing the hiring. They are written to be read by a manager with no training in psychology, and we support managers in reading them. The report isn't a verdict. Most of its value is in the interview it sets up: an applicant who handled most situations well but struggled with the ones under pressure is someone to ask about their busiest shift.
You can also see the pattern across the business — which stores are using the screen, and whether the people being hired are the ones it put forward. Where you want that, it can be reported back to you as well.
The evidence behind it
A long-researched method, validated in your own stores rather than borrowed from someone else's.
Situational judgement tests have been studied for decades. One widely cited review pooled results from more than 10,000 people and found that they consistently predict how well people go on to perform in the job — across different jobs and different settings. (McDaniel and colleagues, Journal of Applied Psychology, 2001.)
The stronger evidence is local. Because the screen is validated against your own staff's performance, you are not relying on a result established somewhere else and assumed to carry over. You are relying on one established in your business.
We have been building retail screening this way since the mid-2000s. For one multi-store retailer, we built an online screen on a sample of its own sales staff and their performance data. Every new applicant took it, and regional and store managers used the reports to reach good candidates before competitors did.
Psych Press has developed and published psychometric instruments since 1995, in-house and in partnership with universities and international test publishers.
Who it suits, and who it doesn't
Businesses that hire front-line retail staff in volume.
It suits
Businesses hiring retail staff in volume, whether recruitment is managed centrally or by individual stores, where applications arrive faster than anyone can read them properly. It earns the most during seasonal peaks, when a store may need several people in a fortnight.
It isn't built for
Management and other roles outside front-line retail work, which need more than this screen — our selection reports and assessment centres cover those. And a store that hires one person a year will get less from it than one that hires twenty.
Hospitality, customer service and sales roles each have their own screen, built for the role: hospitality screening, the Customer Service Predictor and sales screening. For security-services businesses, the Security Employment Screening Questionnaire combines work history, reasoning, situational judgement and personality.
Frequently asked questions
Won't this slow hiring down when a shift needs filling?
It usually speeds it up. The applicant spends 10–15 minutes on it, the report arrives the moment they finish, and the shortlist is ranked, so the hiring manager spends their time on the three best applicants rather than reading forty CVs.
Can applicants fake their answers?
Less easily than on a personality questionnaire. A personality test asks people to describe themselves, and anyone can describe themselves well. This asks which response to a situation is most appropriate — and working out the right way to handle a difficult customer is itself part of what is being measured. Someone who can reliably spot it has shown something the store needs. Anyone who has guessed their way through tends to come apart in the interview, when the manager asks what they actually did the last time it happened.
What does it cost?
It depends on how many stores use it, how many applicants go through it, and whether it is calibrated on your own business's data, so we scope it with you. The figure worth setting it against is what one store spends recruiting the same role three times in a year — which is the cost the screen is there to bring down.
Start a conversation with us
Tell us about your situation and the support you are looking for. You can write as much as you need.
Or call us on +61 3 9670 0590.