Diversity in retail: Why and how to get a more diverse team
Retail is an important part of many industries. From fashion to beauty, skincare, food & drink, electronics, footwear, homewares, and beyond, retail is big business. Having a diverse team is hugely beneficial for any organisation, and retail is no different. Building a staff that ranges in age, background and ethnicity will enrich your organisation by giving you direct insights into a range of perspectives. It will also ensure that your team can relate to every customer that walks through your doors.
Along with sales know-how and industry knowledge, additional skills such as language and communication skills are hugely valuable in retail. Communicating with customers is key to building trust between your brand and consumers. Diverse teams in retail tend to be more effective in speaking with and attracting a bigger, broader customer base. Plus, diverse teams that reflect their customer bases are more inclined to pick up on and counteract insensitivities in a brand’s communication, for instance. Today’s globalised world means that cities and communities all over the world are highly diverse. Businesses need to reflect this to ensure they are reaching their full potential, especially in retail where customer-facing roles are standard.
What is diversity in retail?
Diversity in retail means hiring people from a range of backgrounds. It considers social factors like gender, age, sexual orientation, religion, race, or disability. Hiring employees across a range of ages, race or gender, for example, will enrich your team and allow them to connect with any customer that enters your store. On the financial side, there is a strong correlation between diversity in a company’s leadership and how likely the company is to out-perform competitors. As well as making your brand more interesting and attractive to a range of potential customers, diversity in retail offers benefits on a financial level too.
Benefits of a diversity retail team
Have you ever wondered why diversity is important in the workplace? Diversity in a retail team offers solid benefits, which enhance the overall performance and success of the business. For starters, a diverse team brings together individuals with unique perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences. This fosters a rich pool of ideas and creativity. Diversity and gender-inclusivity in retail is also invaluable in addressing challenges and adapting to the ever-evolving retail landscape.
A diverse retail team is also equipped to understand and cater to a broad customer base. With employees representing different demographics, cultural nuances, and preferences, the team can develop a deep understanding of customer needs and perspectives. Tailoring their approach to deal with customers from various backgrounds will lead to a more inclusive and welcoming shopping environment. This can then lead to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty. Whether you are selling clothes, music, garden furniture or food, today’s globalised world means that your customers may come from anywhere, and will have vastly varying perspectives.
Ensuring you have a diverse team in place that reflects the customer will improve your business’s customer empathy, which will help nurture strong customer service relationships. This is something which every paying customer will greatly appreciate, and as a result, they are more likely turn into recurring customers.
How to improve diversity in retail
There are various strategies available when it comes to improving diversity in the retail side of your business. It is always worthwhile to test a couple of them and assessing the outcome before deciding on the best long-term approach for your company.
1. Use recruitment platforms
Using recruitment platforms strategically is a good way to help your organisation enhance its employee diversity. Requirement platforms let you target a broad candidate pool and diverse talent. Don’t stick to just one jobs board – posting on multiple sources will broaden your reach and ensure more potential candidates view your ad. Many of those recruitment platforms, such as Teamdash, have built-ins diversity recruitment tools which can help you in the diversity recruitment process.
2. Build diverse teams and boost employee engagement
Team spirit and company culture are super important in today’s workplaces. When employees feel that their unique perspectives and qualities are welcomed, they are much more likely to go above and beyond in their jobs. Putting a strategy in place to attract a variety of applicants will provide you with a good foundation for developing a diverse retail workplace.
3. Use blind recruitment processes
Nowadays, recruiters can use a blind recruitment process as a way to focus on the skills, knowledge and abilities of potential candidates (read more about diversity recruitment). In retail, this process ensures fair and unbiased candidate evaluation at scale. If you remove identifiable information at the assessment stage of recruitment, your team can hone in on candidates’ skills and qualifications – this is a crucial part of any hiring process. This strategy fosters diversity by opening opportunities to a broad range of candidates, and can go a long way in helping you build an inclusive, ethnically diverse retail workforce.
4. Use a strategic hiring approach
Being strategic in how your source potential candidates for your retail business can go a long way in making the recruitment process simpler and more efficient. As a starting point, you can extend job advertisements across a multitude of diverse job boards and social media platforms (maybe use a social media recruitment tool) to engage a broad, qualified candidate base. It is also a good idea to tailor job postings and campaigns specifically to attract underrepresented groups, which fosters inclusivity in your organisation. If you craft custom job ad landing pages with information designed to resonate with potential candidates, you can demonstrate your commitment to diversity and cultivating a compelling company culture.
This multifaceted strategy can expand the reach of your recruitment efforts, as well as create an environment that actively values diversity within your retail team.
Benefits of a diversity hiring tool
Hiring tools offer features that let you manage recruitment on a large scale, and ultimately make recruiters’ lives easier! Features like analytics and reporting functionalities can be used to track a range of KPI’s, including diversity metrics. This then allows you to make data-informed decisions and implement the most effective strategy for your particular goals. A diversity hiring tool can also support networking with diverse professional groups. It can be used to find connections that might be missed when hiring via traditional channels.
Hire more diverse candidates in your retail business with a diversity hiring tool
Teamdash can help you build diversity and inclusion in retail in a few ways. Our software helps recruiters reach diverse candidates by making processes like blind recruitment and diverse job posting quick and easy. It also offers insightful analytics and reporting that let you monitor and track the diversity of your pool of candidates. These insights are crucial for finding areas for improvement, and building your talent pipeline, as well as identifying what’s working well in your diversity recruitment efforts.
You can leverage Teamdash software to connect with diverse professional networks. This can help you tap into communities that are not always reachable through the usual hiring channels. Teamdash also lets you easily expand your talent-sourcing channels, which is a step towards building a more diverse team in retail. It lets you post adverts on social media plaforms as well as jobs boards, and tailor your recruitment campaigns to invite minority groups. Custom job ad landing pages can also be created via our tool, which let you tailor your recruitment efforts to speak to range of qualified candidates.
