Recruiting and keeping the best employees have always been concerns in grocery, but the rise of technology and different demographics’ varying attitudes toward work have made this endeavor more challenging than ever. To help attendees of Progressive Grocer’s recent GroceryTech event in Dallas get a handle on their own hiring approaches, Food Lion Talent Acquisition Manager Jessica Griffin sat down for a one-on-one chat with PG Editorial Director and Associate Publisher Gina Acosta.

A key point for retailers to understand, according to Griffin, is that “your future associates are your current customers, and vice versa.”

That means communicating with them in ways beyond telephones and email – text messaging, digital interviewing and ads on social media platforms like Instagram, for example. “How can we make it easy for the associates, for the future candidate … [to help] them understand that there is a career within Food Lion?” mused Griffin. “I think that's the biggest thing with omnichannel, just understanding where these people will be or are, and attracting them in those different ways.”

Asked to characterize the current labor market, Griffin noted that it was “very different than it was 10 years ago, or even five years ago. People are looking for convenience, but they’re also looking for stability. I was doing some reading the other week, and I was looking for, what are the people looking for? Is it salary? Millennials, we look for salary – where’s the money? Gen Z is not the same. They’re looking for stability. They’re looking for a home; they need the feedback.”

When it comes to grocery hiring in particular, Griffin emphasized the importance of highlighting the opportunities that exist in the industry, noting the value of “being able to get in front of that customer and helping them understand, ‘Hey, your daughter worked here at 16 and [she could] be here again, working in the corporate world at 26.’” She agreed with Acosta’s assertion that “grocery retailers really need to do a better job of stressing that opportunity.”

Having come from the fast-paced tech world to work at Food Lion, Griffin recognized that she needed to update and accelerate the company’s hiring process to get people into open positions as soon as possible.

“We’ve implemented an interview strategy,” she explained. “So you’ll have that conversation with the first person and they’re capturing that data to understand what you like, what you’re interested in, and then you’ll go through a second interview with that store manager or CSM, and they’ll assess you for the talent that you have, and then we hire you. But everybody will go through that same interview process to assess talent, and then that way, you’ll know who you have in your store. … And that leader is supposed to communicate that to us to start to build those succession plans. Corporate is the same thing. Everybody’s following the same interview process. … That has helped us in getting some great people. I think our turnover rate when I started was like 88%. We’re down to like 67% right now.”

As far as interviewing candidates goes, “everybody is assessed on the same pole, and I think doing it that way and keeping the interview process short [works],” she observed. “I think some of our roles, you might get five or seven interviews. That’s crazy, right? Let’s just keep it at three for the entire business. Whether you’re going from a bagger to a VP, I think everyone needs that same experience.”

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