Identifying High & Low Performers with Retail Employee Assessments

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By Lisa McCann

Have you ever wondered how to make all your retail employees like your top 10%?

Surveying your current workforce and identifying your high and low performers will help you better understand what you need to drive better hires. Using tools such as employee assessments and performance summaries allow you to gain insights into the key areas high performers are succeeding in and their associated skills. Analyzing your low performers is also important because you can focus in on the areas that you think are causing them to lag behind their peers. The first step is to understand what differentiates these two groups is to focus on the variations in their skills, capabilities, personality traits, and behaviours.

Where are the Competency Gaps?

Your current workforce needs to take your employee assessments. The questions will provide you with insights into what key competency areas high performers are excelling in comparatively to low performers. You can then plot your employee scores over each competency and see which areas have skill gaps. These are the important competencies to place a higher weight on in the assessment scoring.

It’s also important to understand which employees are having long term success and are growing within the business. These are employees who you will want to understand their key competency areas and how they differ from those who turnover. This will help you again weigh in on what a great hire looks like and their associated score.

Why Focus on Low Performers?

Low performers can give you immense insights into skills gaps within your current workforce and future needs that will start to arise. When you see the differentiators between high and low performers you can start to red flag those low scoring competencies in the employee assessments. If a candidate ranks substantially low on something that is deemed essential for employee success in the role, they will be red flagged. In terms of current employees, this helps your organization decide how to best deal with current skills gaps and what training or development programs you may choose to implement to improve your workforce. A current employee may rank high in a customer service role, but their selling abilities may be lacking. This may allow you to transition the employee into another area of the business where their strengths could be used or opt to implement a training program to help them better their selling skills.

What Roles Drive Results?

Looking at the key roles within your organization and which are driving front-line business results will help you create a stronger assessment tool. If certain roles are essential to business results, you will want to ensure that they are being filled with best fit candidates. These are areas you will want to build out in an employee assessment to ensure you are hiring candidates who will match your expectations. Scoring will never be perfect but if you can continuously reassess your optimal scores and make improvements based on post hire results, you will drive better hires each time. Additionally, strategic planning comes into play when you start to understand which employees are successful in the long term with your organization. These are employees you will want to build training and retention programs for to make sure that your organization is developing top talent.

Lisa McCann is the Corporate Marketing Manager at Vancouver-based recruitment company, Mindfield Group.

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