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By Matt Pillar, Editor, Retail Solutions Online and Integrated Solutions For Retailers magazine

As close to 10% of our work-eligible population heads into the fall season unemployed (that's about 15 million people), the approximately one million seasonal jobs opening up very soon in the retail sector will be hard-won. But while a hiring spree for temporary holiday employees might offer little consolation for the jobless, it creates a great opportunity for retailers like you to hone your hiring processes and improve the quality of your workforces.

Retail was among the hardest hit sectors this summer, dropping more than 44,000 employees from June to July alone. The customer service chasm created by that drop in staffing will require you to bulk up considerably for November, and that bulking up needs to be underway now. According to Nikki Baird, managing partner at RSR, the quality of candidates available to you never looked better. On a recent call (which you can download here: http://video.webcasts.com/events/jame001/31688/), Baird fielded a question on this subject by citing some of her company's recent research. In that research, she asked retailers if the profile of employment candidates is changing based on economic conditions. She found that retailers are definitely seeing a shift in the quality of candidates, but not a decline. In fact, as displaced workers become more desperate for work, Baird says they're moving down the food chain in terms of what they're qualified to do. In turn, retail employers are actually seeing an increase in education level and overall quality of candidates that are applying.

How Qualified Is Too Qualified?

The challenge, says Baird, is figuring out how to weed out the people who are looking for any job, as opposed to those who are really looking for retail jobs. "Given the high turnover that already exists in retail, the last thing you want to do is set yourself up for more turnover when you hire now." Hiring candidates that are too qualified could lend to higher turnover in 2010. For example, one of the retailers queried in RSR's research admitted that currently, it classifies the quality of its workforce as a 5 on a scale of 1 to 10. "We'd love tens," this to-remain-anonymous retailer wrote, "and we're getting tens who apply for jobs. But we don't have the incentives in place to keep tens. We're not hiring the tens, we're not even bringing them in for interviews, because we know we won't be able to keep them." Instead this retailer, which is representative of most, is strategically taking advantage of the glut in the hiring pool by shooting to upgrade its workforce to sevens. That's a sound strategy that's fueled by the real-time need to bulk up on staff for the holidays. And it addresses another dynamic of holiday hiring: customer service. Capitalizing on a more (but not overly) qualified labor pool during the holidays will not only help cultivate your 2010 staff, it should help mitigate the classic "inept customer service rep" conundrum that plagues so many retailers from November through January.

Put Applicant Tracking Technology To Work

In advance of the holiday season and with the largest available labor pool in decades, you'd do well to deploy some tools to help manage and track large volumes of applicants. Integrated Solutions For Retailers magazine has featured in-depth feature stories on how Rite Aid (September, 2009) and 7-Eleven (March, 2009) have tackled the applicant tracking challenge with solutions from iCIMS and PeopleClick, respectively. These software solutions are helping retailers manage candidate relationships, job requisition and approval, sourcing, and hiring process and workflow, while also providing analytics tools that drive intelligent workforce planning.

Companies like iCIMS and Creative Options also help retailers manage employees post-hire, with systems for performance management, succession planning, surveying, training on specific procedures and initiatives, and assessment. Tools like these will help you keep the talent you acquire this holiday season, while helping you weed out underperformers. And of course, workforce management solutions like those offered by Oracle Retail, RedPrairie, Reflexis, Tomax, and others featured at retailsolutionsonline.com will ensure you maintain your workforce in an efficient manner.

The pool of qualified, unemployed laborers looking for jobs as we head into this holiday season presents you with an opportunity that shouldn't be squandered. In years past, perhaps you settled for warm bodies as you bumped your store staff up by a few percentage points in advance of the season. This year, everything's different. Putting some tools in place to help manage your applicants through the recruiting, interview, and hiring process will ensure you capitalize on a labor pool that, with any luck, you'll never see again.