It’s no secret that labor challenges continue to plague the convenience store industry. Retailers just spent three days talking about hiring and retention best practices at the 2023 NACS Show.
While turnover has consistently been one of the biggest problems for Alimentation Couche-Tard — parent of Circle K and the second-largest c-store retailer in North America — the company has seen “significant improvements” over the past few years, Ina Strand, chief people officer for Couche-Tard, said during the company’s investor day on Wednesday.
Those improvements are reflected in the number of job applications Couche-Tard receives every quarter, which has grown about 40% over the past couple years, Strand noted. She credited the company’s efforts to revamp its career website, as well as letting applicants schedule their own interviews and implementing an instant-hire process for pre-qualified candidates, as reasons for this surge.
“While part of this [applicant growth] is a correction in the labor market — you probably see this across many other organizations — it’s not just the market,” Strand said. “This is a big priority, and we've had some really smart people putting together some very successful programs.”
Strand noted that Couche-Tard brings on about 250 new workers across its organization every day and has also leaned into the gig economy to expand its labor pool.
“That has been alleviating a lot of the pressure on our teams and is becoming a competitive advantage for us,” Strand said.
Couche-Tard’s onboarding process has undergone a facelift in recent years, Strand said, with the goal of engaging new hires from the start. The enhancements include a buddy system, where current workers help new ones get settled; and built-in mobile alerts, which allow new hires to report their experience — good or bad — to store managers.
“We've learned over the last few years that this is really about winning the first day and then it's about winning the first 40 hours,” Strand said.
The new onboarding process also includes gamified experiences for food, fuel and other elements of the job.
One of those games, Customer Stars, aims to educate new hires on sales and service inside the store. It’s available on mobile devices, and recreates life at the store, offering lessons on meeting customers, when it is and isn’t appropriate to upsell, and how to chat about Couche-Tard’s loyalty program.
Since launching the Customer Star program, overall basket sales have increased, Strand said.
“[Gamification] has become a really important part of our overall people strategy,” she said. “It allows us to reach this big group of employees in a very engaging way.”
By day 14 of the onboarding process, 96% of Couche-Tard’s new hires said they feel ready for the job — a double-digit-percent increase compared to previous years, Strand noted.
Once an employee finishes their first 30 days on the job, Couche-Tard shifts to retention mode, Strand said. As part of that, Couche-Tard prioritizes its leadership development program to give team members a career path to work towards.
Over the past three years, all of Couche-Tard’s regional directors and 800 market managers have come from its leadership development program, she noted. Couche-Tard currently has over 7,000 store managers enrolled in its leadership program.
Leadership development, Strand noted, “is the single most important factor” to retaining employees.
“People join organizations where they leave as leaders,” she said
