The e-tail recruitment challenge

The main problem in e-commerce recruitment is quite simple: there aren’t enough experienced staff to go around. After years of under-investment, retailers have finally grasped how crucial the web is and want to bolster their teams, but the pool
of talent isn’t there for them to draw on.

For those retailers that did get on board early on, experience isn’t the problem. The challenge for them is keeping the staff who have the expertise and are now highly sought after commodities.

“Pure-play retailers like us will come under increasing pressure from retailers to retain staff,” says Firebox managing director Christian Robinson. “Established retailers look to companies like us for staff because we have the experience and they have respect for what we do.”

E-tailers like Firebox need to find ways to retain their staff in the face of tempting offers from high street competitors. For these players the challenge will be to offer their staff imaginative incentives to stay, says Moira Benigson, managing partner at executive search firm MBS. Such incentives can include long-term equity deals and generous benefit packages.

“People are headhunting everywhere from Net-a-Porter to Asos,” she explains. “They’re having a very difficult time retaining their staff.”

Patrick Tame, founder of e-commerce executive search firm Beringer Tame, says part of the reason why retailers are only just waking up to the realities of e-commerce is that too many are still unaware of how much needs to be invested to be effective.

“When it comes to a website people still try to do it on the cheap,” he says. “If you really want this to be a core part of the business you need to put a realistic amount of money into it. A company needs to work out what skills they are
missing then they need to approach the market.”

One of the things that retailers still don’t grasp, he adds, is that a career in e-commerce is much less rigid than in traditional bricks-and-mortar retailing, and in many ways the recruitment rule book needs to be ripped up. Part of this is placing more emphasis on the skill set that someone will bring than their particular background.

“If you’re looking for someone with very specific experience in your sector then you’re limiting the amount of people available to you,” Tame explains.

And because there are now more positions than experienced staff to fill them, retailers also need to be prepared to fork out more to tempt professionals away from their present jobs than they might in other areas of the business.

The HR challenge that e-commerce presents is one that many believe retailers have overlooked for too long. If companies want to stay competitive, there will soon be no excuses.