Retail is a fast-paced environment with a lot of unpredictability. To help your business succeed in these tempestuous seas, you need the right store manager to be your rock.
The best store managers are detail-oriented, able to juggle multiple tasks, and driven to provide the best customer experience possible. Finding and hiring the best store managers is no easy task, but nailing your store manager job description is a great first step.
But what does a store manager do? And how do you know someone’s right for the job? This step-by-step guide dives into these questions. We’ve also come up with a customizable store manager job description template to help your business attract the best of the best.
What are a store manager’s responsibilities?
The best store managers are dynamic personalities with a ton of retail experience. The store manager is the person who ensures sales and profitability goals are met, staff are managed, assistant store managers are supervised, and customer satisfaction is enhanced.
Your top candidates should have a wide base of experience in managing inventory, running reports, merchandising, and of course managing people—both employees and customers. Some store manager duties include:
- Keeping track of inventory levels
- Making sure every product is stocked
- Planning purchases
- Staying in touch with suppliers to keep product stock from running out
- Hiring and training
- Ensuring customer service needs are met
- Maintaining store cleanliness
- Cross-training staff to ensure task coverage
- Employee scheduling
- Cost tracking—material and labor
- Running expense, sales, and profitability reports
- Assessing team performance—as a whole and as individuals
A great store manager understands that they maintain a well-oiled machine—a machine tasked with creating an inviting store that boasts a fantastic customer experience.
What to look for in your next retail manager.
Look for seven core skill groups when hiring a retail store manager:
- Leadership skills: A store manager needs to inspire and guide their team, create a positive work environment, and foster a culture of teamwork and collaboration.
- People skills: The ability to interact effectively with both staff and customers is crucial. A good store manager should be able to build rapid rapport and strong relationships, as well as handle conflicts professionally, fairly, and consistently.
- Organizational skills: Store managers often juggle multiple tasks and projects simultaneously. They need to be able prioritize tasks and make quick decisions, as well as to shift from task to task quickly without skipping a beat.
- Sales and marketing skills: Overseeing sales activities, promoting the store and its products, and implementing marketing campaigns to drive traffic and increase sales are key responsibilities of a store manager.
- Financial management skills: Monitoring the store’s financial performance, creating budgets, and making decisions to improve profitability are essential aspects of the role.
- Inventory management skills: A store manager should be adept at monitoring stock levels, ordering new merchandise, and managing inventory to ensure that the store has enough products to meet customer demand.
- Problem-solving skills: Identifying and resolving problems as they arise and making decisions to improve the store’s performance are essential.
5 key interview questions to ask a store manager candidate.
Assessing potential store managers based on their resume skills is hard enough. But even if you know they can balance a spreadsheet, how do you find out if they can balance a team?
Soft skills are often just as important for a successful candidate, particularly in a managerial role like store supervisor. By posing the right questions during the interview, you can assess the skills that are harder to screen for and find the manager of your dreams.
Here are some questions that can help you hone in on the right candidate during the interview.
What led you to a career in retail?
Ideally, you’ll find someone who is passionate about retail—and especially about managing a retail store. That means loving all parts of the retail environment, from inventory to supervising and everything in between.
To assess their suitability as a manager, look for what motivates them and what will keep them connected to the role over time. Related questions to ask might include:
- Tell me about the best manager you ever had. What made them so effective?
- What strategies do you use to manage your time and balance the complex responsibilities of store management?
- What do you love about retail that keeps you in the industry?
- What do you hope to learn from the role?
What does quality customer service look like to you?
Providing quality customer service is a core part of a store manager’s job. Howthey view customer service—particularly in regard to difficult or demanding customers—can have a huge impact on your business operations.
Handling customer complaints is a crucial part of ensuring quality customer service. What’s more, they need to be able to train employees on giving good customer service, which means they need to be able to provide feedback on creating a stellar customer experience.
Related questions to ask might include:
- Tell me about a time you made a customer’s day. What special skills of yours went into making that happen?
- Say you witness an employee being rude or dismissive to a customer. How do you respond?
- What does “going above and beyond” mean to you?
Do you have experience training new employees?
Training happens at every point in a retail worker’s career, from onboarding to learning new skills and—eventually—someday becoming a manager.
Your store manager’s teaching style and training background can make or break the strength of your retail team. After all, a manager’s job is to make sure all the work is done effectively and efficiently.
Related questions to ask might include:
- What training was most effective for you while learning the job? How do you pass that wisdom onto your trainees?
- What would you say is the most important element on onboarding a new retail employee?
- How do you help ensure consistency of standards across a retail team?
What is your inventory management process like?
While there’s plenty of technology to help track inventory these days, managers must have a good handle on the process to ensure a fast and accurate inventory. Ideally, they would also be proficient in inventory tracking software—the less time they spend on inventory, the more time they have to put into the rest of your business!
Follow-up questions to ask might include:
- What are you looking for when you do inventory of a product?
- Tell me about a time you encountered an inventory discrepancy. How did you handle that?
- Are you up-to-date with the latest inventory software?
How do you ensure your team hits its sales goals?
For many retailers, hitting sales goals is important. But there are constantly shifting factors that are beyond a store manager’s control, such as sudden shifts in the economy, hazardous weather events, and labor pool fluctuations.
An effective manager can motivate their sales team to achieve sales goals and get them to close as many sales as possible, regardless of the situation. How a prospective store supervisor encourages sales can tell you a lot about how they engage employees.
Related questions to ask may include:
- How do you respond when a team or team member doesn’t hit their sales goal? How do you respond when they do?
- Tell me about a time when you had an impact on a team member’s sales numbers. What made the difference?
- How much importance does your management style place on sales?
- How do you balance encouraging employees to hit sales targets against providing a calm and welcoming customer experience?
A customizable store manager job description template—just for you.
Attracting the right candidates for a store manager position relies on writing a detailed job description. Below is an example store manager job description to inspire you and help you find the best managers in your area.
Feel free to use this job description, but remember to customize it to fit your own business’s unique needs!
Store Manager Job Description Template
XYZ Style is on the hunt for a passionate and driven Retail Store Manager for our new store location!
Are you the perfect fit?
As the Store Manager, you’ll be at the helm of all sales and operations for a top-tier retail store environment. Leveraging state-of-the-art technology, you’ll bridge the gap between our website and retail stores for our customers. You’ll recruit, hire, and train a team of personable associates ready to help our customers express their style.
We’re looking for a self-starting, high-energy leader who thrives on providing quality customer service. You’ll join a close-knit group of sales enthusiasts, all working together to hit aggressive sales goals and meet timelines to grow the business and develop effective business strategies.
Paired with significant inventory management support, your role in personnel management and support will be crucial in achieving the success of our business and improving customer satisfaction.
Responsibilities
- Embody company culture and values, acting as a role model for all team members.
- Recruit, hire, and train sales associates, preparing them to engage our customers in fresh and meaningful ways.
- Drive customer engagement both inside and outside the store, from store events and promotions to community projects.
- Direct the daily activities of assistant managers and sales associates in alignment with the company and store goals.
- Take regular inventory, order products, and collaborate with fulfillment partners to ensure a smoothly running warehouse.
- Ensure operational efficiency by actively managing tasks related to payroll and paperwork.
- Develop and maintain store guidelines that make the store easy to shop at and add value to the customer’s purchase journey.
- Develop business strategies to meet sales goals and improve store performance.
- Focus on improving customer satisfaction as a key goal.
Required Skills
- 2 years of experience as a manager in a retail environment.
- Knowledge and familiarity with active lifestyle choices such as yoga, cycling, pilates, weight training, running, nutrition, and other healthy activities.
- Ability to interact socially with customers, employees, and business partners both inside and outside of the store environment.
- Ability to manage a team, including working with individuals to set actionable goals for professional growth.
- Great interpersonal skills, a positive attitude, and the ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment.
- Strong analytical and quantitative skills; comfortable with building advanced spreadsheet models.
- Familiar with Excel, Outlook, and retail inventory and POS systems.
- Self-motivated, a good communicator with a natural ability to bring out the best in others.
- The ability to multitask, set priorities, and work well under pressure.
Download: Store Manager Job Description Template
Keep track of your store manager hiring—every step of the way.
Keeping all the steps involved in hiring straight is no mean feat. Especially for such an important role to your business, getting support in managing your store manager candidates only makes sense.
Track all store manager applicants in one place with Homebase. With our Plus plan, you can post your store manager job description to multiple job boards, ask screening questions to filter out those who may not be a good fit, and even message candidates to schedule interviews—all from the same platform.
Once you’ve identified the right candidate, you can send them an offer letter directly through the same interface. When they accept your position, you can kickstart the onboarding process right from our app.
Even if you’re not hiring all the time, odds are you’ve got a roster of employees to schedule—or your new store manager will. Our scheduling app makes sending out team schedules and communicating with team members easy as pie.
Even better—our scheduling app is completely free. Why not give your new store manager the gift of easy scheduling?.
Hire the best store managers you can find.
The store manager is a challenging role, and it’s not for everybody. That’s why hiring the right one is as important as finding the perfect product line.
Taking the time to understand what to look for in a store manager is a great step toward securing your small business’s future. Simplifying the search process? Even smarter.
Go ahead and make work easier. Give Homebase a try.
Remember: This is not legal advice. If you have questions about your particular situation, please consult a lawyer, CPA, or other appropriate professional advisor or agency.
