Hiring a retail store manager
Two hundred applicants, many with recognisable logos on the CV, and almost no way to tell from the page whether someone ran a store or executed a playbook written at head office. For an independent or a small chain, that distinction is the entire hire.
The big-brand CV is the most reliable false positive in retail. Managing a branch of a national chain and running a store are different jobs sharing a title. In the first, pricing, ranging, rotas, marketing and often recruitment arrive from elsewhere; in the second they are yours. A CV shows the logo and the years — not which decisions the person actually made. And the hardest part of the job, holding a team together through the decisions nobody enjoys, is invisible on paper by design.
From a store to a guide, in one conversation
Selene goes after the size of the thing being run — team, turnover, and how much of it the manager actually controls.
Team size, turnover, and how much they control
For a leadership role Selene asks about team size and key stakeholders. For retail specifically she pushes on autonomy — because whether the manager sets the rota, the range and the local marketing is what decides which half of the applicant pool is relevant.
One sentence changes the guide
Retail ads ask for commercial acumen and a track record of hitting target. Both are readable and both are common. This asks for the part of the job that actually breaks people, and it demotes the thing most CVs lead with — the size of the previous employer.
Exceptional, not just good —
“Someone who has had to let a member of staff go, and still had a team afterwards.”
→ A hard people decision handled well became a must-have; time at a large chain stopped counting as a signal.
What the guide ends up measuring
Six criteria, weighted for a full-autonomy store of nine people. Local marketing sits as an important criterion rather than a footnote purely because footfall here is this person's problem, not head office's. At a fifty-person flagship inside a national chain the same guide would look almost inverted — which is the point of building it from the conversation.
Nothing to gate on, and a big pile to read
No licence, no certification, no fixed availability question — every one of the two hundred gets read. That combination, high volume with no eligibility filter, is the most expensive shape a role can have for a human reader, and the one where a consistent guide saves the most time.
Scored on what they ran, not who they ran it for
Selene never receives the candidate’s name or the raw CV. She scores a blind, structured profile, with any stated age, sex, nationality and religion stripped out before scoring runs.
Half these CVs lead with a famous logo, and the scorer never sees it. What is left is what the person actually ran.
How the blind scoring works →What stays with you
Selene's half
- Establishing how much autonomy this role really carries, and building the criteria to match
- Reading all 200 against the same guide, blind, with the evidence attached
- A ranked shortlist with a recommend-or-decline call on each
- An interview brief that pushes on what's unresolved — like the P&L question
Yours
- Advertising the role — Selene doesn't post to job boards or source candidates
- Any trial day, store visit or reference on commercial performance
- The interview, and ideally an hour with them on the shop floor
- The offer, and the decision about who runs your store
Describe the store, not the job title
One site or twenty, full autonomy or a central playbook — the difference between those two shows up in the first three criteria.