The Good Guys

Requirements:

Store Executive Managers, Territory Executive Managers

Methodologies: 

National talent mapping, national talent pipe-lining, search and talent acquisition

Organisational context:

The Good Guys is a chain of consumer electronics stores with 100+ locations across Australia. With (an estimated) $2B revenue and approaching 70 years of heritage as a private, family-owned operation; the business embarked on a major transformation of both its ownership and operational structure towards the end of 2015. At this time, the business was operating with a hybrid model at store level which consisted of Joint Venture Partners running approximately 60% of their store network and the remainder being managed corporately by Store General Managers. 

The Good Guys had a mandate to transition all of the Joint Venture Partnership stores to corporately run stores by the end of the 2015/16 financial year. As a result of this significant organisational transformation, the business was prepared for many of the existing Joint Venture Partners to exit the business, therefore facing the prospect of a severe talent deficit across the national store network. Not long after this first aspect of the transformation was underway, The Good Guys announced their organisational intent to either explore an IPO or a trade sale. It was a time of huge upheaval and speculation for the organisation and they knew that the success of their transformation hinged on them securing incredible talent for their stores.

The pain points and challenges:

  • With the transition to a fully corporatised retail model looming, as well as the rollout of a raft of new stores, The Good Guys needed the top handful of customer centric leadership talent right across Australia - and fast.
  • The Good Guys needed to form an exclusive, long-term partnership with a recruitment firm that could operate as an extension of their organisation to attract and assess remarkable store leadership talent in every state of Australia. 

People Equity’s solution:

  • Our dedicated project team invested heavily in refining and understanding the brief for the Store Executive Manager and Territory Executive Manager roles.
  • Working in conjunction with The Good Guys’ People and Culture Managers, Head of People and Culture, Head of Retail and Chief Executive Officer, we collectively defined and refined the end-to-end recruitment process. 
  • With Board level visibility, we also established rigorous tracking and reporting frameworks so that we could communicate the status of the candidate pool at short notice. 
  • We leveraged our extensive networks within retail across Australia to seek referrals, map talent, and directly approach prospective candidates or engage them through digital and social communication platforms. 
  • The selection criteria allowed us to assess a broad candidate talent pool against their technical ability, cultural agility, political savvy and leadership presence. We used behavioural interviewing technique to extract “stories” from our candidates which demonstrated their abilities and aptitude in these key areas.
  • From there, it was about managing and keeping our talented candidates engaged through a client-facing recruitment process that sometimes spanned three months and involved three to four interview stages with The Good Guys as well as psychometric testing, police checking and reference checking through to the offer.

Results:

  • Over the 18-month duration of this project, we placed Store Executive Managers into well over half of The Good Guys’ national store network, as well as several Territory Executive Manager appointments.
  • We placed the top 1% of our total candidate pool into the Store Executive Manager positions.

If you would like to discuss a talent pain point you are experiencing and how we can help, please call our retail search and recruitment expert Gabby Symons on: 0432 261 116

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