Foot Locker
Foot Locker, Inc. leads the celebration of sneaker and youth culture around the globe through a portfolio of brands including Foot Locker, Kids Foot Locker, Champs Sports, atmos, WSS and Sidestep. With approximately 2,800 retail stores in 28 countries across North America, Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, as well as websites and mobile apps, the company’s purpose is to inspire and empower youth culture around the world, by fueling a shared passion for self-expression and creating unrivaled experiences at the heart of the global sneaker community. Foot Locker, Inc. has its corporate headquarters in New York.
1. What changes have you made to your candidate experience recently? What improvements are you most proud of? How do you know that your changes are making a difference?
Enhancing candidate experience continues to remain a priority with the recruitment team. In 2022, we maintained our efforts from the previous year and implemented additional changes as well. We continued to utilize a video interview format for many of our roles to ensure a great experience. For many of our distribution positions, we have continued to utilize a fully virtual hiring process for a safer and more seamless experience. We also remain consistent with additional candidate touch points. These touch points ensure that candidates are regularly updated on their status. To ensure more engagement and connection with our distribution, call center, and field candidates, we also continue to employ our talent pools.
Additional improvements made this year include implementing enhancements on our career site, such as making it easier to locate remote positions and clearly indicating in our job descriptions if a position is remote, hybrid or in-office.
2. Why did you decide to make changes to how candidates were being treated? What data or evidence prompted you to make a change?
We review responses to the CandE Awards Survey and implement changes based on the responses we receive. We also regularly solicit feedback from our regional and global recruiting teams to help identify process improvements and efficiencies. For example, based on feedback we received from our hiring teams, we have made changes as to which areas of the business utilize assessments during the application process.
3. How did you build support and commitment within your team and the broader organization? How did you demonstrate the importance of candidate experience?
Candidate experience is consistently a point of conversation both within the internal recruitment team and with broader teams when speaking to hiring managers. We regularly review feedback and responses to continually evaluate and adjust where needed.
In addition, all levels of the organization, including C-suite leaders, are involved in the interview process and prioritize candidate experience. To be mindful of candidates’ time and to increase efficiency, we have parameters in place to standardize the approved number of interviewers based on job level.
4. How do you measure candidate experience? How do you report on your recruiting process? How do you use that data to demonstrate financial impacts as well as manage recruiter and hiring manager behaviors?
We use a variety of methods to measure candidate experience. First, we use the data and responses from the CandE Survey to analyze the experiences of our candidates throughout the hiring process. Second, we include traditional recruiting metrics like time to fill and time to hire in every recruiter’s performance evaluation. We are also expanding our reporting and analysis of time-based metrics to discover any areas of opportunity across additional areas of recruitment that previously were not measured. Third, we have continued to expand and develop our field recruitment teams by having them support and enhance the candidate experience in their assigned territory.
Finally, we use our ATS to track the time it takes to move between recruitment phases to identify pain points and increase process efficiencies. For example, how long it takes to move a candidate from “reviewed” to “phone screen” to “hiring manager interview.” This data is then reviewed on an annual basis from a global perspective with a member of our management team to identify trends.
