The grocery industry faces a myriad of fluctuating challenges — from tariffs to supply chain hiccups — but employee turnover is one issue that hasn’t let up.
Grocery industry employee turnover is at 69%, one of the highest rates of any other U.S. industry, the National Grocers Association reported during a June 2024 webinar, adding that smaller grocers are impacted the most.
Enter The SuperMarket Agency, a curated recruiting company dedicated to grocers, big-box retailers and convenience stores to help them fill store-level management roles.
The Staffing Agency, which consists of fellow recruiting firms The Chef Agency and The Estate Agency, acquired the grocery recruiting business from founder Steven Hankins and launched it under its new name in January. Like its sister firms, The SuperMarket Agency connects workers and companies in the specific industry with permanent placements for hourly and salaried jobs.
Steven Kamali, The Staffing Agency’s CEO, expanded the platform from beyond the greater Washington, D.C., area, where it exclusively ran under Hankins, to across 25 markets nationwide.
Kamali sat down with Grocery Dive to discuss how The SuperMarket Agency assists grocers and aims to highlight grocery as an untapped area for hospitality workers.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
GROCERY DIVE: When would you say was a turning point in grocery labor that ultimately led to the shortages grocers face today?
STEVEN KAMALI: I think it was COVID because there was a shift in expectations of job seekers. People want more for themselves, right? They expect more. I think convenience has become a huge component of that. People are rather savvy about ways to find jobs that don’t require them to be in the office and don’t require them to be interacting with customers or clients. So you have to make things enticing enough to get people through the door.
Why is a platform like The SuperMarket Agency important for grocers in today’s retail environment as well as for individuals looking for jobs in the food and beverage industry?
It is more and more challenging to find talent in the grocery industry today than virtually ever before.
My belief is that folks from hospitality, food and beverage specifically, have a good understanding of how to deliver good hospitality and understand the importance of customer interaction. I also believe that there are a great number of opportunities available to them in the grocery space today, even more so than in the hospitality space. Folks are either unwilling or unable to relocate and, unfortunately, that’s a great challenge for the hospitality industry because people are looking for talent that’s able to shift into new markets — and we found in the grocery industry that they’re amenable.
There are obviously fewer qualifications required within the grocery industry than are required by hotels and restaurants, generally, and that creates a vacuum of opportunity.
How does the platform match potential workers to a grocery retailer? What other industries do these candidates come from?
Our database today is outside of supermarkets specifically. Remember that we acquired a business with 23 years of placements and relationships. So we’ve started with about 25,000 folks within our database.
Connecting to us today, the best way to do so is through the website or LinkedIn, and it’s just a very easy process of sending along your resume and then having one of our recruiters connect with you and chat with you. And so it’s really straightforward and basic.
The interesting thing about groceries and supermarkets is that you don’t always have people raising their hands for a specific department or a specific role. They’re looking for the opportunity to be able to make a living. And so what we’re doing is guiding them through that process and showing them where the opportunities are, what markets they’re available in and what role we think that they’re best suited.
People from the hospitality industry have become a great tool for us because, given our tenure within the industry, we have access to over a million candidates within our existing database.
How can a grocer get involved with this platform?
What you typically find is that grocers at a certain scale, let’s call it 250-plus stores, often have in-house teams that handle talent acquisition and then they have an HR team supporting their talent acquisition. Often when it comes to store openings, their team becomes overwhelmed with so many roles that need to be filled. That’s often when they reach out to us.
There’s an interesting group of business owners that sit between 50 and 150 stores that haven’t yet invested enough resources and money into their own talent acquisition teams to be able to handle the hiring for all of their stores. And so that really is our sweet spot.
Although we do work with folks with less than 50 stores, what we find is it depends on how upmarket the concept is, which will determine whether or not they can afford to pay for an outside resource like us.
How specific can retailers be when describing the roles they need filled?
Our clients are telling us exactly what they’re looking for. Often, they’ll tell us “Hey, it would be great if they’d worked within X, Y and Z industry or had worked in X, Y and Z store” or “Hey, we like to hire from so-and-so marketplace because we found that they’ve trained their staff really well.” If it’s an ethnic grocery store, our clients will ask for potential candidates who understand the culture, [such as] “Can they be savvy and inform our customers on different products?”
Some retailers are looking for subject matter expertise, like do the potential workers understand wine, meat or produce.
What are the benefits of a dedicated recruiting platform like The SuperMarket Agency for grocers?
Our competitive advantage is not the tenure of our team or tenure within the industry, but it’s being able, for our prospective and existing clients, to access a whole group of folks from another industry — and hospitality closely relates to those. Those attributes that folks from the hospitality industry have, we believe, lend themselves rather well to the supermarket industry at large.
This isn’t to say that businesses couldn’t do this on their own, but at times, businesses have other stresses and they have other needs that they need to be able to focus on. The recruiting industry at large is a populous business, and we think we found an industry that is underserved by recruiters — and that’s a big part of why we’d like to be in the business.
Clarification: This story was updated to more accurately describe the acquisition and launch of The SuperMarket Agency.
