There is another notice upon the big bulletin board at the head of the employees' stairs—a sort of town-crier affair with temporary and permanent notices of interest to the store's workers—which tells the working force that when vacancies occur within the big store they will be promptly posted on this and other bulletin boards. The workers are advised to apply for any position which they may feel they are competent to fill. Ambition is not curbed in Macy's. On the contrary, it is stimulated to every possible extent. The employee is restricted only by his own limitations, if he has them. It is a firmly-fixed house policy to promote, wherever it is at all possible, from its own ranks. Among its high-salaried men and women are not a few who have worked their way up from the bottom. In fact, among these six or eight of the best paid men in the store, is one who boasts that he first came to New York fifteen years ago, with but a suitcase and eleven dollars in his pocket.
The employment department must have been very much on the job when it hired this man. It generally is very much on its job.
Obviously, the hiring of workers for an enterprise as huge as Macy's cannot be conducted on any hit-and-miss plan. We have gone far enough with the store in these pages to see that hit-and-miss does not figure at any time or place in its varied functionings—and nowhere less than in its employment department. The hiring of new workers for the store is indeed a branch of the business machine that receives constant and great care and systematic attention. A store must employ the right sort of people in order to be a good store. This is fairly axiomatic these days.
These workers are gathered in a variety of ways—by volunteer applications, by newspaper advertisements (in New York and outside of it), by outside free employment agencies, by circular appeals generally to educational institutions, and, best of all, through the solicitation of its regular employees. There is no appeal for a worker that, in my opinion, can compare with the suggestion made by an employee that the place of his or her employment is a good place for his or her friends, as well.
I am warmly concurred with in this opinion by the store's employment manager, a big, upstanding man, who in his Harvard days was a famous football player. The rules of that fine game he has brought to the understanding of his present problem.
"One of the most desirable class of applicants is that brought by our own employees," he says, frankly, "as in hiring these people we have a feeling of security; especially if they have been brought in by some of the old and most loyal employees. It has been our experience that such applicants enter more readily into the spirit of their work and develop more rapidly than those obtained from other sources. We advertise in the classified columns of the newspapers only when it is absolutely necessary. Our regular daily advertisements keep the store constantly before the public eye—and generally that is enough.
"During the recent war period, however, we had no scruples about advertising, as nearly every other line of endeavor was in the same boat as we. Never before have the newspapers carried so much classified advertising. Yet when all is said and done, besides the moral undesirability of this source of supply, we found it also very expensive indeed.
"Some people believe that the function of an employment department is merely to keep in touch with the labor market and engage employees," he continued. "This is erroneous. The duty of this employment department is to raise the standard of efficiency of the whole working force by the proper selection, placing, following up and promotion of employees and so bringing about a condition that will result in their rendering as nearly as possible one hundred per cent. service to the store. That is the real reason why employment departments such as this first came into existence. Business some years ago awoke to the realization of the fact that its indiscriminate handling of the entire labor problem was causing a tremendous economic waste, not alone to the employee and to society, but to itself. It then began for the first time to deal with the problem of its personnel in a scientific and practical way."
The market for workers—like pretty nearly every other sort of market—is, as we have just seen, subject to fluctuations; there are seasons when the employment manager—ranking as the store's fourth assistant general manager—must look sharply about him for the maintenance of its ranks, other seasons when long files of would-be workers present themselves each morning at his department doors. For the five or six years of the World War period the first set of conditions prevailed. It was difficult for any department-store, ranked by the Washington authorities in war days as a non-essential industry, always to maintain its full working force, to say nothing of its morale. Recently the pendulum has swung in the other direction. America is not exempt from the labor conditions which are prevailing in the other great nations of the world. And there are plenty of people who would work in Macy's. Yet the store has refused to use this situation as a club over its workers. Throughout the darkest days of the business depression it told them that it had no intention either of reducing its force of workers (beyond the usual lay-off of extra Christmas people) or of reducing their individual salaries. Which was a considerable help to its Esprit de corps.