To hire a retail salesperson, first define their duties and working conditions, then check the required skills in an interview and a training exercise. Allow someone to work with real customers, stock, and the cash register only after formalizing the employment relationship and submitting the required hiring notice. The trial period takes place as paid work.
After hiring, explain the store’s rules, teach the employee how to perform transactions, and set up access to the inventory management software. Agree on clear assessment criteria in advance so that performance decisions are based on specific observations. Before the first shift, check that the employment paperwork is complete, the employee understands their duties, and they have the necessary software access rights.
Define the salesperson’s responsibilities
Practical recommendation: Make a task list before publishing the job posting. Depending on the store, a salesperson may advise customers, take payments, put out stock, check price tags, or help with inventory counts. If one person will handle all these duties, describe each one and decide who will help during the busiest hours.
For each task, specify the required skill and the employee’s authority. For example, a salesperson should identify what a customer needs and explain product features, but refer nonstandard discounts to a manager. This helps candidates understand what is expected and lets the owner assess the specific skills the store needs.
Prepare the offer terms separately: work location, schedule, pay, bonus rules, training, and any trial period. If a bonus depends on individual sales, decide in advance how the store will determine each consultant’s contribution when another employee takes the payment.
Write a clear job posting without discriminatory requirements
Practical recommendation: Name the store and product categories in the posting, and describe the main duties, schedule, work location, pay terms, and selection process. If experience is not required, explain what the employer will teach. Describe requirements in terms of conduct: “check products and payment amounts carefully,” “explain the differences between models to customers,” and “follow cash-handling procedures.”
Legal requirement: Article 2-1 of the Labor Code of Ukraine (KZpP, the Ukrainian abbreviation) prohibits discrimination on grounds unrelated to the nature of the work or its conditions. For a standard retail salesperson vacancy, do not specify a preferred sex, age, marital status, or place of residence. The law allows requirements inherent to particular work and restrictions expressly set by law, but the owner’s personal preferences do not provide such grounds.
You can post the vacancy on job sites, the store’s social media pages, and local job-search groups. Assess candidates recommended by acquaintances against the same criteria. In a brief preliminary conversation, check whether they can work the proposed schedule and perform the stated tasks. Gaps in work history or isolated mistakes on a résumé do not, by themselves, prove professional unsuitability.
Conduct interviews using the same questions
You can use the U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s structured interview method for interviews. If you choose this approach, prepare job-related questions, ask them of every candidate in the same order, and rate the answers on a shared scale. This lets you compare candidates using consistent criteria.
- “How would you find out what a customer needs if they have not decided which product to buy?”
- “What would you do if the shelf price differs from the price in the software?”
- “How would you respond if a customer complains while a line is forming nearby?”
- “Give an example of a mistake at work: how did you notice and correct it?”
Assess whether the candidate clarifies the circumstances, proposes a logical sequence of actions, and understands when to consult a manager. Record the substance of the answers. Give the person a chance to ask about pay, workload, and training.
Legal requirement: Article 25 of the Labor Code prohibits requiring information about political party or ethnic affiliation, origin, or registration of a place of residence or stay, as well as documents not required by law. Do not include debt or criminal record certificates in standard screening without a legal basis for requiring them.
Check skills in a simulation and record the assessment
Practical recommendation: Run a short consultation simulation in which a manager plays the customer. Give all candidates the same product description and task. To check cash register skills, use training data or a demo environment that does not involve real payments or changes to stock levels.
During this assessment, a candidate must not serve real customers, take money, fulfill real orders, or do work in place of staff. If you want to assess someone during a real shift, formalize their employment first and pay them for the work. Calling it an “internship” does not replace formal employment.
Below is an illustrative example of a recommended rating scale that you can adapt to your store’s duties.
| Skill | 0 points | 1 point | 2 points |
|---|---|---|---|
| Identifying customer needs | Asks no questions | Clarifies only part of the customer’s needs | Clarifies intended use, budget, and important features |
| Explaining a product | Invents product features | Repeats the description without explaining it | Explains relevant features and admits what they do not know |
| Handling a discrepancy | Ignores the problem | Notices it but needs a prompt | Checks the information and consults an authorized person |
| Communication | Interrupts or pressures the customer | Is polite but inconsistent | Listens and explains the next steps clearly |
In this illustrative example, the maximum is 8 points. Scores of 2, 1, 2, and 2 add up to 7 points. Set the passing score and critical errors before screening begins. The same scale helps compare candidates, but it does not guarantee future performance.
Formalize employment before the first work shift
Under Article 24 of the Labour Code of Ukraine, before an employee is allowed to start work, an employment contract must be concluded, formalized by an order or directive, and a notice of the employee’s hiring must be submitted to the State Tax Service (STS). Formalizing the employment after a “trial shift” does not meet this requirement.
Cabinet of Ministers Resolution No. 413 provides that the employer must submit the notice using the form in Appendix 1 to the territorial body of the STS where the employer is registered as a payer of the single social contribution, before the employee starts work. The main method is electronic submission using a signature based on a qualified certificate. If electronic submission is technically unavailable, the document is submitted on paper together with an electronic copy. If the employment relationship is formalized electronically through the “Obrii” system, the resolution provides for automatic transfer of the relevant information. Before the first shift, check that the notice was submitted or the data transferred in accordance with the established procedure.
The employee submits a passport or other identity document, plus either an employment record book, if they have one, or employment history information from the relevant register. Education and health documents, a military registration document, and other documents are required in the cases set out by law. A diploma or medical documents are not universal requirements for every retail salesperson vacancy. At the same time, you must not assign work that a medical opinion says is contraindicated for the person.
Article 24 generally provides for a written contract and makes that form mandatory in certain cases, including when the employer is an individual or the employee is a minor. During martial law, Part 1 of Article 2 of Law No. 2136-IX allows the parties to agree on the form of the contract. This exception does not remove the requirement to issue an order and submit the notice before the employee starts work. Practical recommendation: Put duties, schedule, pay, and trial period terms in writing so both parties can check what they agreed.
Set a lawful paid trial period
Under Article 26 of the Labor Code, the parties agree on a trial period when entering into the contract, and the relevant condition must be stated in the hiring order. Labor law applies to the employee, so their work must be paid in line with state guarantees.
Under Article 27 of the Labour Code of Ukraine, the probation period for workers may not exceed one month. Before agreeing on the period, check whether the occupation under which you are hiring the salesperson is classified as a worker occupation. For other employees, the general limit is three months, and in certain cases, with the agreement of the relevant elected body of the primary trade union organization, six months, unless the law sets a different period. Days on which the employee did not actually work are not counted toward the probation period, regardless of the reason. For a standard salesperson hire, you may agree with the employee on a probation period of up to one month, if the law allows probation to be set for that employee.
Article 26 sets out categories and cases in which a trial period is not allowed. However, during martial law, Part 2 of Article 2 of Law No. 2136-IX allows a trial period for any category of employee. It does not introduce a general extension of trial period limits. The special limit of 45 calendar days and the option to hire with certain military registration deficiencies established by law apply only to employees liable for military service at critically important enterprises, institutions, and organizations in the defense-industrial complex specified in Part 3 of that article. An ordinary retail store cannot use this exception just because it has a staff shortage.
To bring in staff quickly and address staffing shortages, Law No. 2136-IX also allows fixed-term contracts during martial law or for the period needed to replace a temporarily absent employee. Set the contract term and the trial period separately.
If the trial period ends and the employee continues working, they are considered to have passed it. Article 28 allows dismissal during the trial period due to established unsuitability for the work, with three days’ written notice. Record specific facts to support such a decision; the owner’s dissatisfaction alone does not establish unsuitability. When formalizing a dismissal, you must also comply with other applicable employment protections.
Train the salesperson and compare performance under similar conditions
Legal requirement: Before work begins, the employer must inform the employee, in a manner agreed with them, of the information specified in Article 29 of the Labor Code. Explain who the employer is and where they are located, the employee’s position and duties, when they start work, where they will work, and what equipment they will use. Inform them of their rights and duties, working conditions, internal work rules or the terms for setting the work schedule, working and rest hours, and the provisions of any collective agreement.
Explain the terms and amount of pay, the length of annual leave, the procedure for professional training if provided, and the procedure and Labor Code notice periods for either party to end the contract. Ensure they receive instruction on occupational safety, workplace sanitation, occupational hygiene, and fire safety. Inform them in writing, with their signature, about any unremedied hazardous or harmful workplace factors, their possible health effects, and the right to relevant benefits and compensation.
Practical recommendation: Assign a mentor to demonstrate a consultation, a sale, referring a return request to a manager, and closing a shift. After the explanation, ask the employee to repeat the steps under supervision. Record what they have mastered and where they need more training.
Assess the quality of consultations, transaction accuracy, and compliance with procedures alongside sales. Compare employees while taking into account shift length, customer traffic, product availability, and task allocation. Illustrative example: 24 sales in 8 hours and 18 sales in 6 hours both equal 3 sales per hour. Even this comparison requires checking the working conditions before drawing conclusions about the salesperson’s contribution.
Torgsoft: salesperson permissions and assigning sales to employees
Before allowing a new employee to use the cash register, set up their role in Torgsoft. The official guide to salesperson permissions describes access restrictions for menus, forms, and buttons, as well as individual transaction settings. Depending on the employee’s duties, you can prohibit changing the sale date, block product deletion or require a reason, and restrict access to financial reports and settings. Check the result by signing in under the salesperson role. These features require configuration and do not replace work procedures or manager oversight.
To assess individual sales, choose the appropriate salesperson work mode. Overall sales do not show individual contribution, and a shared shift badge assigns purchases to the shift. For individual tracking, create a badge with a unique barcode for each salesperson and train employees to register the salesperson before a sale. If different consultants help one customer select products, you can use the product-to-salesperson assignment procedure described in the guide: enable the “Link sale to salesperson” setting and select the “For each sale” registration mode. The consultant labels the selected product with their barcode tag, and before scanning each product, the cashier first scans the corresponding consultant’s barcode. If the cashier skips or mixes up this step, the software will allocate sales to employees incorrectly.
The described modes support calculating sales bonuses and percentage-based or fixed additional payments to employees for specified product types. The work start and end log shows recorded events, which depend on employee actions. Practical recommendation: Use this data alongside mentor observations and the circumstances of each shift. An assigned sale by itself does not show consultation quality or determine a fair bonus without agreed rules.
Legal sources
- Labor Code of Ukraine No. 322-VIII: Articles 2 and 2-1 — labor rights and nondiscrimination; Articles 24–25 — formalizing employment and documents; Articles 26–28 — trial periods; Article 29 — employer obligations before work begins.
- Law of Ukraine No. 2136-IX, “On the Organization of Employment Relations under Martial Law”: Article 2, Parts 1–3 — contract form, trial periods, fixed-term hiring, and special conditions for specified enterprises in the defense-industrial complex.
Resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine dated 17.06.2015 No. 413 “On the Procedure for Notifying the State Tax Service and Its Territorial Bodies of the Hiring of an Employee (Domestic Worker), the Conclusion of a Gig Contract, or the Termination of an Employment Contract with a Domestic Worker”: the procedure for submitting the notice before work begins, the form in Appendix 1, and the transfer of information through the “Obrii” system.
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