I was transitioning from an hourly associate to a salaried member of management, so I had to submit an application through the internal job posting website, to a training program in a nearby store. From there I was called by a corporate recruiter, who confirmed some basic information (name, age, town, etc), who then emailed me links to an assessment.
The first assessment was around 50 questions, mostly simple math, and gave you questions to determine operating budgets, which associates had effective sale rates, so on. Fairly easy stuff. I passed the first assessment, and was given a second one, about 100 questions based on personality type questions. I approached it with a "customer service" orientation in mind, and I passed as well.
I did a very short interview, probably under 30 minutes with my Store Manager, with usual interview questions. Describe a time you felt challenged professionally, how do you deal with stress, what are your three biggest weaknesses, so on. Most SM's, from what I've gathered, don't have a lot of experience hiring other than minimum wage sales associates, so the interview was very easy.
I was then called a few days later by a Store Manager in a larger volume store in my district who works closely with the District Manager, She emailed me a 6 page sales roleplay we conducted over the phone. It gave a list of problems with a store like customer complaints, low sales, low credit card applications, etc, and asked me to find solutions for them. At the end she asked me questions over my choices, and once again, I approached it with a "customer service" orientation, and felt like I did very well.
After that I was formally accepted into the position, and transitioned to the 5 Week ASMIT (Assistant Store Manager in Training) Program, which went over different aspects of store management, such as Operations, People, Loss Prevention, Sales, and Retail. Mostly computer based training, but I did most of mine in an extremely unstructured format, essentially with my manager using me immediately as a pseudo manager, which was fairly stressful.
I did one week of "specialized" softlines training in a larger store in my district, consisting of doing grunt work with softlines associates and very little management training. At the end of the week myself and one other trainee had a test over store operations that lasted a little over an hour. If I had not done a bulk of my training on my own time (something they stress that you are not to do!) there is no way I would have been able to pass the exam.
