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Hiring: Slow Down to Get It Right

Hiring: Slow Down to Get It Right

Recently, I wrote on the cost of turnover, explaining how to put dollars on your turnover cost. Understanding the hard and soft costs of employee turnover should cause you to want to make some changes to your hiring, training and retention processes, and policies in your store. If you have put the dollars on turnover and are sickened by what you see, there is hope.


As previously discussed, find-the-right-people all turnover is bad; however, too often dealerships have extremely high turnover, much of which can be attributed to what I like to call a “Fire Hire”. A Fire Hire is when someone feels that their store/department will catch on fire if they don’t make a hiring decision today. It’s unwarranted pressure. The dealership will not catch fire and the store won’t close the doors. Making a bad hire today because you are in too big of a hurry doesn’t solve anything. In many cases, the hire causes the fire because the individual hired wasn’t qualified or was the wrong fit from the beginning. So the first thing we have to do to reduce our turnover rate is to slow down to get it right.


In most stores, if everyone would simply slow down the hiring process the dealership turnover rate and cost will automatically fall because more informed decisions will be made.

5 Steps to Hire Right

Write a clear job description.


A job title/function, immediate supervisor, and job purpose are just the beginning of your job description. A job purpose, if you aren’t familiar with that, is a simple statement that encompasses the core function of the position.


For example – “Help prospective customers purchase a new vehicle while delivering exceptional customer service”.


Duties and responsibilities are the toughest part of any job description. This is not an exhaustive list of everything this individual will ever do. It’s also not a list of “thou shall nots”. It’s a list of duties and responsibilities that are crucial to the execution of the position. I strongly suggest using action verbs like repair, sell, or prepare which describes duties or responsibilities. Avoid words like understand, analyze and determine as much as possible. As it is related to automotive positions, these are not measurable.


Understanding is likely the most abused of the bunch. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve seen “understand the customer’s needs” on a job description. The reality is I don’t care if they understand the customer or not; what I really want is for the salesperson to be able to identify key buying signals and act upon them during the sales process.


Other items commonly on a job description are qualifications (ASE certified, high school diploma), physical requirements and direct reports. I need to draw special attention to physical requirements. Never include any physical requirement of the position unless it is required of all applicants and is actually required to do the job. As an exaggerated example, you can’t make it a requirement that the next service advisor be 6 ‘10” or taller because you feel it would be nice for someone to reach the top parts shelf, when a ladder would allow a 5’ service advisor to reach the same parts and do all of the same duties.

Create Employment Great Ads


Too many dealers forget that the ad is designed to get people interested in potentially working for you. You want applicants to read your ad and want to respond. Is there something special about your store? Do you have fewer hours than your competitors? Does the position you are looking to fill have some high value perks, like set hours?


You should use the duties and responsibilities as the base of your ad, but not as your ad. Again, I’ve seen dealership ads where it was the job description just dropped in ad space.


Be creative, but not deceitful. Stop getting stuck in the same old job titles. I recently had the opportunity to test a theory and you may be shocked by the results. I ran a traditional automotive sales professional ad: “Highly successful auto dealer searching for highest caliber sales professional … no automotive experience needed … will train. Valid driver’s license, clean driving record, ability to follow direction” … you get the idea. Response rate on this ad was 39 ad views and only 7 responses; it was horribly ineffective.


So I dug into the job duty expectations and found that the dealership position had many of the same qualities found in customer service positions and I ran a different ad: “Customer service representative – looking for that upbeat winning personality that loves people and solving problems. Entry level, full time with all training provided. Must be willing to provide outstanding customer service, follow direction in showcasing company products and services, maintain accurate customer records” … etc. Response rate on this ad was 702 ad views and 186 responses.


If the job of the ad is to create qualified applicants to join the team, clearly you need to be creative in your ad writing because 26 times the respondents allows you to make a better selection of applicant.

Screening and Testing Applicants


Screen the resumes for skill set matches. Look for accomplishments and increases in responsibilities. Then test those that you find. I test applicants before interviews. Why would I want to waste my valuable time interviewing individuals who have no skill set to do the job?


It doesn’t matter if you purchase tests or create them; every position in the store should have some basic skill testing. Do you really want someone who thinks they have the talent to be your next controller, but their skills are limited to processing 10 billion a year in accounts payable? Just because you processed large dollars in payables doesn’t mean you processed large quantities of transactions (like in every dealership) of that you can read a financial statement.


Think about the skills required to perform the job and look for tests or screening methods to thin the applicants before the interview process. It will keep you from being “sold” on an unqualified individual. Too often I hear great dealers say “I want to give them a chance”, but they have been sold on the personality and not on the qualifications.

Interviews


Between the screening and the testing, I always request that a full employment application be completed. More than a few applicants along the way get testy over it, claiming all my information is on my resume. Totally untrue! Your resume does not tell me if you are a convicted felon, but my application does ask that question.


I can ask why you left your previous employment. Applicants don’t offer that up on resumes, nor do they usually offer past earnings or professional references. My application also requires that the applicant acknowledge that everything they have provided is true and accurate and that they understand I may verify any of it.


Then comes the interview process, which begins with cross checking the application with the resume and uncovering mismatched information, job gaps and unrecorded jobs. Then I cover the job history, which varies from applicant to applicant.


Last I move to a set of standardized questions that will be asked of every applicant for this position. I like to use job specific questions based on real scenarios from your dealership and ask how they would respond. You are looking for questions that will uncover any attitudes or bias that would interfere with the applicant’s ability to do the job.


The standardized questions are designed to allow an apple-to-apple comparison when job histories vary widely.

References and Additional Interviews


Many references aren’t worth the paper written on these days. They tend to be personal, not professional, and the reference has been coached on what to say. Verifying past employment is nearly impossible in many cases. The solution is to ask for professional references and to look for your own references.


Someone applying for a finance position should have been able to tell you which bank reps they worked with the most; you can reach out to the bank rep to see how clean their deals were. Most dealers are very active in their communities and can find someone who knows a local applicant.

If you have followed these five steps, you will have slowed down your hiring process to make better decisions and thereby lowered your future turnover rate.

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