A. Little Help
- Author: Art Little
- Subject Matter: Management
- Issue: Recruiting
As a recruiter I am looking for three things: talent, attitude and a consistent work ethic. There are other attributes to consider, but that is what I am mainly interested in. That is what I think it takes to be a winner. As a recruiter for the shop, I know that If I can recruit people with those three qualities I will have done my job.
Talent is first on the list for a reason. If I hire someone who doesn’t have the talent to do the job, I am just setting myself up to lose. Talent is hard to describe, but I know it when I see it. Let’s look at the definition of talent: an innate ability, aptitude, an above-average ability, a natural endowment or ability of a superior quality. I don’t know about you, but I want people with innate, above-average natural endowments and abilities working for me.
In sales, a lot of managers have good people skills, and yet some managers outsell others. The reason for that – usually, but not always – is that they have more sales talent than others. There are order takers and closers in sales. The closers are the ones with the talent to close the sale. That is the talent I am looking for when I recruit a manager. The closers are the winners in that group and give me and my team the best chance of being a winner.
The closer’s sales talent gives
the shop a higher lead-to-sale conversion rate and usually a higher ticket price. That means more work for the shop and more money for me. If the manager can’t close the sale, he loses and the shop loses. Nobody works until the manager sells something, so it is pretty important that the manager be a closer and not just an order taker.
The talent I am looking for when I recruit technicians is speed and accuracy. If you watch technicians work for 30 years as I have, you get to see a pretty good sampling of talent. There are those technicians who have the touch. They do not struggle with disas-sembly or assembly. In their heads, they stay a step ahead of what they are doing and focus on quickly moving through the work assignment. Their hands move faster than others with less effort. Their warranty rates are low because they have not left anything off or assembled something wrong. Their work is accurate and without error. They make it look easy. These guys’ uniforms seem to always be cleaner than everyone else’s, too, for some reason.
Speed is a really important factor when I am recruiting, because I have to know how many units a builder can build a week and how many removals and installations an installer can do to work out the productivity numbers for my shop. For example, if I have a manager selling 10 major repairs a week and I hire a builder who can build only six, I have hired a loser, because this builder is not qualified to work in this shop. He may do fine in another shop and be a winner there, but he would be a sure loser in this shop.
Attitude is next because it is an intricate part of being a winner. Talent is not enough when a team is involved. Winners have to maintain a positive attitude. I think we have all worked around people with a bad attitude: the builder who is mad all the time and treats everyone on the team, including the owner, as if they are stupid; the manager who is always demanding the impossible; the installer who is always bitching about something. These guys are losers. They make it harder than it has to be for everyone. They don’t respect themselves or anyone else.
Respect goes a long way toward developing great attitudes. Winners respect themselves, their teammates, the owner and the shop. That respect dictates how employees interact with each other as teammates. Respect breeds a good attitude. It is critical when people work together as a group. A bad attitude makes for a long day for everybody. You can choose to be happy or choose to be unhappy as Mama always said. Winners seem to find a way to always have a great attitude.
Last but not least is consistent work ethic. An employee can have all the talent in the world and a winner’s attitude, but if he has a poor work ethic he will fail and you will fail with him. A past employee, Freeway Frank, comes to mind. Let’s use Frank as an example to prove my point. Frank was a builder who had more talent in his little finger than most builders have in their entire body. He had a great personality. He got along with the other employees and the customers loved Frank. He was a natural. Frank had fast hands and could knock out a steady 12 units a week with a warranty rate under 3%. He was as slick as it gets on the bench.
Freeway Frank got his name from drinking with the bums under the I-35 freeway bridge. Some days he would come to work, work all morning and, when lunch rolled around, get in his car and drive to the freeway bridge and not come back until the next day; thus the name Freeway Frank. He was so good, he could do that one or two days a week and still get built out by Friday most weeks.
Even though he was probably the most-talented builder I ever met and had a great attitude, Frank’s work ethic made him a loser at the shop. His work ethic eventually spilled over to the other employees and they started to go to the I-35 bridge too. The only problem was that they did not have the talent, speed and accuracy that Frank had and they couldn’t keep up. Frank dragged the team down. His work ethic eventually led to breaking up a great team that I had spent a lot of my time and money putting and keeping together. It was sad for me to see such a waste of real talent, but I learned a valuable lesson. Frank was living proof that it takes all three – talent, attitude and a consistent work ethic – to be a winner in our business.
As shop owners, sometimes we get used to losing and tend to settle for what we have. It is easier that way. Recruiting takes time and effort. It costs money. Besides that, we might hire a flake or someone less productive than our existing employee.
That is true. There are no guarantees when it comes to recruiting. It is hard to know whom to hire. The hard truth is that we never really know whether the employee we hired is competent until he gets there and the show begins. I have bought my ticket, got my popcorn and sat down on the front row to see the show many times only to find out that there ain’t no show. When you need to increase productivity at your shop and you are not getting it done with the team you have, what are your choices?Well, you have two options: win or lose. You can decide to put a winning team together to work in your shop or go to the I-35 overpass and see whether you can find Freeway Frank and his boys.
Art Little is the founder of TransTeam. His website has been the home of the National Employment Headquarters for the transmission industry since 1997. Visit www.TransTeam.com or call Art at 888-859-0994 for more information.
