It’s Your Business
- Author: Terry Greenhut, Business Editor
- Subject Matter: Shop Management
- Issue: “Selling” to top-notch candidates
Eighth in a series
Recruiting new employees has a whole lot in common with finding new customers, which is something we, as owners and managers, do every day. We are continually selling people on why they should use our services. We advertise, ask for referrals, market by getting involved in the community and generally try to show that we are a good, honest and trustworthy business, that it’s safe for people to use when they need help.
Aren’t those a lot of the attributes that a person wants from a potential employer when looking for a job? If you’re more comfortable selling to customers than hiring employees, looking at it in terms of selling the employment opportunity to your candidates. When you have a job available, consider what’s special about working for you or in your company.
Most automotive repair businesses are local operations with one shop. There are still some that run more than one, but owners of successful multi-shop companies have had to develop special skills to keep them profitable and be willing to put up with the level of aggravation that even a well-oiled multi-shop operation brings. Single shops operate within the boundaries of how far customers are willing to drive to avail themselves of their services.
Distance
The same goes for employees. They will look for jobs within a mileage that is comfortable for them to reach and return home from every day.
When I first went into business back in 1975, advertising was mostly a matter of being in the right Yellow Pages directories for the areas you thought you needed to cover. It was very expensive, and the further the areas were from the shop, the less likely there would be any business coming from them. After a while when we actually had a track record of business, I put pins in a map to show where my customers really came from and how much in advertising cost had gone into attracting each. I learned to my dismay that most customers won’t travel more than a few miles to get services no matter how good they are. The cost of advertising outside of our optimal business zone wasn’t even being covered by the amount of business we were getting, so of course, we cut back on advertising to those areas and began to concentrate our resources where we knew they would do the most good.
Employees are like customers. They will only travel a certain distance and/or a predetermined amount of time to get to work, so your employee pool lays out on the map similar to your customer pool, except that employees will travel farther or longer. You need to determine how far they will come to work for you that makes sense. Keep in mind that when a person is looking for a job he or she will stretch that distance in their own mind but if they actually start driving it every day it gets longer and harder. It’s a huge waste of your time and effort to hire good employees only to have them quit in the near future because the commute turns out to be too much for them or because another job opens up closer to home, so question carefully as to how far they can realistically travel to come to work.
Why work here?
If you were going to advertise to get new business for the shop you would want to include the benefits customers would receive for having you service their vehicles. When advertising for employees you’d want to do the same. What are the benefits of working in your shop as opposed to others? A friend and fellow shop owner in New York always puts the phrase in his employment ad, “warm shop” to indicate that it has heat. Having always had heat in my shops I didn’t see the significance of it till I found out that there were a lot of shops that either didn’t provide any or a minimal amount below a comfortable working level, so if someone had ever worked in that type of environment they would be looking for a warm shop to work in. The same would go, no doubt, for hot climates and air conditioned shops.
Aside from the usual benefits offered by companies to attract good employees, some shop owners are now offering tool allowances to help their technicians keep up with the hand tools they need to purchase. Our industry being one of the few to require employees to have their own tools, it makes sense that to hire and keep good people some help with that expense based on longevity and/or productivity might be a good selling point. If looking to hire inexperienced people who you plan to train and mentor, having a starter set of tools for them to use until they can see if they like the business and are going to stay would be an excellent perk to advertise.
Where do you go to look for these good employees you are seeking? Of course, the first place we all go is to our existing employees. We ask if they know anyone who’s looking for a job. Sometimes friends or family members ask us for jobs, but we need to be very careful in both of those scenarios. If we hire any of those people, whether there is a relationship to us or any of our existing employees, what kind of upheaval might we be creating? Will other employees feel as though there is favoritism taking place? How hard will it be to discharge one of those new hires if we have to? How comfortable will you feel having to give orders to or discipline a family member? As one shop owner who was having a problem with an employee once asked me, “How do you fire your father?” He was only half serious but the point is that the ramifications of firing a close relative can tear up an entire family; so the question is, “Would it be better not to hire relatives in the first place?” Of course it’s always your decision, but think it through carefully before committing.
Family, friends
As for hiring friends, if you want to keep them as friends it would probably be better not to hire them. Having done so several times, I’ve learned that small business owners, in general, have very high expectations of themselves and anyone they hire to work for them. Most employees will not be that dedicated. They may want to help the owner succeed, but the reality is that it’s not their business. They don’t own it and therefore don’t usually get any benefit other than the normal pay and benefits everyone else gets. They won’t make the Herculean effort that the owner will. The owner on the other hand takes it as a personal betrayal if his friend and employee doesn’t put forth the same effort as he does. That wears heavily on both of them and often dooms their relationship.
You might feel that hiring strangers is risky, but hiring anyone is. You never have any way of knowing whether or not it will work out, and even if it does, for how long? The revolving door of employees will continue to turn for as long as you are in business. The best you can hope for is to slow it down as much as possible by hiring the best people you can find and treating them well enough that they won’t consider leaving too quickly should another opportunity present itself.
Trial basis
Checking references thoroughly and doing credit and criminal background checks can help you determine what kind of a person you are hiring, but people can mask who or what they really are for a while. That’s why I always liked to hire on a trial basis. The longer the trial the more likely it is that the candidate’s true self will be shown.
Back in the days when it was difficult, if not impossible, to perform background checks, I hired a fellow one morning out of desperation and put him right to work helping another tech install a transmission. He said he would go to his old place of employment at lunch time to get his tools. At about 11 a.m. one of my part time workers who helped out in the parts room came in to work. The new hire asked the tech he was working with, “Who’s the guy that just came in?” “That’s Joe,” he said. “He’s a cop who works here part time.” About noon the new hire went to get his tools and never came back. I’ll let you guess why.
Youngsters
I always enjoyed training young people who were new to the industry, especially when it came to transmission rebuilders. I wanted them to learn proper procedures, and I knew how difficult it was for many seasoned veterans to lose some of the bad habits they might have developed. So I went around to trade schools, not necessarily automotive, to register with their HR people. I would be sure to give them a list of the benefits their students would receive working for me. I hired many on a part-time basis while they were still in school to give them a taste of the real world and was able to keep several as full-time employees after graduation.
If you are going after students in automotive trade schools, you need to be aware that many of those schools receive sponsorship from the big car companies, so you will be competing with their dealers for these people. The benefits you are willing to offer need to be at least as good as theirs, if not better, to attract these people.
Of course the internet and social media have taken the place of the old printed means of advertising for employees. Placing ads with some of the employment sites and sites like Craig’s List have yielded good results for many shop owners. If you don’t know how to find these sites, pretend you are looking for a job and do a search. You will start receiving emails from all of them every day. You should also have an employment section on your shop’s website and always be willing to accept applications even if there is no job available at that moment because you know there will be one soon. It’s just the nature of our business.
