The key to recruiting is generating a large enough pool of applicants who are both qualified and whose personalities are a good fit with your company.
That, of course, is the ideal scenario. Given the arguably crisis-level shortage of service technicians, little is ideal in staffing your service department to fully meet customer demand. This issue’s cover story, beginning on page 20, looks closely at this serious industry issue and explores effective ways some of your peers are trying to overcome it.
While the cover story will help in your recruiting efforts, I would like offer some tips on how to best select the right employee from a field of applicants. Devising a system for figuring out who has the right talents and traits for a certain position is critical. Yet, according to a recent FastCompany.com article, this step often is overlooked. Here are some tips for identifying success factors and finding out which candidates possess them:
Analyze the job. Get input from others to help you with this. If you’re looking for a technician, for instance, ask your other technicians to come up with a list of skills, experience and personality traits required for the position.
Craft behavioral interview questions. Asking how an applicant has handled certain situations in the past is the best way to predict how they will respond to similar events in the future. Think of stressful scenarios the new employee will likely encounter and formulate questions based on those.
Make current employees part of the interview process. Then have them tell you what they think. This not only helps you make a better hiring decision, but shows existing employees you respect and value their opinions.
Assess skills. You can do this through a written test, a hands-on evaluation such as troubleshooting a truck in the shop, or both. In an ideal world, you might hire someone with good communication and math skills and an excellent personality, then teach him how a truck works. But in reality you don’t have that time.
