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.
The battle isn’t over after you’ve hired the right person. According to Fast Company, employees are easily enticed away during the first year of employment. In our industry, it’s an almost constant threat.
Mentor the new hire or appoint a mentor to help close any skill gaps. During the first year, hold monthly meetings with each new employee to go over how they are doing and address any concerns they have. The first one can be an “expectations exchange” in which you define what you expect from the employee and the employee outlines his or her goals.
Training, especially when it involves technicians, is a win-win retention strategy no matter how long an employee has been working for you. According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, a growing body of research concludes paying for employees’ education makes them more likely to stay. In the rapidly changing world of computerized truck technology, it makes sense that this kind of investment would instill loyalty. A technician told me he spends hours of his free time every week reading about the latest systems and software. “It’s the only way I can be good at what I do,” he says.
When Scully NationaLease, a company that maintains medium- and heavy-duty trucks, offered its technicians training for Automotive Service Excellence certification, it retained a large percentage of those who accepted it. Truck Parts & Service’s sister publication, Successful Dealer, chronicled the training program, provided by Thomson Delmar Learning, in its March issue.
When employees leave a job, limited praise and recognition is the primary reason. Simply taking the time to treat people well and acknowledge their contributions can go a long way.
