Hiring a good manager probably is the single most difficult and important thing you’ll ever do. Fortunately, expert help is available.
It’s 7:30 on a Friday morning. Carl, your shop manager, pokes his head into your office and asks for five minutes of your time. You think he wants to schedule some much-needed vacation. Instead, Carl floors you with the news you least expected or wanted to hear. He’s leaving. His wife has accepted a job promotion out of state. He’s found work near her new office.
You shake hands, congratulate Carl and watch 10 years of loyalty, experience and know-how walk out your door. More than that, you say goodbye to that special type of employee, a technical person who is also a people-person— someone who is as comfortable dealing with employee and customer issues as he or she is with collision repair.
You also face a real headache. Replacing Carl will be no easy chore because (1) your shop has few management-level employees ideally suited for the position and (2) good managers are difficult to find.
Your first choices are the workers who helped fill-in whenever Carl took time off—Vic, the lead estimator, and Mike, your most-experienced technician. Vic, however, has no interest in management, and Mike is happier toiling away in his service bay where his contributions probably have their greatest value.
You could turn to Angi, the ambitious, sharp tech you hired last year who wants to run your operation someday. She’s already started taking management-training classes but probably needs more experience. You also could hire a seasoned manager from another shop. In both those cases, though, you’re betting your operation on an unknown factor and facing the possibility of alienating your veteran employees.
What should you do? Turn to the professionals. ABRN talked with four hiring experts who offered their tips to help you hire wisely and prepare for the day when your high level employees move on.
Hiring skills: Practice makes perfect
While every hire is significant, none arguably has greater impact than your manager. Privately concerned you might not make the right decision? You’re not alone. Operators in numerous industries have difficulty hiring for one very good reason. According to Bob Cooper, president of Elite Business Services in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., they lack proper experience.
Hiring is a skill. Developing it, therefore, requires practice and direction. Odds are you haven’t hired a lot of managers. On top of that, you’ve probably never taken the time to review your hiring practices or asked for expert advice. Any wonder, then, you’re not confident when it comes to performing this task?
It’s time you started building hiring expertise. Cooper says the best way to do this is through practice. Always be hiring—not in the sense of actually bringing aboard new people, but regularly evaluating current and prospective employees. Cooper suggests beginning the hiring process well before you have a position to fill. Just as you continually evaluate tools and other processes as they come to market, you also should be sizing up potential job candidates, both within your own shop and in your business.
While it is feasible to evaluate your own employees for promotions or open positions, getting a close look at collision professionals from other shops may seem impossible. Fortunately it’s not. Cooper explains that hiring is all about forming relationships and any hiring should be the culmination of forming a great relationship. One of the best ways to begin these relationships is through your local shop association.
Cooper suggests offering your shop as a meeting place since that will bring managers and managerial candidates into your business. Better still, offer to host management seminars since managers who are genuinely passionate about their jobs (passion is a requirement for this position) continually look for ways to upgrade their skills. Get to know the attendees. Ask around to determine who are the best and brightest.
Once you’ve spotted talented professionals, get to know them personally—determine what sort of people they are. Why? In the world of shop management, personality trumps technical know-how. Cooper explains that while technical skills are significant, they can be learned. On the other hand, top candidates must already possess vital personal qualities such as honesty, integrity, tact and decency. During the hiring process, your job is gauging a candidate’s true character and determining if he or she possesses these qualities.
To do this, Cooper suggests getting to know potential candidates casually, for example at informal lunches or dinners, where personal interactions tend to be more genuine and where you can converse as colleagues or even friends. The idea here, says Cooper, is keeping the conversation away from work as much as possible.
“Find out the person’s view on family life, things like that,” he says. “Just get them talking. Find out if this is a positive person, a glass half-full or half-empty person. Also, pay attention to how they treat the waiter or waitress. Are they courteous? Do they say ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you’? How they treat these people will give you a real indication of how they’ll treat your employees and customers. Afterwards, ask yourself questions, such as, ‘Is this the sort of person I’d want as a neighbor?’”
Once you get to know the person, consider his or her technical and business skills. Then, roll all these qualities together to build a complete picture of the potential hire. Cooper says what you’re ultimately looking for are “stars”—super performers who are also super people. Once you locate them, you can put together a target list of individuals to contact when you need to fill a position. Since you’ve already built a relationship, most of the difficult hiring work will be out of the way.
Still not sold on the process of constant hiring? Cooper provides the following analogy. “The best time to look for a doctor is when you don’t need one. If you wait until you’re sick, you’re stuck with the first doctor available.” You can inoculate yourself now against this situation by building the skills you need and looking for the help you will someday require.
Culture club: Matching personality to position
Every business organization has an associate who might best be called the “odd man out.” This is the employee whose personality doesn’t quite mesh with other associates, the employee with whom others find it difficult to approach or communicate. While the “odd man out” may be productive, for obvious reasons you probably don’t want him or her serving as your manager.
“Every shop has its own character,” says John O’Hare, president of Automotive Professional Search Inc. in Timonium, Md. O’Hare states that operators must take into account their shop’s particular business culture when hiring. “You should be determining in a face-to-face interview if the person will fit in. Previous success is no guarantee. You may be excellent in one business and horrible in another. Every business is different.”
This is why it’s imperative to be close to your own operation. You need to know how your people interact. If you’re still concerned with how well your employees will mix with a new manager, ask them to take part in the interviewing process. Suggest they put together questions or simply sit in on part of the interview. Or, take the candidate out to lunch and invite your employees to come along. You can quiz them later on their impressions of a prospective hire and how that person will fit into their work environment.
Remember, your manager is your main motivator, the person your team is built around, the person who determines how efficiently your employees work together. Make a poor decision here and you could end up hiring a whole new set of employees to replace the veteran team that walked out upon finding they couldn’t stand their new boss.
Along with matching a personality to a culture, O’Hare, who has spent 13 years placing auto service professionals, offers two other pieces of advice: One, hire locally. “Shop managers are unique in that they form close business ties with insurance customers and other clients. Your next manager should already be familiar with the customers in your area.”
Two, handle reference checks properly. References are useful but can pose their own problems, especially if you aren’t personally familiar with the reference. References can gloss over a candidate’s performance, unfairly criticize a candidate or give widely conflicting evaluations. For these reasons, O’Hare suggests looking for trends. He explains, “If four people have the same comment it’s probably true. If you’re given two conflicting views, give more weight to the one more similar to the opinion you’ve formed.” There’s truth in numbers.
One other tip you might consider when weighing references—do enough interviewing and investigating on your own to form an opinion of a candidate. If references carry the majority of the weight for your decision, you need to do some more work.
Predicting performance: Science lends a hand
Considering the importance of making a great managerial hire, and the costs of a poor one, you’d think someone in the business world would have developed some useful, science-based processes to accurately evaluate a job candidate’s skills and predict performance.
You’d think that. And you’d be right.
Management consulting firms and other companies have spent decades creating and improving a wide array of tests and surveys that help business owners evaluate job candidates and accurately forecast their success in a number of work environments. Automotive service management, fortunately, just happens to be one of these environments.
Gilbert, Ariz., -based Summit Performance Group uses a process called benchmarking to help companies systematically evaluate job candidates. Benchmarking measures character traits using job candidates’ responses to surveys. For example, Summit’s Step One Survey (SOS) allows employers to check the integrity of a candidate by measuring the discrepancy in survey answers supplied by prospective employees. SOS, notably, is given before an interview. “Wouldn’t we want to know as much as possible about our prospective hire before we actually submit them to the interview process?” says Dewing. SOS also provides recommended interview questions to go along with its results.
Summit additionally uses benchmarking to prepare proficiency reports on a candidate’s job skills in specific positions, for example, manager or customer service representative. These reports measure a candidate’s level of expertise in areas such as verbal skills, verbal reasoning, numeric skills and energy level.
A scale, ranging from a low of 1 to a high of 10, indicates weaknesses and strengths. Summit provides in-depth analysis of the significance of each score. For example, a low score in numeric reasoning indicates that a candidate “may overlook the implications derived from a set of numerical data” (translation, doesn’t understand how math applies to the workplace), while a high score reveals that a candidate exhibits “little difficulty in assimilating new information of a numerical nature.”
PI Worldwide Inc., of Wellesley, Mass., offers a similar service called Predictive Indexing. Developed nearly 50 years ago and based on psychological sociological studies, the Predictive Index (PI) evaluates the basic motivational drives of people at work. Senior Vice President Dennis LaRosee explains, “Human behavior is a common denominator in every industry. Predictive indexing is a proven way of measuring work-related behavior. We measure how people do their work and predict how they’ll function in certain environments.”
For example, in their PI evaluation, managerial candidates work through a two-part survey consisting of 86 different adjectives describing human qualities, adjectives such as: helpful, relaxed, shy, loyal, brave and flexible. For part one, candidates circle the qualities they believe others expect them to exhibit. In part two, candidates use the same list of adjectives and circle those qualities they believe they possess. The survey takes from 10-15 minutes to complete.
Analysis of the responses, according to LaRosee, indicates specific personality patterns. These patterns reveal the major motivational drives of each respondent and the character traits that impact the work the respondent will be most successful in. For example, analysis can show a respondent’s sense of urgency in different workplace situations or a respondent’s willingness to adapt to a changing environment.
LaRosee notes that predictive indexing works best when utilized as part of a “well rounded” hiring process. Dewing similarly states that benchmarking is one part of the process. Both services are intended to help companies save time and money by enabling them to more accurately evaluate job candidates and therefore better match people to positions. Better matches translate into decreased job turnovers.
Both services also are accessible to shops of all sizes. Summit’s tests can be administered online and automatically evaluated. PI Worldwide offers plans to both large and small businesses.
The two companies additionally share the same view on matching managers to shop cultures. Echoing O’Hare, LaRosee declares, “The person doing the hiring needs to say, ‘Is this my kind of person?’ When you answer ‘yes’ what you do is continue building on a culture. This is extremely important since a manager affects the rest of your company. The same holds true if you’re opening a new shop. The type of manager you hire determines your culture.”
Having some scientific input on the qualities that define and drive your managerial candidates can go a long way in successfully finding a manager that complements or builds the best culture for your business.
Solving the riddle: Time is on your side
Going back to the problem outlined at the beginning of the article, who is the correct hire for the shop? If you haven’t already guessed it, a right answer isn’t possible at this point. Hiring is a multi-step process, and the operator hasn’t worked through all of those steps. And while the operator’s problem may seem urgent, sufficient time actually is available for a thorough hiring process.
If you find yourself unexpectedly having to replace a manager, the fact is you don’t have to make an immediate hire. You temporarily have to make sure the most important managerial duties are attended to. For those, you can put in place the same system you used whenever your manager took time off. For example, you can take over the tasks yourself or delegate some to capable employees.
Indeed, even if you haven’t delegated duties before, now might be the perfect opportunity. Since you need to continually evaluate your employees’ capabilities anyway, consider making the best of the situation by handing over tasks to talented employees with the time to perform them. See how they respond.
Regardless of how you handle the immediate crises, though, don’t fall into the trap of hiring out of need or desperation. If you hire the first manager available, there’s a good chance you’ll need to re-hire that position again. Give the hiring process all the attention it’s due. Use the available resources. Get help from a consulting firm; use personality testing and surveys; call shop association members and ask for candidates or begin training your most interested and talented employee to take over the position.
Remember too, the hiring process doesn’t end simply because a position is filled. You still have to evaluate a new hire’s performance during a trial period, anywhere from 90 days to six months. Cooper notes, “Take a hire out for a test drive.” Think of the trial period as the final hiring step, the last hurdle your candidate must leap.
This period also might be the ideal opportunity to give a talented and interested tech like Angi her shot at managing. Try gradually turning over the managerial duties to her. If she works out, you’ve got your new manager. If she isn’t ready, continue looking for other candidates while she contributes where she can.
Sound like a lot of work? It is, and no doubt, you’d much prefer to invest that time, effort and expense into some other part of your operation. Just keep in mind that hiring wisely pays off in the end. Ultimately, your new hire is the product of a process. Knowing that, would you want your process to be short, cheap and based mostly on luck? Or would you prefer a more deliberate, thoughtful and comprehensive path geared logically towards success? The choice is yours.
