I’ve been fortunate to not have to do a lot of recruiting of new employees over the years. At one point about a year ago, fully three-quarters of our shop’s employees had been with the company a decade or more.
This past year, however, we’ve added two employees because of growth and replaced our bookkeeper who retired and two long-time technicians who left (one by our choice, one by his own).
The less-than-overwhelming response we received to our “help wanted” classified ads for those positions in our city’s daily newspaper led me, as it has many other shop owners, to seek out other ways to fill the openings. We relied in large part on referrals of potential employees from our current staff, and from industry suppliers who knew technicians looking for work.
But in talking with other shop owners about the issue, I’ve found quite a few great ideas of ways to recruit new employees. Particularly during the boom times of the late 1990s, for example, a number of shop owners said offering signing bonuses in their ads boosted response. Running those ads can be expensive in many markets, and as one shop owner told me, “I’d rather get more applicants to respond by offering a few hundred dollars as a signing bonus than spend that same amount of money just paying to run my ad for another week.”
Virginia shop owner Mike Anderson shared some great recruiting ideas at one industry event I attended. His company, for example, has hired several former police officers or firefighters who have retired in their mid-40s after 20 years on the force.
“They love cars, they’re mature and they have supervisory skills,” Anderson said. “They’re not looking to make tons of money because they have a [pension] income, and they don’t necessarily need the benefits.”
Similarly, he said, those leaving the military post their resumes on searchable Web sites (such as the Army Career Alumni Program, www.acap.army.mil) that also enable employers to list job openings nationwide. The government may even pick up some of the training and certification costs for those veterans.
One of our current 10-year employees actually came to us through a temp agency. We’d had a particularly aggravating period of turnover in our entry-level detailing position, and rather than going through the hiring process every few months, I decided to call a temp agency. Not everyone they sent us worked out, but in those cases, the temp agency did the “firing” and had someone new for us right away. And when we ended up eventually hiring several of those “temps,” they got an immediate raise that cost us nothing because the agency was no longer taking a cut of what we were paying them. As I said, one of those detailers went on to become a painter’s helper and is now a painter for us.
We’ve also had success over the years hiring entry-level employees through our local community college, which has an excellent collision repair-training program. But I don’t think you should expect the schools to refer their “best and brightest” to your shop if you don’t take some role in helping that training program improve and succeed. Get involved with the program’s advisory committee, offer to be a guest lecturer once or twice a year, invite students to tour your shop, offer to look over students’ resumes or conduct practice job interviews with them, sponsor a scholarship or help the program get tools, equipment or repairable vehicles donated. Your involvement will only help the program produce a larger, better-qualified pool of new techs for your shop and the industry.
It also can pay to think about some other places to advertise job openings. Print and online classified ads are available through publications like this one as well as industry Web sites like Autobody Online (www.abol.com). Post the opening on your company’s own Web site. And check with your national or regional associations—ours posts job openings (free of charge for members) on its website and in the weekly and monthly publications.
When advertising online or outside your immediate area, play up what might attract someone to your community. Shop owners in rural areas often complain about techs being attracted to the “bigger opportunities” in the city, but there are plenty of “city techs” who long for the recreational opportunities and “quality of life” of smaller communities.
As with virtually any problem you face in this industry, building a network of other shop owners you can contact for help also can offer another possible solution to employee recruitment. Whenever I have an opening, I try to tell as many of the other shop owners I’ve gotten to know through CARSTAR, a “20 group” or our state association. On several occasions, they’ve told me about technicians looking for work.
Recruiting successfully is similar to marketing your shop to potential customers, in that creativity and persistence can pay off. I feel we’ve built up a pretty good arsenal of options to try when we have openings. I’m just hoping that unless we have another growth spurt, we won’t have to use them too often for another 10-year stretch.
