Why Do Dealerships Hire Out of Desperation?

None of us want to admit that we hire out of desperation, but we’ve all done it. Perhaps it’s after coming off a bad month of sales or maybe after a Saturday when customers were everywhere without enough staff to help them. One thing that is certain; hiring decisions born of desperation are never made through a clear and well-considered process.

Consider the familiar position of having not hired for a while, recruiting like crazy, and ending up with a handful of candidates that seem worth talking to. There may only be a few minutes to really look at the candidate’s resume before you speak with them. After all, it only took a few minutes for the prospect to build this personal portfolio, or did it?

Picking up their resume as the candidate walks into your office is not preparation, and the old approach of “I’ll know it when I see it” simply doesn’t work anymore. The fact of the matter is that hiring without a completed success profile is not being prepared for success.

Let’s talk about something that I’m truly passionate about as your dealer coach; Preparation. This means treating hiring as the most important activity necessary to grow your business. Preparation is learning to hire the right way at the right time by applying a proven process…every time.

Too often, we are not clear as a team on what we’re really looking for in a candidate. This means we’re likely to, once again, hire the first person that sits down, shakes their head up and down, and says ‘yes’ to each of our unprepared questions. We must define the knowledge, skills, and behaviors necessary for the applicant to succeed. It’s also crucial to have solid interview questions before you walk into the interview

As I travel across the country, I see the same theme again and again. We spend countless hours teaching our people how to ask the right qualifying questions to our customers so we can better understand how best to serve them. This philosophy should be mirrored in our hiring process. After all, sloppy hiring decisions stemming from not qualifying and being unprepared are actually the most expensive and costly mistakes that we make.