Automotive dealership staffing involves finding the right people, hiring them, training them, and managing them for various roles in an automotive dealership company. Companies need staff with different skills and experience for multiple roles. These may include sales personnel, service advisors, technicians, administrative roles like office managers, and human resource staff.
However, building strong auto parts shipping companies with a vast customer base requires dedicated and determined staff. While finding the right person for a role is challenging in the crowded job market, making them stay with your company for long is even more difficult. So, this blog will deep dive into how you can manage automotive dealership staffing problems.
Why Is Finding the Right Staff Necessary?
Every business, including auto part shipping, requires great team members to achieve success. Irrespective of the management processes, your staff decides whether your business will be successful. So, making the right decision while hiring an employee can make or break your business. But how?
Hiring is costly: If you don't invest your time and energy while hiring any staff, you will be in that process multiple times. So, your costs will increase, leading to lower profits. For instance, you have hired a guy as a marketing manager for auto parts shipping companies. While hiring, you found him perfect for the post. However, you find him unsuitable for the role after a few months. So, you end up hiring for the same role again. These mistakes result in high turnover rates and become costly for your automotive dealerships.
Besides, continuous firing may create a negative brand image of your company in the market.
How Can You Develop a Solid Automotive Dealership Staffing Strategy?
Before crafting an automotive dealership staffing strategy, you should know your requirements. If you keep searching for talents unthinkingly without understanding what you need for your dealership company, nothing is going to help you.
A solid strategy to hire the right staff involves three things.
Attracting the right talents to your organization.
Hiring people is not only based on their skills and experience but also on checking if they fit in your company. Learning the skills is easy if you prioritize the culture-fit aspect while hiring any team member.
Once you are sure of a person, faster onboarding gives you ample time to train them for success.
So, if you are hiring for any role in your automotive dealership company, invest adequate time and energy in finding the right person. This will not only create goodwill for your business but also help you reduce turnover rates.
What Are the Challenges in Automotive Dealership Staffing?
Finding The Right Fit For a Role: Finding the right candidate for a role is challenging in any automotive parts shipping or auto dealership company. Although the number of people aspiring for jobs is increasing, finding a person who is committed to their work is difficult.
Retaining The Top Talent: There is another problem bigger than finding a perfect fit: retaining the top talent for a longer period. Seventy percent of the employees in an automotive dealership business can switch their companies for better pay, better benefits, and work-life balance. So, if you don't offer these to your employees, retaining them will be next to impossible.
Less Awareness: Another less-discussed problem in automotive dealership staffing is that people don't know what it is to work in an automotive dealership. Many people who are looking for jobs don't know about these jobs and the skills they need to be successful. This unawareness creates a gap between auto dealership companies and talents.
To overcome this, you should look outside the automotive box for talent. For instance, you should take a chance and hire someone to manage the shipping of OEM parts, even if they don't have specific experience in the automotive industry. Analyze their general skills and hire them because you can train them to be specific to your industry.
3 Best Practices to Overcome the Automotive Dealership Staffing Challenges:
Understand the Right Size Staff for Your Auto Dealerships:
Whether bringing in new customers or providing last-mile delivery service to the current ones, determining the right staff size is crucial. By hiring the correct number of qualified and skilled employees, auto parts shipping companies can mitigate the risk of bad reviews or low NPS and CSI scores. Understaffing can put a lot of stress on the current employees, leading to less productivity and inefficiencies. Hiring more staff than required can increase your costs. But how can you determine the staff you need to deliver your services and grow your business effectively?
Ask your managers and team members.
Find out the inefficient areas and see if any technology or tools can fill the gap
Understand individual and team performance
After analyzing all this data, make well-researched decisions about hiring staff. First, determine which department you need to hire people for and how many people will be optimal for effective business growth.
Look for Skills and Not Experience:
This is a golden rule of hiring the right person. With an increased inclination towards digital retailing, hiring people with formal dealership experience won't help much. However, if you widen your horizons and look for specific skills in a person, it will be easier to find a talent for a particular role. So, instead of sticking to auto dealership experience as a hiring criterion, take chances with people from other fields.
If you do this, you can harness a different talent pool from various industries like tourism, hospitality, etc. So, next time you hire someone for any position, jot down the core skills you need. Remember to write about soft skills along with the hard ones. While going through the prospects, look for those hard and soft skills rather than the experience.
Proper Onboarding Process:
You cannot harness his full potential without a solid onboarding process, even if you have hired a great talent. Here is what you should do to ensure that the new joint comes with its maximum potential.
Pre-boarding: Send welcome emails and give him access to various portals. Share essential information about your company, the services you provide, etc.
An organized Orientation Program: This should include the company's mission, values, and vision. To make the new employee feel at home, give him a tour of the facility and introduce team members.
Training: No matter how talented or skilled someone is, training is crucial for a specific role. So, once you have hired someone, train them to improve their roles.
Check-ins: Regular check-ins and feedback ensure that your employees stay on the same page regarding the company as you. However, it is your responsibility to be soft and kind throughout.
Final Words:
For more than half of auto dealers, dealership staffing remains a primary hurdle in their business growth. However, you can overcome this hurdle by developing a solid strategy, applying the practices mentioned above, and going beyond experience while hiring. The right staff are the writers of a business's destiny. So, choose yours wisely.
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