The next time you are hiring to fill a position within your facility you need to examine the scenario that opened the position in the first place, did the past employee fail you or did the facility training level or support system fail the employee? Do you have clearly defined policies and procedures that outline WHAT you want accomplished on a daily basis or is your department run with a policy of every person for them self?
Winners like to work for establishments where the goals are defined and the procedures to attain the goals are clear, concise and achievable. Only when you have clearly identified the issues that brought you to the point of hiring a replacement can you move forward with a plan to hire a viable body to help you achieve the department goals?
The basis for hiring a new service advisor or technician should be as follows;
1. Ask the candidate to bring with them their advisor reports or technician reports from their current or last place of employment.
2. You want to see more than just their personal statistics; you want to review where they rank within their current dealership of peers.
Ask for your candidates advisor or technician reports and look over the effective labor rate, hours per RO, dollars per RO, open repair order list, flat rate units, available hours vs. produced hours and really drill down on each candidate to see where they currently rank within their existing employment. STUDY THE NUMBERS!
Examine the advisor or technician reports of your candidates and make sure they ranked at the top of their current employment. The reason I say this is if they were ranked number four out of five advisors or seventeenth out of twenty technicians what will they bring to your dealership that is unique? Hiring winners means they were ranked number one or two in their current employment, not the middle or the bottom of the pack.
If you want more of what you currently have keep hiring the way you always have! Should you really wish to succeed then start hiring smarter more ambitious people who will lead in your facility and help attract more talent to enable you to grow?
Excellent service advisor candidates do more than just take orders from your customers! Excellent service advisors, called winners consistently up sell recommended services and up sell items recommended by technicians. Excellent service advisors continuously keep the lines of communication open with their individual customers ensuring them an excellent servicing experience. Excellent service advisors check over their own individual open RO list throughout the day, closing work-orders that are completed and calling their customers to have the completed vehicle picked up in a timely manner, this is done to counter parking lot congestion and maintain the loaner vehicle fleet with available vehicles for the next customer.
Your ability to have available parking and loaner vehicles is your facilities ability to facilitate more appointments thus making more revenue. The excellent service advisor is more than just an average service advisor, to be an excellent service advisor means being a consultant to customers. The consultant advisor has the mentality that each customer is his or hers within the dealership and strives to maintain that customer long term by building a relationship of trust and integrity. The advisor who turns each customer into a repeat pattern with little or no attention to the customer’s needs is just and order taker. Order taker advisors belong at Jiffy Lube not in a dealership setting.
Excellent technicians are those that consistently apply themselves to the training requirements and strive to build their own income stream within your facility. The excellent technician produces more hours than the forty hours he or she is in the building, having a fixed first visit ratio of ninety-five percent or higher with minimum comebacks. Excellent technicians use their time wisely while in the workplace and will inspect each vehicle properly prioritizing up sell repairs in terms of need analysis.
Before you hire your next candidate decide WHAT you NEED and HOW you will interview for it! Make a point to itemize the qualities you are seeking and review your own department numbers to better understand where you currently are and where you want to be! You will never achieve 100% fixed absorption unless you hire and train your employees to be better each and every day! You will also continue to make minor inroads with your CSI until you hire and train your employees to be consultants with each and every customer they come in contact with. I ask you this, “Do you want more of the same or do you want to initialize and transform your dealership into a revenue stream that is unstoppable even in the current economic climate”? The choice is yours!
Stop waiting for something positive to happen, execute the positive change NOW and you will be better prepared to start really making a difference on the bottom line today!
David
