Hiring Right Strategies for achieving success the first time by: Brent Hoskins, Office Technology Magazine
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oe Sales seemed like he was the right person for the job. He came across as professional and polite, had some good sales experience and provided quick responses to your questions in his interview, so you hired him the same day you met him. You sent him out into the field his first week on the job with the expectation that he would provide a nice boost to your sales revenues. However, two months later, unable to optimally perform his duties, you let him go. He fell short of your expectations. Your search for the ideal rep continued. Is this scenario far from the typical hiring process in your dealership? Is there some aspect of it that sounds a little familiar? Have you had the exact same experience? Whatever the case, there is one reality that should be on the minds of all dealers whenever a position is being filled: A hiring mistake can be costly. “On the low end, some say the cost of a bad hire may be $50,000, and at the high end it may be three times that much,” says Sally Brause, director of human resources consulting at GreatAmerica Financial Services (www.great america.com/PathShare). “I spoke to one dealer recently who said the cost of bad hires at his dealership in one year was more than $1 million. It can be very costly.” Brause cites recruiting expenses and compensation as examples of hard costs associated with a bad hire. However, she says, a lot of the cost comes in soft dollars. “For example, how much time did the manager and others in your organization spend trying to train and develop this person, taking their focus away from the top performers?” she asks. “You also have to think about the impact on your customer community. If you hire the wrong sales rep or service tech, he (or she) can do a lot of damage to the reputation that you have worked hard to build.” In order to avoid incurring both the hard and soft costs associated with a bad hire, there are several key strategies for hiring success that dealers can follow. Collectively, they will help you to hire right the first time, rather than going
through a cycle of hiring and firing multiple people for the same position in a relatively short period of time. Consider the scenario of Joe Sales, and the seemingly quick interview process. Instead, says R. Thomas Bruguiere, vice president of recruitment for the sales, service and management recruiting firm Crawford Thomas (www.crawfordthomas.com), the interview process should be more thorough and include “multiple interactions” with employees of the dealership, not just with one person. Bruguiere recommends an initial face-to-face interview with the hiring manager. “This should be a meeting to assess the individual and his résumé, ask basic interview questions, make sure he is a good fit for the position and to let him know exactly what the position entails,” he says. “This should be a ‘get-to-know-you’ meeting.” Following a successful first meeting, a good second meeting, Bruguiere says, is to have the candidate see a “day in the life” at the dealership. When hiring a sales rep, for example, he says the candidate should come in and “meet multiple individuals” within your company and participate in a “field ride” with a designated sales rep, “actually going out into the field prospecting and cold calling.” The rep taking the candidate on the field ride — ideally someone who is similar in age and background to the candidate — should be told by the hiring manager, “‘I will want you to give me your honest opinion about the candidate,’” Bruguiere explains. “‘I will want to know if you think the candidate would be successful in this position.’” Brause says she, too, is a proponent of having a current employee take the sales rep candidate on a field ride. “I am a big believer in that for a couple of reasons,” she says. “From the candidate’s perspective, I want him to see ‘the good, the bad and the ugly.’ I want him to have a realistic preview of the job. The last thing you want to do is tell the candidate that everything about the job is terrific and have him say on day one, ‘You mean I have to knock on doors and cold call?’”
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