The Best-Kept Secret to Hiring Techs and Advisors

Jan. 28, 2019
The trap most shop owners fall into is they hire people for what they know, and they end up firing them for who they are. Want to avoid a similar trap? Personality assessments can be an effective tool during the hiring process.

Let’s say you’re looking to hire a superstar technician. You find one who has a proven track record of success, and put them through a well-constructed interview process. You decide that the person sitting in front of you is the perfect fit, and you make them a formal job offer in hopes that they will agree to join your team. They agree, and, for the first time in a while, you’re able to sleep throughout the night, because you know you’ve done your due diligence, and have finally found the top tech you’ve so desperately been needing. All good so far, right?

Your new hire comes to work on Monday, and you’re off to a great start. And then, it happens. Within the first few weeks, you start to get the sinking feeling that you may have hired the wrong person. There’s no question that they can fix cars the right way, and they do it quickly. They also show up every day on time, and they keep their workplace clean. The problem is, they don’t follow your procedures very well. Your key employees are telling you that the new guy seems to complain quite a bit about meaningless things, and they’re sad to report that he’s not very social either.

You start to hope that he’ll either “adjust or come around,” or that he’s just dealing with some personal issues that will soon pass. But after a month or two, you reach the inevitable conclusion: this guy doesn’t like to follow rules, he has an attitude that doesn’t fit well in your shop, and your other employees are not very pleased that he’s working with you. After many sleepless nights, you decide to let him go, and you start the process all over again.

Unfortunately, many shop owners live in this world of high employee turnover, or end up telling themselves that they’d rather keep someone who’s not a good fit than run the risk of simply swapping out one bad employee for another. If this sounds all too familiar to you, then consider this:

The trap most shop owners fall into is they hire people for what they know, and they end up firing them… for who they are.

To put it another way, shop owners often hire people for their skills, and fire them for their behavior. So, the best-kept secret to hiring superstar techs and advisors? It’s going a step beyond learning about their skills and experience, and learning more about who they are as a person. As someone who has grown some of the most successful shops in America, I’ve learned over the years that in order to hire top employees that my entire team will really enjoy working with, I have to pay very close attention to their personalities and behaviors during the interview process. I do that to this day with Elite, and it’s been one of the most important keys to my hiring success. However, I also know that my perception of someone’s personality will only take me so far, so I have every applicant complete a 45-minute online behavioral assessment before the first interview.

Here’s why: An assessment can tell us whether an applicant has the propensity to follow rules, how social he or she is, his or her level of optimism, how open he or she is to constructive feedback, and a whole lot more. Not only do these assessments help us conclude whether the applicant is even someone we should interview, but they also give us direction on where we should dig deeper, and the questions we should ask during the interviews. For example, if the assessment suggests he or she she is not very social, then you know you need to ask questions about how he or she worked with others in the past so you can discover if there were personality conflicts, ego issues, etc. If the assessment suggests he or she has a propensity to ignore rules and procedures, you can ask him or her specific questions about how he or she inspected and repaired cars, and how he or she interacted with the advisors.

So, here’s what I’m going to ask you to do. First, think about the people you’ve fired. Hopefully it hasn’t been many, but I suspect you will discover that, with rare exception, the reason you fired them had little to do with their skills, but was because of who they were as a person or how they behaved. Secondly, I’m going to ask that you accept the fact that there are many behaviors (and propensities) that will show up on behavioral assessments that you or I would never be able to detect during an interview, no matter how thorough we may be. And lastly, consider that if you do the math, hiring the wrong person is going to cost you at least $5,000.

If you now agree that you need to dig deep and learn more about who the person really is before you hire them, you need to do what Fortune 500 companies and the top shop owners in America do, and have every applicant complete a behavioral assessment before the first interview. There are many companies that provide such services, such as Predictive Index, Berke, and Myers-Briggs, to name a few. We use Berke, and have been quite pleased.

If you do begin assessing the people you may hire, then you have my promise: You’ll have a much higher probability of hiring the techs and advisors that your other employees will enjoy working with, they’ll follow your rules, and you’ll be able to go to sleep at night knowing you have an incredible team of superstars.

Sponsored Recommendations

How one auto shop was able to order 20% more parts

Learn how one auto shop talks about the benefit of using PartsTech in their shop.

Vehicle Inspection Checklist For Auto Shops

Vehicle inspections, whether digital or on paper, are crucial for auto shops, ensuring thorough assessments and fostering trust by transparently revealing a vehicle's condition...

6 Reasons Why A Digital Vehicle Inspection Is A Must-Have

In an era of growing technology and innovation, auto repair shops must keep pace with the latest advancements to meet customers preferences and remain competitive.

How Your Auto Shop Can Now Connect To 30 Tire Suppliers For Free

Yep! We have over 50 tire suppliers in our network. And PartsTech is the only platform where you can access more than 30 of those suppliers FREE OF CHARGE.