The road to dealership success is constructed with proper hiring practices, employee development, and retention.
Dealership employee development and proper hiring is an investment that will deliver tremendous benefits. Without a doubt, you have given it a thought and strived to raise employee efficiency and retain them for longer. However, what if you had a proven method to identify the right talent? If you had an unswerving strategy to place your hire in the role where they would perform their best and positively impact your profitability?
If we tell you there is a way to eliminate all the guessing work and annoying and time-consuming processes of hiring and placement. Would you still opt for the traditional, tedious methods? Nobody like to see their employees underperform or leave for a more satisfying role.
Put an end to your tiresome and ambiguous hiring and placement process.
There is a reliable and no-nonsense way to recognize how the candidate fits your team, culture, and work pace. Will the candidate contribute how you expect, or will they go above and beyond? How to ensure you have employees to maximize your profitability and provide exceptional service to your customers?
You can obtain those answers through a proven assessment. A cognitive and personality assessment can give you more insights than you would think into a candidate’s potential and traits. Attributes such as collaboration, motivations, persistency, and more can be easily evaluated with such assessments . It will help you discover a candidate’s strengths and limitations.
Evidently, recruiting employees who are driven and genuinely excited about their work produce better results. Motivated employees can lead to increased productivity and allow a dealership to achieve higher levels of output. Dealership employee development and right hiring could make a huge difference.
Traditional hiring vs. data based hiring
To give you a scenario, you hire an experienced sales manager. This manager has worked through several stores in the town and highlights their migration from store to store as an achievement. However, he comes with his own bag of habits or negative traits that he has absorbed over time from his peers and bosses. Furthermore, the candidate is good at hiding it at the interviews. Once you hire them, you realize that the new hire is good at disappearing from the sales floor from time to time, avoids training, and neglects the dealership’s goals. Consequently, you realize that all your time and resources in hiring this candidate went down the drain.
The good news: you can take control of your hiring practices so that you can get an accurate understanding of the person before you hire them. To emphasize, taking advantage of a recognized assessment will allow you to place the people in the right role based on their qualities and capabilities.
Let’s take a closer look at how hiring can be improved with the help of cognitive and personality assessments.
Quality practices to hire quality candidates
Employee turnover is a huge problem in the automotive industry. Therefore, to attract quality candidates, you need to change your hiring practices. Look over your current employees and assess if you knew their strengths and limitations better. Would you not place them in a role better suited to produce higher results? Personality and cognitive assessment are great tools to improve your hiring practices significantly. This tool will provide valuable data to make informed decisions and keep the guesswork out.
Interpretation of results for efficient dealership employee development and hiring
Assessment is only half of it. Correctly interpreting the results is a significant part. The assessment measures the candidate’s personality traits and maybe even gives you a brief remark on their personality type. How would you successfully use this information in your department? This is where professional consulting comes in handy. A professional interpreter can tell you how a specific personality type, say, ‘Analyzer,’ will fit in the sales or F&I department? Wouldn’t it be better to get an in-depth view of what this person could do to close deals or present F&I ancillary products by quickly evaluating the client’s needs? Consultants can draw a clear sketch of where this candidate would perform best based on their traits.
Data based training and development
Whether product sales or F&I, one of the core functions of your staff is to understand customers’ needs to serve them better. Similarly, the development of your employees should also be done based on their individual needs and traits. Taking a data-based approach to learning your employee’s potential and characteristics would help provide customized training. PRO Consulting specializes in training dealership staff based on data insights. In terms of employee performance, the results of tailored training have been significantly higher than traditional training.
On the other hand, retaining efficient employees is another major challenge that dealerships face.
The turnover rate costs dealers millions of dollars, and the current atmosphere is creating a revolving door of retail automotive talent. A COX Automotive staffing study shows, the sales consultants’ turnover rate is 67%, and F&I and other dealership roles are between 38% and 40%.
It demonstrates that dealers need to take an unbiased look at their hiring practices, compensation plan, and overall culture or risk of losing talent to other dealerships or industries.
Some of the strategies to decrease turnover are:
- Set realistic expectations in the job description
- Utilize cognitive and personality assessment to vet candidates before you invest your time and efforts
- Assess employee’s potential and traits to provide customized training
- Conduct regular check-ins to track progress and provide feedback
Positive impact of dealership employee development and right hiring practices:
Setting clear expectations and providing resources and training would allow employees to enhance their sales process, handle objections and close more deals faster. In addition, regular training and engagement with managers will make them feel valued. As a result, they will be more likely to succeed in their job, stay longer, and contribute fully to the dealership’s profitability.