The ONLY Way To Hire Technicians in 2021

Let's talk about hiring and recruiting and should we, should we start back? I don't know, should we go back five years? Sure. So five years ago, what were the secrets to recruiting tax advisors, service managers?

Great. Yeah, great question. So I met you seven years ago when, when you first came out and did a 20 group with us at Lithia Motors. And the difference between then and now is just substantial. Money was the key. Money was the key for recruiting technicians, for getting people to really look at vocation. Really all they cared about was money. So to go seven years in the future to today, incentivizing and making tax want to look at your company takes a lot more than just their flat rate wage and even, you know, some of the benefits. They, they're, they're looking at different things to incentivize them now. So they're looking at quality of life, so they're looking at their scheduling. So if you're a service manager now and, and you think that every tech's gonna want to work six days a week, you know, from 8 in the morning till 6 at night, then there's a reason why you're not getting a lot of candidates to go come and stay with your store. So creative scheduling we have. Some of our stores now are actually doing 3:13 and they align them in a way, such a way that sometimes that tech actually has like five or six days off before that three comes down around. Now obviously you have to have the volume, the physical plant and the team to support that. But that's one of the things is just incentivizing these techs. The other is to really play on, you know, the technology that's involved. There's a very good reason why we don't call them just mechanics anymore. We call them technicians. In fact most schools that part of the learning is tied into stem. So there's a lot with the electronics and what they've learned and make sure that they're going in the right direction to be able to handle it, to be able to jump in. And I really like going to some of the greater vocational schools around the country. WyoTech in general has really come a long way with new ownership and a new focus and see some of these recruits that they're getting and what they're putting into their brain. What people don't realize is they don't come out of us a vocational school. Plug and play. One of the great things that the vocational schools do is really kind of teach them how to learn because now we're going to put them through all their manufacturers training and on average that's another seven years, up to about $110,000 worth of investment from the dealership per. So we have to find that right candidate that's ready to get that training and move on. Younger. I hate to use the word millennials because now there's all sorts of different words for people of that age. But they're actually, they're intrigued with that kind of learning and they're excited to learn more. So if you can kind of get them on the path to do that, that's great.

Take a step out of, you know, entry level techs, and now we start talking about season techs and, you know, we've got a problem on our hands now and I kind of equate it to the NBA. You know, we have a lot of guys and gals that are jumping from sign on bonus to sign on bonus to sign on bonus. And it can be very lucrative. So, you know, how do we attract those techs that already have that training to one of our locations? And a lot of times what we're doing is we're searching all around the country for where is there a mass emigration, where are there people leaving for, you know, en masse. Now we can tie in like a store that we have in say, Twin Falls, Idaho, maybe it has all those things that the person that's leaving a big city is looking for. We use that in our ads, we use that in our, you know, this might set the hook on them. You like fishing? There's four rivers that go right through there. And here's how you do it. So looking outside the box, looking where people are coming from, why they're leaving a certain area, what would attract them to one of our areas, you know, those sort of things we're working on now.

So I'm going to unpack a little bit of that. So the, this happens all the time where I'll be talking to a dealer that's, you know, let's just say they're in Waterloo, Iowa, right? And they will, they'll do that typical, you know, my market thing and they'll say, well, it's hard to hire technicians here. You don't understand, you're in la. And.

What we have found is it's way easier to get somebody to relocate to Waterloo than it is to get somebody to come to la. Because if you think about in la, if you're a technician, you're making.

Just say, and let's say you're a technician, that's 28 to 30 okay, so you're about to have your second kid, right? And you're making what, $30 an hour? Now you're gonna make $30 an hour in Waterloo. Waterloo. But $30 an hour here doesn't even get you in the market of buying a house.

Absolutely.

You're sitting in traffic for 45 minutes to an hour each way. You have the frustration of the school system. You know, if you want to go do something on the weekend, you got to drive an hour and a half to the desert to dirt bike or to the mountains. Now you go somewhere like Iowa and you can fish, you can dirt bike in your front yard, you can have a couple acres of property. And for $30 an hour, you can, you know, you can own property. You all of a sudden are in control of, of your life. So there for us, it's way harder in a bigger market to recruit techs, especially downtown. Like you're talking about downtown Chicago, downtown Seattle. It's harder to get techs to want to fight that traffic. And that's where I see the premium and the alternative work schedules. Four tens work in those situations. They're like, okay, I'll do it four days a week and then I'll drive to Issaquah, sure, or whatever. Yeah, I'm not driving six days a week to downtown Seattle or downtown Chicago.

Exactly. And I think you're looking for a little bit of a different animal. You know, we have, I believe, seven dealerships right. Downtown LA with DTLA Motors. And, you know, to recruit them, you're looking for somebody that, you know, wants that constant inflow of customers. They're never going to have to wait for work. They can flag, you know, 18, 19 hours in a day. If they know what they're doing, they. They can work their butts off for those three or four days and then, like you said, get out of town for a little bit and get back. So you have to know exactly what that dealership is good at and some of the things that would incentivize somebody to work there. And then you also have to find the right person. That LA is something that doesn't scare them off and it's something that they enjoy. And we do have techs that like living in the city, and that's their life. They could never think about living. Where I live in Klamath Falls, Oregon, little small agricultural community. So, you know, it takes a lot of work for a recruiter to do the homework and then be really talking. I try to get my recruiters now I have a team of five to tour all their stores at least quarterly. And one of the biggest things I do and tell them is get immersed in that culture of that store. Figure it out, you know, because you're going to be recruiting people there. You want to be able to answer some of the questions that won't show up on a webpage or anything else. You know, you know, how that team works, what they do together and how they work together. How's that culture look? So, and it changes from service manager to service manager. And one of the things Lithia does that I think sets us, you know, in front of a lot of things we do let our service managers and our general managers run their individual business. So we're not like a corporation where everything's the same. So in order to stay on top of that, my recruiters need to be in those stores, get a taste of that culture and figure out that there might be two stores across the street from each other that are very different in the way they're run, but your.

Recruiters are going to see a different point of view than the people that are in the store. That's the other great thing. Right. So I can't tell you how many times I'll be in a store and they'll be like, yeah, there's nothing special about this. But then I'll see like this gorgeous lighting in the shop and it's like really, really clean and it's a beautiful service drive and like a never ending pile of customers and stuff like that. But they're in the, they're in the business all day long. You don't see that. But your recruiters coming in, they need to take, take note of that. I would probably say that I'd have a physical note on each store. What some selling advantage. Selling advantageous.

Look out back behind the shop, there's some grills sitting out there. Oh, you guys must do, you know, barbecues.

How do you do that?

Is the team building.

Yeah. See those things we can help sell.

Yeah, yeah. In those smaller markets too, oftentimes the service manager's been there 20 years and that's where they've been. So they don't understand that when you come from somewhere else, they really do have something special. It's just their day to day.

Right.

You know, burden to carry. They don't understand that if they went somewhere else, it's harder, right?

Absolutely, absolutely.

So having the outside recruiters come in with a different perspective helps bridge that in a sense. Right. Thanks so much for watching this clip of service driving Revolution we're uploading new stuff every day, so make sure you subscribe and click the Bell icon so you don't miss out. If you have a question you'd like us to answer on the show, call 8333 Ask SDR and we'll answer your question on the show. That's 8333 Ask SDR. For special deals on our books and training, head over to offers.chriscollinsinc.com now that's offers.chriscollinsInc.com I'm Chris Collins, and I'll see you in the next video sa.