Hire the Right Person for the J.O.B.

Talk is cheap, so don’t believe everything you read. Test your applicants!

If your dealership is typical, your personnel turnover rate should qualify you for some sort of crisis medal of honor. Losing an employee is bad enough, but I think hiring a new employee can turn out to be a real nightmare. You put an ad in the local newspaper clearly stating “experience preferred” and wouldn’t you know it, every unemployed person in the city calls you assuming you really didn’t mean you needed any experience to come work at your dealership. Then come the resumes from the applicants claiming things like “Bob has walked on water on three different occasions in the past,” and “Mary requires only two hours of sleep – once a month.” If these people are so great, why are they unemployed? Maybe they had a bad turn in their good fortune, or maybe they have relocated to your area, but how do you weed out the bad ones from the good ones?

We know the answer! Test them. It really works. For example, you need a data entry person for the accounting department. You receive ten applications, and you want to begin the interview process. STOP. Before going any further, have a brief interview with the candidate, and if your initial impression is positive, have them take a “hands-on” test. Get one of your accounting personnel to give them a batch of data entry work and let them go to town on the computer. You can use a program like Microsoft Excel to test them as opposed to your dealership software so that it can be easier for the candidate. After about 15 to 20 minutes, examine their work, and you will be surprised at how many people can’t do what they said they could do. Most people get hired because they say they can, but trust me my friend, have them show you they can, and you will avoid a great deal of heartache.

If you’re hiring an accounting manager, give them an accounting test. What’s the use of hiring someone to be in charge of accounting that can’t add or subtract? What if they can’t tell the difference between a credit and a debit? You see, it doesn’t matter if they have ten years of experience doing the job they applied for with your dealership. They may have been doing the job wrong for the past ten years. Please give them a test.

Now you may want to ask if the test needs to be in a written format. Well, this is a good question. I often give “verbal mental” tests to candidates. For example, if I want to hire a parts manager for the parts department, I will ask the person who claims to have experience to verbally tell me how the parts department works. He or she would respond by saying, “First I make sure that I stock the right parts for my tech. I do this by learning which parts are turning the fastest. My goal is to turn my inventory at least four times a year. I order my parts by locating the part name and number and then sending a P.O. to my vendor. When my parts arrive, I receive them and put them into my inventory through the computer system. I make sure my cost and sales prices are correct, along with my bin locations. Once I have received them, I put the P.O., receiver, and packing slip together by stapling them, and then I forward all my paperwork to the accounting department. Wanna learn more? Purchase the book or hire our services.