LAS VEGAS — Hiring the wrong person at an auto repair shop can kill a business, yet shop owners usually hire the first warm body that walks through the door to fill a job opening.
"Our job is to find the right person so it doesn't damage our company. So this is a very important job, and it's the job that we probably spend the least amount of time thinking about, working on or building process and procedures around," Maylan Newton, CEO of Educational Seminars Institute (ESI), told attendees during an AAPEX 2023 seminar.
A successful shop has a good reputation in its community, but it can take just one employee to alienate customers and tarnish that reputation, he said.
Bringing a so-called "bad apple" onto the staff can also ruin the overall morale and culture in the shop.
Newton said hiring the wrong person costs the business time and money in training, correcting mistakes and slowing down production. It may also cost the business a good employee who leaves because of that bad employee.
"So we have to fully understand how critical the right person is at the right position. ...
"The key operative word there is the 'right' people, because there are people out there, but they're not the right people. And most of us are looking for skilled people. We're looking for the same people NASA is, seriously. Skilled people, people who can work with their hands, in some cases as a technician, but as service writers, people that can work with their head and people who can get along with people and people who can sell. And those are all skilled things," Newton said.
He acknowledged that the hiring process is painful.
"And the reason it's a pain is because we don't do it often enough to be really good at it. Or our hiring is done in what I call panic mode."
The hiring process should be a step-by-step process conducted the same way for every applicant to eliminate discrimination.
"So you send me a resume, you fill out an application, you take the math test, you take the skills test. We do an interview. Everybody gets treated the same," Newton said.
"I even ask the same interview questions for every applicant because I want to make sure that I don't leave something out. And I want this to be a repeatable process because if you're the person doing the interviewing now and you have to be gone for six months, can somebody else replicate that and do the same job? We want a repeatable, consistent method of hiring people so whoever is in that position can do it, as opposed to them doing it their way."