Recruiting 101: My Philosophy
One of my best service advisers came from a Verizon store.
I met him years ago when his car broke down on a Saturday in the middle of winter. He brought it to me, we got to talking, and eventually I became his customer. I bought phones from him for years before I finally recruited him.
He knew almost nothing about cars when he started. He liked cars, what we would call a “car enthusiast,” but he didn’t really know how they worked. Ten years ago, I probably wouldn’t have hired him. Back then, I hired almost exclusively for experience. I wanted somebody who knew the industry, knew the job, and could walk in on Monday morning knowing what to do.
My standards are higher now. And strangely enough, the higher my standards have become, the less I care about experience.
I hire for what I cannot teach
Last week, I spent a day going door to door with one of our recruiters in Houston. We probably walked into 20 or 30 shops, and within two minutes of stepping inside, I could usually tell you exactly how the place operated.
In almost every shop, the service adviser sat behind a desk and waited. The customer had to walk all the way to the counter and be the one to start the conversation.
Then we pulled up to one shop, and before we could even make it through the door, a guy came outside.
“Hey guys, how can I help you?”
That is what I am looking for.
He went to the customer instead of waiting for the customer to come to him. It seems like a small thing, but small things tell you a lot about a person. He was paying attention. He noticed us. He was engaged enough to get out from behind the desk and start a conversation.
I can teach someone how a car works. It is much harder to teach someone to notice the person standing in front of him.
That has become the foundation of how I recruit. I am looking for the qualities that are difficult, and sometimes impossible, to train:
Does he naturally engage with people?
Is he curious?
Does he take initiative without being asked?
Is he humble enough to admit what he doesn’t know?
Does he care about doing something well, even when nobody is watching?
If I can find those things, I can teach a person how we do business.
Experience can come with bad habits
Experience is not meaningless. But I no longer assume that ten years in the industry makes someone more valuable than someone who has never worked in it.
Because sometimes it means I have ten years of habits to undo!
We have a certain way of doing things in our business, and there is a reason behind it. The people who succeed here are the ones who are willing to step into our process rather than hold tightly to the way they have always done things.
I tell people in our classes all the time: starting right now, delete everything you know. Seriously. Press delete.
That is much harder than it sounds. When you have spent years being taught that there is one right way to do your job, those habits become instinct. Eventually, you stop questioning why you do something at all.
So when someone comes in and tells me, “You have to do it this way,” my first question is always, “Says who?”
Let’s challenge it. Let’s look at why we do things differently. You don’t have to walk through the door already knowing our way. You just have to be open enough to learn it.
The guy who now oversees our entire Houston operation is probably the best example of this.
He came to us with almost no automotive experience. He had moved to Houston from the West Coast. His family was in the wine business, but he didn’t drink and had no interest in going into the wineries. He had run gyms, coached basketball players you have seen in the NBA, and eventually ran a landscaping business building hardscapes, waterfalls, and stonework.
When Todd interviewed him, he came back and said, “This guy is very, very sharp.”
So we hired him as a service adviser.
For the first two months, we did not let him sell anything. His job was to watch, listen, and learn. He had an hour-long commute each way, so he bought a Tesla and used those two hours on the road to study. He watched our training materials and videos from Motor Visuals that explained how different systems in a car worked.
Nobody told him to do that. Nobody assigned it to him. He simply decided that if he was going to do the job, he was going to learn how to do it well.
Today, he oversees Houston.
That is the deal I offer people who come to work here. I hire the person. I teach them the system.
Your standards are only as strong as your bench
It is very difficult to hold a high standard when you cannot afford to lose anybody. The moment your entire operation depends on one person showing up tomorrow morning, the balance of power changes. You start tolerating things you know you shouldn’t because the alternative is being short-handed. Before long, that person is setting the standard instead of you.
I tell my teams that I will never allow the business to be held hostage by one employee.
A few months ago, we had a guy whose ethics were not lining up with ours. I told the team plainly that if we let him go, they were going to be short-handed. I wanted them to understand exactly what the decision would mean for them.
They told me they would rather work harder than have him around.
So we let him go, and we have been short-staffed since.
That is what a standard costs sometimes. If you say character matters, performance matters, and ethics matter, eventually you are going to have to prove it when keeping the wrong person would be easier than letting him go.
Your team is watching those decisions. Every person you keep past the point when you know you should have moved on tells everyone else what you are actually willing to tolerate.
Which is why, to me, recruiting cannot begin when somebody quits.
Recruit when you do not need anybody
Even when every position is filled, you are one phone call away from an opening. I have been doing this long enough to know how quickly life can change.
People leave for reasons you could never put on a staffing forecast:
Someone moves away.
Someone gets divorced and his life comes apart for a while.
Someone gets sick.
A spouse gets a job in another state and the whole family moves.
Someone makes a bad decision outside of work that means I can no longer keep him employed.
None of those things are unusual. They are life.
If your recruiting starts the day somebody quits, you are already behind. Now you are hiring under pressure, and pressure has a way of lowering standards. Eventually, you stop asking, “Is this the right person?” and start asking, “Can this person start Monday?”
I never want to hire that way.
Our goal is to build a recruiting pipeline strong enough that we never desperately need a person again. Instead of starting from zero every time a seat opens, we stay in conversation with good people long before there is a job to offer them.
Because so much of recruiting comes down to timing.
You can meet the right person at the wrong moment. He likes you. You like him. But he just got a raise, his wife is pregnant, his kids are settled in school, or he simply isn’t ready to leave yet.
That does not make him a dead lead.
I have had people take two or three years to make a move. If I only talk to them during the two weeks I happen to have an opening, I lose them. If I stay in touch for three years, I may be the first person they call when something changes.
That is what recruiting is to me. It is not filling openings. It is building relationships before you need them.
The better you get, the smaller the pool becomes
Once you get specific about performance, attitude, initiative, ethics, and how somebody treats a customer, the pool gets considerably smaller. The people who meet those standards are usually not sitting at home looking for work. They already have jobs. They make good money. They have benefits. Their employers know they are valuable and do not want to lose them.
At that point, your reputation starts recruiting for you.
For example, we texted a very high-level candidate this week and told him we had an opportunity for him. The guy wrote back that he knew us very well. He already has a good job, but he still came in to talk to us anyway.
If our reputation were bad, that conversation would have ended with the text message.
When somebody like that sits down with me, I ask him directly: Why are you here? You already have good pay. You have benefits. You have time off. What made you willing to have this conversation?
At that level, the answer is almost never money. Usually, it is management. Leadership. Standards. How people are treated and what they are expected to tolerate.
High performers do not want to spend their careers compensating for low performers. Eventually, it wears on them. They start looking for a place where the people beside them care as much as they do and where the standard actually means something.
That is why I see recruiting, performance, culture, and leadership as the same conversation. You cannot recruit great people into a business that tolerates mediocrity and expect them to stay.
If you want a regular shop, building a regular team is not that difficult. If you want a high-performing shop, it is a completely different undertaking. You have to know what you are unwilling to compromise on, hire for the qualities you cannot teach, develop the ones you can, and protect the standard once people are inside.
And you have to keep looking for good people long before you need them.