Building a great team is all about PEOPLE
Do your people know you care about them? There are several ways for them to truly know.
One sure way is by the people that you hire. Do you take your time and use a consistent hiring practice or policy? Or are you simply hiring anyone that happens to come your way when you need someone. In other words do you have a bench to turn to?
It used to be in the automotive industry that to get hired on as a salesperson, you simply had to be breathing. The saying was “if they can fog a mirror, let’s try them on.” Thankfully most organizations (good ones anyway) have gotten away from this practice.
Having a bench means that you are always on the look out for talent. Everywhere you go everywhere you shop there are talented people. You simply have to pay attention to the service and treatment you are getting as well as being observant when there is a stressful event going on in a store.
Once you find the talent or have a need, does your team know that you have a consistent hiring process? That is one way that your employees know you care about the growth of your company. Do you always adhere to that hiring process, even when it’s your nephew or niece?
Your process should have several known steps. One is a multiple interview process. You should have a potential candidate interviewed several different times by several different people. I sat on a plane this past week next to a young lady who was employed by ADP. She has been with ADP for three years now and commented about how hard it was to get hired by ADP but what a great company they were to work for. Those comments were made after three years of employment. That’s what you are looking for in your hiring process – hard to get onboard but great to work for.
Another step is that if you really care about your company, you need to know who you are hiring. A background check and verification of previous employment is paramount to hiring a great team. There will still be a few that get through, but a great company assisting you in this is worth it. One such company that many automotive dealers use is a company out of Houston, TX called the Cole Group. What was really interesting to watch is that in a lot of cases once we told a potential employee that we used the Cole Group for background checks, we never heard from the prospect again. You see they knew the Cole Group knew the truth about their background and they weren’t getting through without that information being shared with the company. Now in fairness to the Cole Group, they are an information gatherer and provider not the hiring decision maker. That still rests with you, but at least you have the real info to base your hiring decision on.
What ever your hiring processes are, be it drug testing, background checks, previous employment verifications, you have to be consistent – even in crisis mode and make sure that your employees and staff know, you only hire the best and as one famous college football coach says, we only hire them after they have been processed.
Terry Luker