The historically low unemployment rate makes hiring challenging for dealerships and other employers across industries. To get ahead in the competitive hiring market, dealers need to have an efficient hiring process in place.
Are you losing out on top technician, sales and other job seekers due to lack of a hiring process? We’ve outlined three effective ways to improve your hiring below.
1. Build a Strong Employer Brand and Career Site
Even at a time of low unemployment, most employees are on the lookout for new job opportunities, with 90% of U.S. employees open to a new role. But, as most job seekers are already employed, prospective job applicants have the flexibility to be more particular when considering career changes. This means your dealership needs to excite talent about joining your team with a strong employer brand and career site that answers the “What’s in it for me?” question.
To encourage job seekers to join your team, develop a strong employer brand that encourages job seekers to build long-term careers at your dealership. Your employer brand should include SEO-friendly job descriptions, a compelling career site, defined career paths across departments, employee testimonials, a comprehensive list of benefits and continuous job openings. By developing and maintaining a strong employer brand and career site, you can attract engaged applicants.
2. Optimize Your Recruitment Marketing Budget
Once you have a strong employer brand and career site in place, you can drive more quality applicants through your career site and, as a result, will have to rely less on other applicant channels. But, it’s also important to determine which channels result in quality applicants and which are not worth your investment.
Your dealership understands which lead sources convert to car sales on a daily basis. This same level of attention and data-based decision making should be applied to the most critical component of a dealership — hiring quality people. This can be made possible by continuously measuring the total number of applicants, quality candidates and hires by from each recruitment marketing channel. To better understand the ROI of your recruitment marketing investment, you should also measure dollars spent, quality applicants received, average cost per quality applicant and average cost per hire by channel.
Applicant channels that deliver a large volume of poor applicants will waste your dealership’s time and recruitment budget. By tapping into actionable data, your dealership can improve the return-on-investment for your recruitment budget by vendor or channel, ensure quality hires are being made to drive profitability.
3. Decrease Time-to-Hire
Our data found that for each day a revenue-driving role is open, the average dealership loses $1,000 in gross profit. Put into perspective, for each day there’s an empty service bay at your dealership, fewer cars are serviced in the fixed ops department. For each day you have an open sales role, fewer cars will be sold.
Similar to leveraging data to drive efficiencies in your recruitment budget, you can also tap into data to decrease time-to-hire. For example, you can measure your total time to hire employees and identify ways to decrease overall hiring time. Armed with this data, you can better understand which steps you need to take to more effectively manage throughout the hiring process.
If the data shows candidates keep getting held up in a certain hiring step — such as initial applicant review or the interview stage — you can identify ways to speed up this step, decreasing overall time-to-hire.
The tight labor market means an efficient hiring process is more important than ever before when it comes to securing quality employees. By building a strong employer brand, leveraging data and better managing your hiring process, you can streamline your hiring and secure top talent sooner.
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