Find the skills for collision repair at your favorite restaurant

Sept. 30, 2014
Look for employees in creative places — like your favorite restaurant — that have the soft skills needed to succeed in collision repair. 

Looking for more front office help? Maybe it’s time to go out for dinner.

Like most collision repair businesses (and most businesses in general), we’re interested in hiring younger people — Generation X and Y employees — for all aspects of our business. Hiring technicians and production employees can be less of a challenge in that they generally show up with some level of technical skills and a reputation in the industry, a background that we can pretty easily check.

But what about admin people, the customer service reps and those who need to handle money and talk with customers? We’ve determined that if we find the right people with the right innate skills, we can teach them what they need to know about our specific industry. That means we can recruit them from almost any type of business, in particular restaurants and retail operations.

This is something I learned watching my own daughter at work in a very busy restaurant. She can have 30 people waiting up to 45 minutes for a table – and multi-task – all without getting frazzled. She’s become adept at interacting with the customers and also knowing which customers should go to which waiters – and yet still ensure all the waiters get close to an equal number of customers. Those are not easy skills, yet they translate pretty directly to our business.

That’s why I say going out for dinner might be a great opportunity to recruit your next employee. We’re always looking for people with the soft skills we need: Do they understand customer service? Do they have good communication skills? Are they patient and friendly? Do they show up on time? Can they listen and learn? Can they juggle multiple demands for their attention? Will they respond to your company’s culture?

You can’t change someone’s personality, and some of these skills are closely tied to that. Recruit someone with those soft skills, and they will easily pick up the other information and things they need to succeed in our busy, often stressful business. It’s easy for them.

Once I became convinced of this reality, it was my job to teach the rest of our management team to embrace the idea. It’s led to some changes in how we recruit and hire. In the past, store managers would do the interviewing and hiring, then send the new-hires to our corporate office for orientation. But there were times those new hires would show up and I could quickly tell they didn’t have the soft skills they needed to succeed with us.

Now, store managers still do the initial interviewing, but then a second interview is done at the corporate level by our comptroller and our marketing director, who monitors our customer service reps (CSRs). After all, CSRs are a huge part of our marketing. They represent the face of our business for most customers. They are the directors of first impressions, as we call them, because when you walk into one of our shops, that is the first person you see.

And we are actively looking for people outside our industry for those CSR and admin positions. If you can handle the pressures of work in a busy restaurant or retail environment without losing your cool, you have a lot of what you need to handle the pressures in our business.

So take a look around the next time you’re out for dinner. But be aware you may not be the only shop owner there open to the idea of recruiting in that setting: I know several of my peers who hire people from the retail and restaurant world as well. Focused, conscientious, observant and respectful people have the soft skills you need when searching for a good director of first impressions.

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