If there's one good indicator of how far the automotive industry has come over the past two years, it's the increase in hiring at dealerships in both sales and service positions. For sales, dealers are responding to the current steady increase in demand for new vehicles; in the service department, they are preparing for warranty and maintenance demand that will emerge a few years down the road as those new vehicles return to the shop.
VW saw a 38 percent increase in sales over the past year, which is driving the need for more employees in the near future as those vehicles come back for scheduled maintenance and warranty work. Since developing a new service technician can require several years and between $13,000 and $15,000 in training costs, VW is helping dealers start that process now by launching a career website to pool applicant resumes and provide an easy search tool for dealers evaluating new job candidates.
In the wake of the recession, the drop in new vehicle sales and the reduction of the dealer networks of the Big Three, there are a lot of "former" dealership employees out there to recruit. But even though there is a potentially large pool of candidates, luring those employees back can be challenging, even though top service manager jobs in a metro market can command six-figure salaries.
"Many of these folks lost their jobs through no fault of their own, and to call them up and try to lure them back after what happened to them through 2008 and 2010 is hard," says Gary Simmons of AutoPeople, a dealership recruiting firm. "It's not that easy to find good candidates. If you got lucky enough to have a stable of a dozen or so highly-qualified fixed ops managers, you'd place them in 30 days."
"There's always a lack of really good candidates," says Dave Robison, owner of Automotive Dealer Personnel. "It's hard to find well-established, stable people with all the qualities that the better dealers are looking for."
Dealerships have had to turn to the Internet to help boost their recruiting efforts. "If you are not on top of things with social media, Facebook, Twitter, Craigslist, etc., then you're not going to be successful," Robison adds.
Changing job requirements
Simmons says that the requirements of the service and parts managers' jobs have evolved so rapidly over the past few years that a lot of experienced personnel are being displaced because they haven't kept up with new forecasting techniques, for example.
"There are two energy levels in service management: people with administrative skills, and people with an operations focus," Simmons says. "You look for a blend of both, someone that can evaluate and analyze inventory and labor, and design operating systems that fit that dealership."
Dealerships have fairly straightforward requirements for service managers and technicians, Robison says. "Dealers tell me what they are looking for, and it's almost always the same: stability; someone with the background in that particular area; make sure they don't lie, steal or cheat; and that they live close enough to the dealership to work there," Robison says.
As Simmons puts it, service managers that have come up through the ranks of the technicians are often ill equipped to deal with the financial and sales side of service management. "If that manager has come from being a technician and skipped the service driveway and working with customers, we call that a mechanic in a tie," Simmons says. "You can't have a mechanic in a tie managing the service department in this day and age."
Dealership management hasn't helped in developing service managers, because they tend to focus on front-end vehicle sales, giving short shrift to the sales aspect of the service department —even though service and parts are delivering the bulk of their profits. "Service managers aren't trained to manage inventory turns, they're trained to fix somebody's car," Simmons says.
Robison says dealers are struggling to find qualified technicians, particularly master techs trained on their particular OEM brand. Interestingly, despite the financial opportunities in retail auto dealerships, Simmons says he sees very little migration from the independent aftermarket or the large national aftermarket chains into dealerships. "We see some people come in from the tire industry occasionally, but very little entry from independent shops or mass merchandisers like Sears," he says.
Both Simmons and Robison agree that right now good technicians and service managers can have their pick of positions as dealerships look to expand their rosters. In some markets, that can mean six-figure salaries for management-level positions in the fixed-ops department as dealers continue to boost their service capabilities.
