When I talk about building our company’s culture — and I do that a lot because it’s a key area of focus for me — I often say a lot of it comes down to our hiring.
The bottom line on hiring for me is that we hire almost exclusively based on personality rather than just skill level. I believe if we hire the people with the right personalities, we can give them the skills they need to succeed here.
So many shops hire because, for example, they need a painter right now. So they find someone who knows how to paint. They don’t try to figure out what that person’s personality is like; they don’t care if that painter is a positive person or a negative person. They just need someone, right now, who knows how to paint. So they are fast to hire someone who they think must be able to do it because, after all, he’s painted at 14 different shops.
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For me, I’d wonder: If it didn’t work out for him at 14 different shops, how is it going to work out differently for him here?
Since our business is growing and we place a real emphasis on training and promoting from within, we’d rather hire entry-level people with the right personality, attitude and willingness to learn. We want those who are team-oriented, who want to be part of something bigger than themselves. Skills are on the list of things we look for, but it isn’t at the top of that list.
For one thing, lower-skilled positions tend to be easier to fill than highly-skilled positions. If we can get the right people into those positions, and train them within our company, we will always have someone ready to move up into a higher-skilled position. Our team system helps all employees recognize that the faster they can help train others and get them up-to-speed, the more money the team as a whole makes.
So we don’t hire because we need to fill a particular position with a person; we generally already have someone within the company who can step into an open position. Instead, we hire people with the right attitude and train them into whatever position best matches their strengths and interests.
That said, I won’t intentionally NOT hire someone that held a skilled position at another shop. But too often we’re all just stealing employees from our competitors. That causes a lot of resentment. If someone has heard about us and thinks, “That’s the culture I want,” that’s one thing. But I’d rather not lure employees away from other shops in place of developing our own talent.
If you want to see an example of the concept that I’m trying to implement within my business, look no further than Enterprise Rent-a-Car. Other than a few very specific roles within Enterprise (like accountants or lawyers), virtually everyone at that company started out at the bottom. I’ve personally talked to people as high up as an assistant vice president at that multi-billion company, and they all started out washing rental cars. But they were offered a path and knew that if they worked hard and hit their numbers, they would move up within the company.
That’s what I’m striving for (though we’re certainly not there 100 percent yet). Training your own and promoting within gives your employees a sense of opportunity to grow their own skills and move up into new positions. They have a career, not just a job.
It also gives me the opportunity to add new locations knowing I have people ready to move into the key positions at that new location. That, too, changes the culture within your business. I remember when I opened my second shop there was some concern and even animosity among employees about how the work would now be divvied up. Now my team knows that such growth just means more opportunity for them. They ask me when we will be adding another shop, because they want to manage it, or be the head body tech. etc.
That culture changes the game.
