NADA Show 2023 — the biggest automotive retail show of the year — is complete and we couldn’t be more thrilled to have connected with so many of you in Dallas this year. Read on if you missed us or you’d like a recap of everything we highlighted at our booth.
Throughout the hundreds of conversations we had at our booth, the Q&A portion of CEO Adam Robinson’s presentation on Gen Z hiring, as well as our Friday night happy hour, we noticed three key recruiting and hiring themes emerge that Hireology is uniquely equipped to address:
The technician shortage continues
Experts predict that the automotive industry will be short nearly 650,000 technicians by 2024. This is largely due to a shift in workers’ demands for higher pay, better working conditions, and career advancement. Additionally, Baby Boomers are retiring from this trade at a rate much higher than younger generations are entering it. This shortage is much worse in retail automotive than in any other transportation field and is something that experts have been warning about for years — well before the pandemic.
This is impacting almost everyone we spoke with during the show. Without technicians you miss out on fixed ops revenue that is critical to your bottom line as we continue to navigate a new car shortage. In fact, for every day a technician role goes unfilled you could be losing up to $1,200. Yet in a recent survey of dealerships we found that most dealerships still aren’t offering benefits like scheduling flexibility and career growth options. By defining these perks and putting your employer brand front and center, you can get ahead and capture your share of the technician talent pool.
How Hireology is equipped to help
Hireology offers everything you need to build an employment brand that resonates with today’s technician talent. With built-in job templates and career site builder, you can easily market your jobs as well as your dealership as a great place to work. You can also connect with a wider range of talent through automated job board integrations, text-to-apply functionality, and employee referral programs.
Time = money
Many of the dealerships we spoke with said they struggle to move fast in their hiring process, leading to lost candidates and roles going unfilled much longer than anticipated. And this ultimately leads to an impact on the dealership’s bottom line. On top of this, the time your HR and hiring teams spend completing lengthy manual processes is time they could be connecting with more talent.
According to our survey mentioned above, 93% of dealerships have been ghosted by a candidate in the past year. And we know based on our 2022 applicant research that most job seekers who have admitted to ghosting say they did so because the hiring process was unorganized and took too long to get through.
How Hireology is equipped to help
Hireology includes a range of in-app automation tools, including automated pre-screen surveys and interview scheduling that help you keep your process moving fast. You can also text and email candidates directly from the platform, making it easier to quickly respond to great talent and keep them engaged.
Additionally, Hireology’s breadth of integration partners makes hiring and managing talent a significantly faster process. We integrate with everything from CDK and Dealertrack DMS to Caliper pre-employment assessments and a range of onboarding and payroll providers. Ultimately our dozens of integrations eliminates the tedious process of jumping from system to system to complete these steps.
Hiring the right person matters
Many of the dealerships we spoke with at NADA were looking for ways to hire more quality talent. While applicant volume matters, driving fewer but more quality candidates ultimately leads to better business outcomes. Better quality candidates means that dealers can get more productive employees in-seat who serve in less of an order-taking capability and instead provide true value that can’t be replaced by technology. This ultimately improves customer service, drives sales, and decreases costly turnover.
Where do quality candidates come from? According to our recent study of dealerships, employee referral programs are by far the most effective channel for driving quality hires, followed by career sites.
How Hireology is equipped to help
Hireology’s built-in employee referral program management tool, Hireology Referrals gives you everything you need to run an effective referral program that drives real results. You can send internal campaigns to drive referrals, make it easy for employees to submit referrals, keep track of payout amounts, and much more. Hireology also includes in-app applicant screeners that weed out poor fit applicants as well as integrations with a range of candidate verification platforms, allowing you to focus on the best candidates and weed out the rest.
And that’s a wrap on NADA 2023! If you haven’t yet seen Hireology in action, check out our product tours to take a look at how our tool works on your own time. If you’d like more of a personalized walkthrough of the platform, we’d love to chat. Schedule a free demo today.
