Hireology and NADA are excited to share a joint research report, Saving the Lost Applicant: Hiring Trends to Watch.
This first-of-its-kind report analyzes hiring activity and automotive hiring trends across 4,000+ dealerships representing all major brands and markets. The scope of the research includes every open role, application submitted, candidate considered, and hire made across our network in the first half of 2019, which represents 20 percent of all dealerships across the U.S. The full report highlights the insights and opportunities we’ve uncovered.
Automotive News recently published a piece, “Hiring advice for dealers,” sharing findings from the report, as well as direct insights from Hireology Co-Founder and CEO, Adam Robinson. Read the Automotive News article here.
Through our research, we identified three key learnings on the state of retail automotive hiring:
1. Automotive hiring is getting harder for dealerships across the country. Year over year, retail automotive applicants have dropped 10 percent for all open roles. Adding to this challenge, dealerships need an average of 25 percent more applicants than they did in 2018 to find someone qualified enough to make a hire. Decreasing applicant interest matched with an increasing need for additional applicants is creating friction for dealerships of all sizes.
2. Lost Applicants should be top-of-mind for dealerships of all types, sizes and regions. By not requiring hiring managers to review all applicants for a given role, retail automotive left more than one million applicants on the table in the first half of 2019. With the battle for talent only increasing, this is a substantial loss at not only the dealership level, but across the entire industry.
3. Recruitment ad performance – and costs – vary greatly by channel. For example, career sites drive just 4 percent percent of applicant traffic, but are responsible for 30 percent of eventual hires. Just like marketing vehicle inventory, the best dealerships use multiple channels to recruit applicants for their open jobs, to drive applicants, hires, and ROI across owned, earned and paid recruitment marketing sources.
Download the full report here to explore these insights – and additional trends related to retail automotive hiring. The findings and key takeaways will help you set your dealership up for success next year and beyond by planning for the needs of your top competitive advantage: your people.
