A good manager and personnel for a dealership detail department is the single most difficult aspect for a dealership.

It’s 7:30 on a Friday morning. Danny, your detail shop manager, pokes his head into your office and asks for a few minutes of your time. Your thought is he wants to talk about a raise or a problem he is having.

Instead, Danny floors you with the news you didn’t want to hear. He’s leaving. He has accepted a job with another dealership.

You shake hands and watch five years of experience and know-how walk out your door. More than that, you say goodbye to that special type of employee, a technical person who is also a people person — someone who is comfortable dealing with employees, the used-car manager and salesmen, as well as customers.

Replacing Danny will be no easy task, because your detail shop has no management level employees suited for the position, and good managers are impossible to find. They almost have to be developed.

Possible replacements are the detailers who helped fill in whenever Danny took time off. The problem is, most have no experience in management, and they are much happier toiling away in the detail bays, where their contribution is probably the greatest anyway.

Then there is Danielle, the ambitious, sharp young lady you hired last year who wants to break into the automotive service business and has indicated a desire to manage. She’s a self-starter, taking management training classes at the community college at night, but needs more experience. You could also try to find a seasoned manager from another shop. In either case, you’re betting your operation on an unknown factor and facing the possibility of alienating your existing detailers.

What to do? Turn to the professionals. That is, engaging experts who can provide help, giving you advice on how to organize and hire managers and staff for your detail department.

Hire Skills: Not Experience

While every detail hire is significant, none has greater impact than hiring a manager. Many dealers make the wrong decision. You’re not alone. Dealers all over the country face the same problem for one very good reason. They do not know what kind of manager is necessary to properly operate a detail department.

All hiring is a skill. And hiring for a detail department is even more complex than most hires. Developing the skills needed to operate a dealership detail department requires knowledge. Odds are, as a dealer or general manager, you never hired a detail shop manager.

Plus, you’ve probably never taken the time to consider what you need in a manager, nor have you asked for expert advice. Is it any wonder then you have the wrong people in charge, or that your department does not run properly?

If you want things to improve, you’ve got to figure out what kind of management is needed and whom to hire.

First you have to do one of two things:

1. Hire a manager, and give them the same status as you give a service manager or body shop manager.

2. Put your service manager or fixed ops manager in charge of the detail department, but make sure they know how and what to manage. Most have no idea.

Many dealers simply make the best detailer the manager, assuming if they have detail skills they have management skills. Wrong!

They don’t, and that is why dealers have problems in their department.

You need a manager who can hire, train and motivate people — one who can establish performance standards for detail personnel and a manager who understands production-to-labor ratios, profit and loss and inventory control.

In most cases, detailers — no matter how good they are at detailing — don’t understand these things. And, in most cases, a service manager doesn’t either. You have to insure they are trained in detail shop management and that they even care.

While technical skills might be significant, most skills can be learned. On the other hand, top quality candidates must possess vital personal qualities such as honesty, integrity and a work ethic, which cannot be taught.

Once you have a manager in place, then focus on staff. When you interview a candidate, the job is to gauge the candidate’s true character and if they will be a stable employee, not a warm body that says, “Sure, I know how to detail.”

For example, to get good candidates you must establish a specific hiring process; not just put an ad in the paper for detailers.  

Unfortunately, experienced detailers, and I use that term cautiously, are a type. They are usually transient workers with an unstable work history. Often having many jobs in one year’s time. Many have social problems, etc. And, if they are as good as they say, they would be working instead of looking for a job.

A help wanted advertisement we’ve used to find top candidates is as follows:

AUTO SERVICE TRAINEES – Acme Auto Group has immediate openings for a new service department in the dealership. NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY, will train. Candidate must have a high school diploma, valid driver’s license, clean driving record. Only career-oriented people need apply. Drug testing required. Bring resume and apply to: (Name of a person in the dealership).

This type of advertisement eliminates the majority of bad apples because they cannot meet the requirements. When they come in to drop off the resume and fill out an application, the person receiving them can review their appearance, grooming, etc., and note that on the application. This is another way of screening candidates: how they look when applying.

Then you go through the review and evaluation of the resumes and applications and pick only those candidates that show stability and career orientation to interview.

The 5 B’s of Hiring Detail Management & Staff

Be Prepared: Turnover is a fact of life in the detail industry, but if you hire properly you can reduce this. Always be prepared. They say the best time to look for a doctor is when you don’t need one.

Wait until you are sick and you are stuck with whoever is available. Protect yourself, and have a plan in place to replace a manager and staff as needed.

Be Professional: Use the best, most current tools available to find the best candidates. Don’t hesitate to get professional help. It is available.

Be Thorough: Check references and spend sufficient time getting to know potential candidates. Set up a probationary period for new hires, and spend adequate time evaluating their performance.

Be Aware: Know the detail shop. Be familiar with the culture in the detail department. Learn how all the personalities in the department interact and what detail employees expect out of a manager. Who spends this much time evaluating the detail shop in your dealership? Anyone? No one at all?

Be Patient: Never rush into hiring or hire out of desperation. Something almost always done in dealerships. Hiring always should be the product of careful, well-thought-out steps.

If you’re not satisfied with a manager or new employee, keep looking. The rule of thumb is to hire like you were betting the future of your dealership, because in many ways, you are.

Matching Personality to Position

Every dealership or business for that matter has an associate who might best be called the “odd man out.” This is the employee whose personality doesn’t quite mesh with the others, the employee with whom others find difficult to approach or communicate.

While the odd man out may be productive, for obvious reasons, you probably don’t want them as your detail manager or working in your detail department.

Every detail department has its own character. Dealers must take into account their own detail department’s particular culture when hiring. You should determine if the new person will fit in. Previous success is a guarantee.

A person can be good in one area and horrible in another. Every detail department and dealership is different. This is why it is imperative for a dealer who cares to be in touch with their detail department. You need to know how the people interact. Be concerned about how well employees will mix with a new manager.

Take the candidate out to lunch with some existing department employees. You can later quiz them on their impression of the prospect and how they felt about how the person will fit into their department.

Never forget, the detail shop manager is the main motivator. This is the person that your detail team is built around and the person who determines how efficiently the employees work together. Make a bad decision, and you could end up hiring a whole new group of employees to replace the team that walked out because they couldn’t stand the new manager you hired.

Along with matching a personality with the shop, hire locally, because department managers are unique in that they form close ties with retail clients. Your next manager might already be familiar with potential employees and customers in the area.

Always check references properly. References are useful, but can pose their own problems, especially if you aren’t personally familiar with the reference. References can be misleading, gloss over a candidate’s performance, unfairly criticize a candidate or give widely conflicting evaluations.

For these reasons, you need to look for trends. For example, if four people have the same comment, it’s probably true. If you’re given two conflicting views, give more weight to the one more similar to the opinion you’ve formed. There’s truth in numbers.

Another thing to consider when weighing references: be sure to do sufficient interviewing and investigating of your own to form an opinion of a candidate. If references carry the majority of the weight of your decision, then you need to do some more work of your own.

Predicting Performance

Considering the importance of making a good detail department hire, and the costs of a poor one, you’d think someone would have developed some useful processes to accurately evaluate a job candidate’s skills and predict performance.

Consulting firms have spent years creating and improving a variety of tests and surveys that help business owners evaluate job candidates and accurately predict their success in the work environments.

In general, automotive service management happens to be one of these environments.

A process called benchmarking is used to help companies systematically evaluate job candidates. Benchmarking measures character traits using the job candidate’s responses to surveys. For example, one survey used allows employers to check the integrity of a candidate by measuring the discrepancy in survey answers supplied by prospective employees.

It is given before an interview to provide as much information as possible about the prospective candidate before you actually submit them to the interview process.

Benchmarking is also used to prepare proficiency reports on a candidate’s job skills for specific positions, such as a manager or customer service representative. The report measures a candidate’s level of expertise in areas such as verbal skills, verbal reasoning, numeric skills and energy level.

Scales are used, ranging from a low of 1 to a high of 10, indicating weaknesses and strengths which provide in-depth analysis of the significant of each score.

Time is on Your Side

Going back to the problem outlined at the beginning of the article, who is the correct hire for your detail department? If you haven’t already guessed it, a right answer isn’t possible at this point.

Hiring is a multi-step process, and the dealer hasn’t worked through all of these steps. And, while the dealers problem may seem urgent, sufficient time actually is available for a thorough hiring process.

If you find yourself unexpectedly having to replace a detail department manager or staff member, the fact is, you don’t have to make an immediate hire. You temporarily have to make sure the most important managerial duties or functions are attended to.

You can put in place the same system you used whenever someone was on vacation. For example, delegate to others.

If you have never delegated duties before, now is the perfect time to do so. Since you need to continually evaluate your detail employees’ capabilities anyway, consider making the best of the situation by handing over tasks to talented employees with time to perform them. See how they respond.

Regardless of how you handle the immediate crisis, don’t fall into the trap of hiring out of need or desperation. If you hire the first detail manager or person available there’s a good chance you will need to rehire for that position again.

Give the hiring process the attention it needs. Use the available resources. Get help from a professional. Use personality testing and surveys. Call community colleges and ask for prospective candidates.

Remember, too, the hiring process doesn’t end simply because a position has been filled. You still have to evaluate a new hire’s performance during a trial period. This is anywhere from 90 days to 6 months. Think of this trial period as the final hiring step,  the last hurdle your candidate must leap.

This period also might be the ideal opportunity to give a talented and interested tech like Danille her shot at managing. Try gradually turning over the managerial duties to her. If she works out, you’ve got your new manager. If she isn’t ready, continue looking for other candidates while she contributes where she can.

Too Much Work

Sound like a lot of work? It is. While the detail department has never been given this kind of attention, would it not be better to invest time, effort and save yourself problems in the future? Just keep in mind that hiring wisely pays off in the end. Ultimately, you new hire is the product of a process. Knowing that, would you want your process to be short, cheap and based mostly on luck?

Or would you prefer a more deliberate, thoughtful and comprehensive path geared logically towards success? The choice is yours. The detail department of most dealerships deserves your time, attention and considerations if it is going to improve. The longer you ignore it or let your general manager ignore it and treat it and the employees as such, you will continue to have problems.

If I can help, please contact me at 1-800-284-0123, ext. 4 or email buda@detailplus.com.