Character Beats Experience Every Time
March 23, 2017
When it comes to finding employees, personality and character traits are more important than experience. That’s one of the most important findings from Jim Collins’s Good to Great, one of the most influential business management books ever written.
The author is a Business School professor at the University of Colorado, and he worked with a research team of 20 people, gathering every piece of data he could from the most successful companies to try to identify the similarities between them. He was looking for what makes a great company, using one of the biggest data sets ever compiled.
What the research team found was that the most successful businesses made a habit of hiring slowly and firing quickly, making sure that only great employees found a home. Successful businesses were far more comfortable being short-staffed than they were being staffed with low-performers.
What makes for a great employee for your shop? What does their work ethic look like? Their sense of being part of a team? Their desire to outperform? Always doing what’s right? If you get the right employee, they can help you deal with whatever challenges you encounter. If you get the wrong employee, they will be the challenge, eating up all of the time you could be using to manage your shop for the benefit of yourself, your employees, and your customers.
This leads to another challenge: if you’re only willing to hire great employees, how do you find them, and how do you attract them to your shop? With the shortage of technicians the industry is facing, it’s not going to be easy to attract the best employees. In fact, your job solicitations will need to sell your shop.
Describe the type of work environment employees can expect when they come to work at your shop. Tell them about the perks – and tell them what they can expect from their fellow technicians. High-performers want to be surrounded with high-performers. The same goes for integrity, customer-focus and truly caring about their fellow co-workers. If you can create that environment, advertise that environment, and demonstrate that environment, you’ll attract the right kind of people to your shop. It may not happen immediately, but it will happen.
Are you looking to attract great employees to your shop? Let Repair Shop Websites help you recruit employees directly through your website! Call us at 855.219.7506 or email Team_RSW@repairshopwebsdites.com to learn more!
