8 Women’s Perspective: Encouraging Talent You’ve probably noticed it’s harder to find qualified people to hire lately. The Macrotrends website says the U.S. population in 2022 is slightly less than 385 million people. The 2020 census found that more than 55 million people (about 14%) had retired. The labor force participation rate was 62.2% in April 2022, and the unemployment rate was 3.6%. There were already job shortages before the pandemic, but the pandemic worsened it. However, even though many people chose to retire during the pandemic, about 1.5 million came back into the workforce later. Any sentence with the word “millions” sounds like shortages should not be a problem, but everything is relative. March 29, 2022, Jeff Cox at CNBC reported five million more jobs open than workers to fill them. That is, employers with 18 jobs have to compete for 10 people. Employers can no longer afford to hire only men when they need to fill jobs. The U.S. is approximately half male and half female, but there are slightly more women than men. To take the statistic above and recast it slightly, suppose you have 18 jobs and 10 job candidates, but five are women. If you default to hiring a man, those five men will compete for 18 jobs, and it’s no wonder you can’t find enough people to hire. Hiring women starts with recruiting them. That can be challenging because many women don’t consider working at a dealership, and the turnover rate (according to CDK research) is 88%. But women make or influence the decision to buy a vehicle most of the time. Many people in the industry think women are more likely to buy vehicles from other women, so companies that ignore women are losing out on a great sales opportunity. Bottom line: women dealer employees can lead to more sales. Many companies in the auto industry have gotten the message. At CNCDA, 75% of our staff are women. Additionally, our Board of Directors includes the incredible talents of Hilary Haron (Haron Jaguar Land Rover Volvo), Cheryl Bedford (Sunset Auto Center), and Anne Boland (Bob Smith BMW). And our NextGen group is spearheaded by Hilary Haron and Ellena Sweet (Fresno Acura). We appreciate the perspective, leadership and value they bring to our organization. General Motors’ board is one of the most gender-diverse boards in the country. The CEO is Mary Barra, and 58% of the board members are women. Most of the committee chairs are women, too. Other industry CEOs include: • Liza Borches (Carter Myers Automotive) • Mary Buchzeiger (Lucerne International) • Flavia De Veny (Camaco-Amvian) • Corina Diehl (Diehl Automotive Group) • Aicha Evans (Zoox) • Gail Faulkner (Faulkner Auto Group) • Julia Fream (Original Equipment Suppliers Association) • Linda Hasenfranz (Linamar Corp.) • Jennifer Johnson (Kendrick Plastics) • Abigail Kampmann (Principle Auto) By CNCDA Staff
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy ODQxMjUw