offer within their desired salary range if they felt like it was a better cultural fit. We found that 36% of automotive job seekers would take a lower paying role within their desired salary range if it provided a good culture or working conditions. As dealers, you know better than most that first impressions matter — and when you can provide an enjoyable experience for the customer (or the candidate), you’re on your way to gaining their loyalty. Go Beyond the Script Just because you’re using an interview guide to make sure that your hiring managers gather all of the relevant information from candidates doesn’t mean that you have to go down the list robotically. Instead, you should ask questions during the natural flow of conversation so it feels less like an interrogation and more like a dialogue. The questions you have in your interview guide should vary in type. You want to find out if the candidate has the technical skills and experience necessary for the role you’re filling, especially if you’re hiring for technicians. Despite this, you also need to gauge whether the candidate has the soft skills needed to handle interactions with customers. You can do this by asking a variety of behavior-based and skill‑based questions from your interview guide during the interview. Capture Insights in Real Time Other than steering the conversation to find out more about the candidate, your only job during the interview is to document your findings to share with the hiring manager and others involved in the hiring process. If you don’t have a way to note your findings while you’re discussing with the candidate, you run the risk of forgetting information that could help you make a decision between one candidate and another. Taking notes in real time is extremely important so that you can make the best hiring decision for your dealership. Without these annotations, you can’t accurately give comprehensive feedback to other hiring managers. When it comes to evaluating candidates, the more information the better — so noting things like their attitude, their strengths, how you would rate them for the role in general and more can all help you make the final decision. POST INTERVIEW BEST PRACTICES Holding a successful interview doesn’t mean you’ve crossed the finished line just yet. Now, you need to compile your thoughts into a fair evaluation of the candidate, which can sometimes feel more daunting than the interview itself. Block Time for Hiring Administrative Tasks Daily Immediately after the interview, you should take 10-15 minutes to review your notes and clarify any ambiguities while the interview is still fresh in your mind. Realistically, your hiring managers should be able to plan this brief period of time immediately after the interview. Employees who work on your hiring team should also block time in their daily schedules to complete all of the various hiring administrative tasks assigned to them instead of trying to squeeze it in when they can. This technique ensures that these critical steps actually get completed and that the employee will have the dedicated time they need to focus. Examples of tasks hiring managers could work on include updating candidate statuses or scoring candidates based on their notes from earlier. Accurately Update Candidate Interview Status Modern hiring platforms exist to make hiring easier and faster — but only if you know how to optimize your usage. In this case, if you want truly efficient candidate tracking and organization at your dealership, it’s crucial to track your interview statuses. Interview status goes further than whether or not the candidate was hired or rejected; you can use these statuses to reflect on confirmation of interview invites, if the interview is in progress or completed, if the candidate simply didn’t show up, or even canceled. These interview statuses can come in handy when you’re reflecting on your various candidates’ interview statuses within leading recruitment platforms like Hireology to note whatever situation you please. With interview statuses, you can accurately track meaningful codes to reflect a candidate’s progress. You should also use tagging features available to make searching for candidates that much easier. Instead of scrolling through all of the candidates you have for an open role, simply type in some unique identifier that you’ve flagged the candidate with to save time and move faster. This is especially helpful when you want to reach out to previous applicants who you thought might excel in a different role or if they were simply second place in the last round of hiring. Using tagging in this way can expand the pool of qualified talent you can hire from — and can potentially speed up your process overall. Evaluate and Score Candidates Holistically When you first sit down to evaluate and score candidates, you want to compare their answers in the interview to what your ideal candidate that you envisioned earlier would say. This keeps the evaluation fair since you’re not directly comparing them to another candidate and can unbiasedly provide an interpretation of their skills, both technical and interpersonal. We suggest that you never score anyone over 80% if you’re the one conducting the initial phone screening, simply so you don’t give the hiring managers you pass them along to with any reason to have bias. You don’t want to influence them in any way, so scoring 80% or below lets them go in with their own expectations for the experience. After completing this initial evaluation, it’s time to compare candidates to one another. At this step in the decisionmaking process, it gets down to brass tacks: who has more of the skills you’re looking for in the role? If you did your due diligence when comparing the individual to the ideal candidate, you vada.com 19
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