Panel: Attracting, keeping the new talent shops need

By John Yoswick

Andy Challenger has a front-row seat in terms of knowing what workers are looking for from their employer right now. That’s because Challenger, who spoke at the “MSO Symposium” in Las Vegas in November, operates a Chicago-based firm that companies hire when laying off employees to help those workers find new jobs.

Challenger said the ranking of employees’ priorities shifts. This past fall, for example, his company’s survey found that flexibility remains the top priority, but that “empathetic leadership” has risen to the No. 2 spot, higher than in the past.

“That wasn’t even on the list when we started taking this survey two years ago,” Challenger said. “But this is something that employers are hearing from workers constantly, that they want to feel listened to, they want to feel like people, and they want to feel cared about.”

Discussion about “wage inflation” — and actual increases in the cost of living — has helped bump “higher wage” up from sixth on the list to the No. 3 spot. And “upward career trajectory” remained the fourth highest priority.

“Employees today are saying they really want a path forward in the organization,” Challenger said. “Employers that are able to provide that are going to be rewarded in this strong labor market.” 

Attracting and developing new talent was also a discussion during a panel discussion at the Collision Industry Conference (CIC) held in Las Vegas during SEMA week. New Mexico shop owner Jim Guthrie, said his five-shop company uses a “recruitment card” as part of its effort to attract new employees. Guthrie said all his employees have the cards, which include a QR code that can be scanned to link to the company’s “career page” where someone can fill out and submit an application.

Guthrie said collision repair businesses can develop an internal promotion to encourage employees to hand out the card to potential hires. If a referred potential employee gets hired and stays for six months, the employee who handed out that card may get $500, for example, “and if they stay another six months, they get another $500,” Guthrie said. “Whatever the promotion is that you want to come up with within your own shop. The recruitment card has been a neat little tool for us.”

Guthrie said his company tries to have six to 12 entry-level employees participating in a program that  uses a basic curriculum outlined by I-CAR that starts with the simple environmental and safety training, “and then goes through bumper tools, door panels and bumper repair.” Students learn a skill, then can use it in the shop.

“It takes somebody off the street, teaches them the basics, the theory, and then they go put it into practice,” he said.

Once a student in the program can demonstrate the skill, and has the tools to perform it, they are “signed off for that particular function, whether it’s drilling spot welds or whatever.” Within two or three years, he said, students are “advanced to a point where they’re basically a B-tech. It’s a way they can earn while they learn.”

If a student can be paired with a single mentor, that can help, Guthrie said, and “you’ll break a lot fewer parts that way.” But students can be overseen by a variety of people in the shop while in training. 

“Some of them even work with other entry-level techs,” Guthrie said. “If someone has been there a year or two, and you’re only teaching bumpers, that’s all he has to help someone learn is a bumper. There’s no reason to use an A-tech to teach a guy to take a bumper off.”

Dara Goroff of I-CAR said the “Entry-Level Technician Learning and Development Guide” was created after talking to the industry about what would help someone entering the trade “feel immediately of value in your shop.” It focuses on five core skills: assembly, disassembly, small dent repair, plastic repair and prep for refinishing. Goroff said it is the start of a broader I-CAR initiative to provide a solution for those looking to attract, mentor, train, and retain technicians, and will include both mentorship and apprenticeship guides that take into account how younger potential technicians want to learn.

“A lot of the folks who thrive in collision repair really are not book learners,” Goroff said. “They’re not video learners. They want to do, as well as either read or watch something, before they’ve learned it. The mentorship and apprenticeship guides will truly help somebody learn something and put hands to wrench, put hands to metal, and actually do something. Which builds the skill of the learner, builds their confidence in what they’re doing, and makes them feel a sense of pride, which goes directly to a shop’s ability to retain that individual in the career, or a school’s ability to ensure that once a student shows up in a shop, their transition from learning to working is much, much smoother.”

“Her program is awesome,” Guthrie said. “It will teach you a very simple theoretical skill, and then you can go right into the shop and become productive.”

Another panelist, Brandon Eckenrode of the Collision Repair Education Foundation (CREF), said the value of quickly giving entry-level works a set of skills they can put to use in a shop is something that needs to be communicated to collision repair training programs in schools. Collision repairers, he said, need to get more involved with schools to talk to instructors and students so they know “what skillsets they’re looking for as an employer that will make [students] more productive as an entry-level employee, as opposed to the detrain and retrain that we’ve heard many people have to do because of whatever education they might be getting inside their school.”

While schools are often required as part of accreditation to provide students with at least an introduction to a wide variety of skills, Eckenrode said, they also need to understand “when you come in on Day One to work in my company, here are the things that we would love for you to be able to do, as opposed to that mile-wide inch-deep learning philosophy.” 

“We also hear time and time again that [shops] need to go talk with the administration, the deans, the principals, so that they know there’s this industry out there that’s waiting for their students [and] there’s great earning potential there,” Eckenrode said.

CREF represented the industry at the American School Counselor Conference this past summer, he said, and counselors told him, “We get it. We need to embrace technical education more.” So CREF is working to create resources those counselors can use “when they’re talking with a student, so they can showcase this as a viable option for them, and what the different opportunities are.”  •

John Yoswick, a freelance writer based in Portland, Ore., who has been writing about the automotive industry since 1988, is also the editor of the weekly CRASH Network bulletin (www.CrashNetwork.com). He can be contacted by email at john@CrashNetwork.com.