It’s no secret that hiring is one of the biggest challenges for any small business owner. Take that challenge and add to it the shortage of a particular skillset available in the workforce, like the shortage of techs we have in the auto repair industry, and the problem feels more like a disaster.
This means if you want to have a chance at hiring good techs, you have to find any way possible to get a leg up on your competition.
At Shop Marketing Pros, we’ve talked a lot about strategies for hiring, and we’ve definitely touched on career pages, but this article is going to be a deep-dive where we focus specifically on the careers page of your website and what it needs to include if you want to make a huge impact on the people viewing it.
I’m going to use our own careers page as an example throughout this article. I didn’t write this article based on the layout of our careers page but rather our careers page is based on what we know works. You see, we eat our own dog food here at SMP. The stuff we do for our clients, we do for ourselves. Go ahead and pull up our careers page and look back at it when you want to see examples of what I’m talking about.
First, This Isn’t Going To Be Easy
I need to start by letting you know that the process you’re going to have to go through to get this right isn’t going to be easy. It’s not necessarily hard but it’s going to take some time. This isn’t a five-minute process. This isn’t something to delegate to just anyone. You should get together a group of people from various positions in your company and have a brainstorming session.
My point in this is to say you need to commit up-front to spend the time to get this right. Don’t rush the process. Do it right, do it once.
Another word of advice – we’re going to be talking about showcasing a lot of things that you may not currently be doing in your shop. We want to paint a picture for a potential applicant that the grass is greener at your shop. No matter how much you may be tempted to do it, if the grass isn’t actually greener at your shop, don’t try to paint the picture that it is. Instead, go water the grass.
The best technicians want to – and deserve to – work at the best shops. Make your shop the shop they deserve to work at. If you don’t think that’s worth doing, stop reading this article now. It will be a complete waste of your time.
Laying The Foundation
When you meet with your team, here are some of the things you’re going to talk about.
What Do You Like About Working Here?
The answers will often surprise you. You think you know why people choose to work at your shop, but have you asked them? Sometimes there are benefits to working for you that you don’t even know about. Chances are, those things matter to other people as well.Â
I’m speaking hypothetically here. You know your team loves that you’re not open on the weekends and you know they love the air-conditioned shop, but has it ever occurred to you that they look at you as a mentor and know that being in alignment with a person like you makes them better? That’s a true benefit to working at your shop.
Are Your Core Values What They Should Be?
You need to examine your core values as a team and determine if they draw in the type of team member that you want in your business.
We run on EOS at Shop Marketing Pros. This means we examine our core values at least once per year to make sure they encapsulate who we are at our core and who we want to be. We use our core values for hiring, firing, taking on new clients, and making big decisions.
If you don’t have a defined set of core values, you’ll want to do that now. Here is a video to get you started.
What Team Building Events Have We Done That Are Your Favorite?
A great shop is about more than just fixing cars. They know thath to truly build a team they have to get outside of the walls of the shop together.
Some of the things our client shops have done with their teams include off-roading, offshore fishing trips, paintball, racing, going to industry events like VISION, AAPEX and SEMA, and much more.
Our team at SMP does an annual beach trip. We’ve done laser tag, go-kart racing with some clients, and we serve monthly with an organization that provides food to low-income senior citizens.
Gathering the Assets
In most cases, you are going to have your website provider build the page for you. I know some of you manage your own website, but that’s not the norm. Either way it goes, it’s going to make the process go much smoother if you get this information together ahead of time.
Here are the things you’re going to need.
- A message from the owner
- A list of benefits of working at your company.
- Pictures of your shop, your team, and of fun events both at and away from work.
- Testimonials from current team members
- Your core values written out
- The questions you want to ask on a minimalist job application
- Available positions.
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Your Auto Repair Shop Marketing Strategies Are Better Together
This message can be as simple as a short paragraph welcoming the applicant to the page and explaining what they’ll find below. It can also be as complex (or simple – depending on how you look at it) as a video welcome message.
I personally prefer the video as it gives the applicant an opportunity to get to know the owner of the shop a little.
List of Benefits
- Weekends off
- 4-day workweeks
- Tool allowance
- Air-conditioned shops
- State-of-the-art equipment
- Busy shops (we never run out of work)
- The shop buys lunch on Fridays
- The shop closes and the whole team goes to a certain training event
The list can go on and on.
Pictures of Your Shop, Team, and Events
Your careers page is not the place for stock photography. No page is, but I digress. Especially do not use them here. You want pictures of your real team with real smiles on their faces doing real activities that you do in real life – both at and away from the shop.
You should have pictures of the shop that show the cleanliness and the modern equipment you have.
What’s interesting is that most of the images you use here are the same types of images you should be using on your social media channels to attract new clients.
Cell phone pictures are fine, but don’t be afraid to invest some money in great photography.
Testimonials From Current Team Members
Nothing speaks to a candidate like what your current team members are saying about you. If you run a great shop, your current team will be happy to provide testimonials. The discussion will have already been opened in the meeting where you asked your team why they like working at your shop.
Get 3-5 testimonials and have them rotate on the page. It gives the page some movement, so in addition to the value of the testimonials themselves, it brings some nice aesthetics into the picture.
Your Core Values Written Out
Your core values deserve a prominent position in your waiting area, your production area, and in multiple places on your website.
Because of this, hire a graphic designer to create a visual representation of your core values. In our case, it’s a simple icon for each core value.
Side note: Every person in your organization needs to take these core values seriously. They’re not just there for decoration. Your entire team should be able to recite your core values and tell you the gist of what each of them means at any time.
The Questions For a Minimalist Job Application
The keyword here is minimalist. Don’t make someone work so hard to get into your job candidate pipeline. You need to ask a minimal number of questions that will let you determine if you should consider this applicant. You can always collect more information later.
I’d also recommend not requiring a resume. The best techs I’ve ever met could diagnose the most difficult driveability problems but wouldn’t have a clue how to put together a decent resume.
In our case, we’re a team of marketers. If you don’t have a resume, we’re not interested. But it’s very different when hiring techs.
Available Positions
Go ahead and have the available positions ready to post to the page. I know some of your website companies, and believe me, once they start working on the page, you want them to have everything they need. If they have to stop to wait on something it may take weeks before they get back to it. #NotShopMarketingPros
Your Careers Page Needs To Look Great
I just gave you a list of A LOT of information to include on your careers page. If not done right it will come out looking like a huge blob of text. This will overwhelm the applicant and probably scare them off.
Go look at our careers page again. You’ll see that it’s broken up into well-defined sections. In addition, images and icons are used to keep the text from running together.
Your website provider should be able to do this for you. Make sure you explain to them what you’re looking for. Send them this article to read if you need to.
In the case that you manage your own website, hire the same graphic designer you hired to make your core values look great and get them to mock up this page for you. It’s an investment in the future of your company.
Make Your Application Available Even When You’re Not Hiring
One of the biggest mistakes shop owners make is to only collect applications when they are hiring.
You should always be courting prospective team members. If you have a great potential candidate apply, take them to lunch and invite them to tour your shop. Get to know them and have them on speed-dial for when the time comes that you need them.
What's Next?
Now that you have your careers page you need to drive traffic to it.
Make sure you have installed the Meta (Facebook) Pixel to the page so you can run ads to the people who have visited the page. These ads serve as a gentle reminder to apply and they can possibly hit that perfect tech who was looking, but not ready, at the exact time they need a prompt.
Here are a couple of additional resources we think you’ll find useful.