A retailer confronts a new hiring reality

When it was time for the furloughed employees of Fred Beans Automotive Group to return after the industry's COVID- 19 shutdown last year, Beth Beans Gilbert was dismayed to learn that many of them didn't want to.

"Some of them wanted to change their job, or they wanted to work from home, or they just wanted to go into a different line of work," said Gilbert, vice president of the family business.

"We lost some people — and we were already needing more people on top of that," said Gilbert, who is responsible for company recruitment. "We're having some success finding them lately, but this is just a challenging time to be hiring anybody in auto retailing."

Most of the U.S. retail industry agrees with her. The Cox Automotive 2021 Dealership Staffing Study published this summer reported that 72 percent of franchised dealers surveyed said finding and hiring the right employees is currently a challenge.

The problems for retailers are almost too multilayered and entangled to explain.

There is COVID-19 and its delta variant, and millions of Americans who refuse to get a vaccination, and then the lingering fear of being in a workplace and interacting with the public.

Schools and day care centers have been disrupted. And there were months of extra federal unemployment benefits, officially ended last month, that enabled workers to stay home.

Gilbert is confident that all of that will fade away in time. But there's something bigger going on, she points out: The job pitch is getting harder.

"We've always relied on our local technical schools to create a supply of qualified people for us to recruit from," she told Automotive News. "But lately, I've noticed that enrollment is really light. The collision programs just don't have many students enrolled anymore.

"And that's scaring me. Young people don't want to go into this field like they used to."

The labor shortage has been festering for years. And to some extent, it was masked by the phenomenon of the pandemic. But now that the industry is gunning its engines to roar back to life, the long-standing reality feels more acute to auto retailers.

The Beans organization employs 1,700 people in 20 dealerships, in a separate parts wholesaling business, at six collision centers and at an express service business. It has a staff of three full-time job recruiters who are trying to fill 135 open spots. Among them: salespeople, a payroll manager and truck drivers to move parts from Beans' Philadelphia-area base to wholesale customers from New York to Virginia.

The newest monkey wrench in retailer hiring is competition. Fast-growing Amazon is also out in the market hiring truck drivers as quickly as it can find them, and Amazon tends to pay a notch higher than auto retailers do, Gilbert acknowledged.

Beans also is encountering competition for drivers in its market because the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority is also looking for drivers right now. And the transit authority, in turn, faces hiring competition from driver-dependent organizations such as Uber, Lyft and Amazon.

Beans is trying new ideas to get around the tight market. To counter the attitude among young people that they don't want to work for commission, Beans now offers sales hires a guaranteed salary of $50,000 for one year. The hires can switch to commission compensation anytime they want, but it's up to them.

Gilbert also is shifting some of Beans' marketing dollars away from advertising vehicles and services to instead focus on advertising the group as a good place to work — a family-owned company where benefits are good and there are long-term career paths available.

"We're not just advertising job openings," she said. "We're promoting our company."

One thing the group is not doing is lowering its hiring standards.

Beans insists on a careful screening process for candidates, including background checks and drug screening. Gilbert admits that sets a high bar to clear when job candidates are in short supply. Some of her managers have suggested that they could fill positions faster if the screening wasn't so tough.

"But I'm not giving in on that one," she said. "We still need to end up with a quality work force."