Stop Waiting for an Empty Chair: How IdealTraits Helps Dealerships Build a Better Hiring Process
Dealerships understand the danger of waiting until the pipeline is empty to start looking for customers. They invest in marketing, track leads, measure response times, maintain follow-up processes, and continually work to keep opportunities moving. Yet when it comes to another resource critical to dealership performance, people, the approach can look very different.
Hiring often doesn't become a priority until someone leaves. A salesperson resigns, a service advisor moves on, or a technician position suddenly opens. Leadership needs someone quickly, so a manager posts a job, starts sorting through applications, schedules interviews, and tries to fill the empty chair while still handling every other responsibility on the calendar. Hiring becomes stressful, and the urgency can make it easier to compromise on the qualities the dealership was looking for in the first place
Reactive Hiring Creates Unnecessary Pressure
Most dealerships don't have a dedicated recruiting department. Hiring may fall to a general manager, sales manager, fixed operations leader, or department head whose primary responsibility is running another part of the business. When the team is fully staffed, recruiting naturally moves down the priority list.
The challenge is that turnover isn't particularly surprising, and neither is growth. Dealerships know they'll eventually need more people, even if they don't know exactly which position will open or when. Waiting until that moment to begin recruiting creates unnecessary pressure and can quickly change the question from, “Who is the right person for this role?” to, “Who can we get in this chair?”
IdealTraits CEO Kevin Mlynarek and Head of Enterprise Nolan Duda encourage dealerships to think about recruiting as an ongoing business process rather than an emergency response to a resignation. Maintaining a candidate pipeline, consistently attracting potential employees, and creating a repeatable hiring process can give dealerships more choices when a position opens and more time to make a thoughtful decision.
Treat Candidates Like Opportunities
There is another lesson dealerships already understand from customer acquisition: speed matters. A dealership would rarely consider waiting several days to respond to a customer who submitted an inquiry because that customer may already be talking to another store. Today's job candidates operate in much the same way. They can find and apply to multiple positions quickly, which means the dealership reviewing an application may be one of several employers competing for that person's attention.
That makes candidate response time an important part of the recruiting process. Technology can help dealerships acknowledge applicants quickly, organize candidates, distribute job postings, summarize resumes, and keep people moving through the hiring pipeline. IdealTraits brings those functions together within one platform, allowing managers to reduce some of the administrative work that makes recruiting difficult to manage alongside their other responsibilities.
Efficiency, however, shouldn't come at the expense of the candidate experience. Kevin and Nolan caution against automating the entire hiring process simply because the technology makes it possible. There is a meaningful difference between using automation to make human interaction happen faster and using it to eliminate human interaction altogether. Candidates still want to understand the people, culture, expectations, and opportunities behind the job description, while dealership leaders still need conversations that help them understand a candidate's goals, motivations, and potential fit.
The best use of hiring technology is therefore not to remove people from recruiting. It is to create more capacity for the human interactions that matter.
Looking Beyond the Resume
AI is changing recruiting for both sides of the hiring process. Employers can create job descriptions more quickly, summarize resumes, organize information, and automate repetitive tasks. Candidates can use many of the same technologies to build polished resumes, tailor applications to individual positions, and apply to more jobs in less time.
As resumes become easier to optimize, dealerships may need additional ways to understand the person behind the application. Personality and behavioral assessments can provide information about how someone communicates, where their strengths may lie, what support they might need, and how their natural tendencies align with a particular role.
Kevin's own automotive career demonstrates why that broader perspective can matter. With no dealership experience, he approached multiple stores looking for an opportunity and was repeatedly turned away. A fifth dealership took a different approach and gave him a personality assessment that suggested he had traits well suited to sales. They gave him an opportunity, and Kevin spent the next 15 years with that dealer group, progressing through multiple positions before ultimately becoming a general manager.
The lesson isn't that an assessment should determine who gets hired. IdealTraits specifically views assessments as another source of information that can help leaders make a more informed decision. Experience shouldn't make that decision by itself either.
Hire the Trait and Train the Skill
Dealerships have traditionally placed significant value on automotive experience, and understandably so. Someone who already understands the business may require less initial training. But experience doesn't automatically equal fit, and a candidate's lack of dealership experience doesn't automatically mean they lack the potential to succeed.
An experienced employee may arrive with habits, expectations, and processes learned somewhere else that don't align with the culture or standards of the new dealership. Someone without automotive experience may require more training initially but bring the characteristics, work ethic, communication style, or adaptability needed to become a valuable long-term employee.
Kevin describes the philosophy as “hire the trait and train the skill.” It doesn't mean experience stops mattering. Certain dealership positions naturally require specific skills, certifications, or technical knowledge. Instead, it encourages leaders to consider experience as one part of the hiring decision rather than using it as an automatic shortcut for determining who deserves an opportunity.
Taking that broader view can also expand the dealership's available talent pool. In a competitive labor market, the next great salesperson, service advisor, or future leader may not currently work in automotive at all.
Measure Hiring Like a Business Process
Once recruiting becomes an ongoing discipline, dealerships can begin measuring it like one. Leaders can look at how many people see a job posting, how many click, how many actually apply, how quickly the dealership responds, where candidates leave the process, how many show up for interviews, how much each hire costs, and how long it takes to fill a position. Retention after 90 days or a year can provide another indication of whether the hiring process is producing successful long-term outcomes.
Those measurements can reveal problems that aren't obvious when hiring is managed through disconnected emails and spreadsheets. A job posting may generate plenty of interest but very few completed applications. Candidates may apply and then disappear because follow-up takes too long. The dealership may attract applicants successfully but repeatedly lose them at the same point in the interview process.
Without a defined system, those candidates can become part of what Nolan describes as a “leaky bucket.” People simply disappear from the pipeline, sometimes without leadership having enough visibility to understand where the process broke down.
Time-to-fill can also affect dealership planning beyond the recruiting department. If leadership knows a particular position typically takes several weeks to fill and additional time to train, that information should influence expectations around productivity and forecasting. Deciding to hire someone doesn't mean the position immediately begins contributing to the business.
First Who, Then What
There is an interesting contrast in how dealerships approach customers and employees. Customer acquisition is treated as a continuous process. Dealerships invest in technology, measure performance, build pipelines, improve response times, and plan for the next opportunity before they need it. Recruiting deserves similar strategic attention.
The people working inside a dealership influence the customer experience, culture, productivity, profitability, and ultimately the organization's ability to execute almost every other strategy leadership puts in place. Kevin summarizes that philosophy simply as “first who, then what.”
Building the right team shouldn't begin when someone hands in a resignation. By developing a proactive recruiting process, responding to candidates quickly, using technology where it improves efficiency, and looking beyond the resume to understand the person behind it, dealerships can make hiring less reactive and more intentional.
As a vendor in The Shop by FordDirect, IdealTraits gives Ford Dealers and Lincoln Retailers access to an all-in-one recruiting and hiring platform designed to help dealerships build that process, maintain a stronger candidate pipeline, and make more informed hiring decisions before the next empty chair becomes an emergency.