A multi-state dealer group with 36 franchises, hiring every week at every store, and no corporate recruiting function. I built it from scratch and ran it at volume, as the group’s only recruiter.
Gurley Leep Automotive Family is a family-owned dealer group headquartered in Mishawaka, Indiana, with 36 franchises across Indiana, Michigan, Illinois and Iowa, selling and servicing brands from Honda, Toyota, Subaru, Ford, Nissan, Hyundai, Kia and Volkswagen to Cadillac, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Jaguar and Land Rover, plus collision centers and finance operations. Dealerships hire all year, across sales, service, parts, finance and the office, at every store.
I first worked with the group as an outside recruiting consultant through my own firm, DealershipRecruiting.com. The results led the group to bring me in house, first to run the Business Development Center and then to build its corporate recruiting function from scratch, as its sole recruiter, serving every store from one desk.
The build ran from January 2019 to July 2021, through the COVID shutdown of April 2020 and the recovery that followed, when the stores reopened and had to be restaffed at once.
Only the hires made through the corporate recruiting function I built and ran. Hires the stores made on their own are not counted. January 2019 to May 2021, where the records end. The gap is April 2020, the COVID shutdown.
The applicant tracking system was implemented and run as the single place every candidate lived, from job posting to start date, for 36 franchises.
Managers across the group’s locations were trained on interviewing and on moving candidates quickly, so the process held without a recruiter in every room.
The group’s Indeed campaigns were rebuilt. Indeed’s own account review, comparing October 2018 to January 2019 with the months before, recorded the change.
An 81 percent drop. Sponsored applications rose from 146 to 1,888 and sponsored clicks from 3,205 to 15,750. Apply rate rose from 4.6 percent to 11.9 percent.
About $209,000 in total recruiting advertising across 31 months, about $268 per hire, across Indeed, CareerBuilder, LinkedIn, Craigslist, Team Engine, WrenchWay and an employee referral program.
In the three-month window Indeed measured, 83 hires came through my recruiting and 8 left: 90 percent retention, against 75 percent for the company overall in the same window.
By far the largest improvement I have seen in such a short period of time.
Indeed strategic account manager, automotiveFrom the account review, January 2019A system, a process and trained hiring managers, then the person who runs it next. That is the build this project describes.
