Dealer groups need to stop recruitment costs coming off the bottom line at a local level if they are to improve overall staff quality, says Jobco-op Automotive.

The company says that this practice is quite widespread but leads to recruitment costs being carried out “on the cheap” or, at the other extreme, in an almost completely uncontrolled manner.

Sales director Derek Webb said: “When a dealer manager at a local level knows that their recruitment costs will be deducted from their profits, they frequently immediately start to look at ways to minimise the cost rather than to find the best candidate.

“Often this means that they will look favourably on a friend-of-a-friend recommendation, recruiting a sales person from a dealership nearby even though they are simply not suitable for the job.

“Even worse perhaps, it sometimes means that recruitment costs are allowed to spiral out of control without any measures being in place to ensure that the quality of candidates is suitable.

“This is one of the most common problems we see in dealership recruitment. It means that the whole approach to the recruitment exercise is wrong.”

Webb believes the solution is add recruitment costs into the annual budget for each dealership at a local level.

He said: “This is simple good practice and means that the cost of recruitment is not treated as a threat to profitability. It provides the opportunity for good recruitment practices to take hold.”