Nat Richards – Techs On The Move

The benefits of international resourcing with Techs On The Move

Have you identified a shortage of skilled tradespeople in your workshop, but can’t find the right people locally to fill the void? Or perhaps you’re been scouring the labour market to try and bring your lead times down, or to grow your team?

Perhaps it’s time to consider international resourcing. It’s certainly not a cheap exercise, but as Gavin Stocks points out in the video below, it can be a great way to secure highly motivated, skilled and experienced tradespeople that bring the value of their training in from day 1.

Want to know more? Keen to chat about how Techs On The Move might be able to help your business? Please feel free to contact Gavin on [email protected] or 0437041154.

What inspires you in automotive?

Most people get into the automotive industry because of an underlying passion in cars (or trucks). It doesn’t matter if you’re a technician, a workshop controller, a service advisor or a service manager – the journey of your career so far probably started because you thought these machines were awesome and working with them every day made some sort of sense.

At some point though it’s easy to lose sight of this passion, as your love of the thing that once made you tick is harder to be inspired by when you’re under pressure to meet deadlines, hit targets, and pay your own bills. People get bogged down and disillusioned, and nothing good comes of that. You can’t flourish into an automotive professional whilst you’re stuck in a rut.

In chatting to hundreds of technicians (and their managers) every year, there are two things that the most inspired (and happiest) people in automotive have in common the most.

First up, these people have their own drive.

They have a drive perhaps to learn as much as they can, or to prove to themselves or those around them that they can achieve a goal. Perhaps they have a drive to improve their understanding of their trade, their role or the industry itself. In the best scenario, some of these people have the drive to help others do whatever it is that drives them, and that brings us to the other thing uniting some of the happiest automotive workers.

These people also often show that they are a leader.

Leadership doesn’t always mean you run your own team, that you answer to big bosses, or that you make the big bucks. Automotive leaders think, work and act in ways that show they care about what they do, and that people around them should care too. In automotive, the best leaders think about how they can improve and learn from every new challenge, rather than looking for easy fixes or a quick exit when things get tough.

If you’re wondering what your future in automotive is, or you’re digging deep when a job isn’t going well, we think it’s worth asking yourself about these things. What is driving you to do this job, and how can concentrating on this make things better? Hopefully you’ll also ask, can I show myself and others that I’m a leader?

Techs On The Move works with Australia’s most desirable automotive businesses, where managers across the country are always looking for people like this to grow their ‘A team’.

If you think you’ve got drive (and maybe some leadership) behind you and need a change, or if you’re looking for an environment where you can build on these qualities, drop us a line here: https://app-au.techsonthemove.com/job-seekers/register-with-us-candidate/

When the ‘A team’ just clicks…

When you’re an aftersales or service manager in the automotive world, or perhaps a small business owner or franchise manager in our industry, every now and again you should feel a beautiful moment where the team just ‘clicks’ and the world feels right. In this moment, the weight lifts and all the effort behind the click is smothered in a fulfilling sense of satisfaction. The work pays off and it all makes sense.

Better than awards or bonuses, that feeling may well be the highlight of your career in the automotive game. We are often drawn in by a passion for cars (or trucks) themselves, but the click soon becomes the end-game when you’re in a position of responsibility.

Every successful workshop runs on a million little things done well, and has an ‘A team’ of people making them happen every minute they’re at work (and sometimes even when they aren’t). That click moment comes when each member of the A team is working to the best of their capacity together, everyone playing their own important part in achieving a shared output, index score or profit – whatever it is that represents success in their business, and often all of these together.

This doesn’t mean that an automotive A team needs necessarily to be packed with the most highly trained, highly experienced staff imaginable – in fact, that often creates its own challenges and can make the click harder to achieve.

Every workshop with an A team we’ve ever been involved with rather is made up out of stakeholders with compatible skill sets, levels of experience and personalities. When they understand their role, and can see how everyone involved contributes to achieving shared goals together, motivation and dedication very often become more valuable than anything else. There can’t be an A team without this common ground, and there definitely can’t be the click moment we all crave.

Building that A team it is damned hard, and keeping it is even harder. Finding the right people to work together for that click moment is a real challenge, and it won’t keep happening if your team members don’t understand what they are a part of.

Techs On The Move was set up to help our clients build these A teams, and our Candidate Pool is dedicated to bringing the right people to your fingertips as you build yours. Learn more about it here – https://app-au.techsonthemove.com/our-candidate-pool/employers/

Is it worth the expense and effort of sponsoring techs?

Let’s face it – sponsoring automotive tradespeople from abroad is an expensive process that requires commitment and patience. The upfront cost is tough to swallow and looks horrible in a monthly budget, and that’s sometimes enough to dissuade managers and human resources people in the automotive industry from going ahead, even if they know that there’s insufficient resources available on the local market to get the workshop humming. The risk of sponsoring an under-qualified person also poses concerns, and the complications of the visa process can be bewildering.

International sponsorship will never be everyone’s cup of tea, but here’s a few things to consider if you’re on the fence:

If you’ve got big lead times and empty bays, you need techs. Having work booked for weeks in advance is great for business confidence, but lead times of more than a week have a proven negative impact on customer retention and satisfaction
Further to this point, if the work exists but you’ve got non-productive bays for lack of the right techs, you’re missing income straight to the bottom line. You’re already paying the rent on the space and the equipment but you’re earning none of the profit, which means you’re missing thousands of dollars per week, let-alone how this stacks up over the course of a typical 4 year visa term if you had a sponsored tech on hand
How’s the depth of experience in your workshop? Our technicians coming from overseas typically have years of experience highly relevant to different roles or manufacturers, and there’s few things we enjoy more than service managers telling us their new recruit is leading the way. Even if you’re doing a great job of attracting apprentices (which is fantastic), do you have the right people around to support them?
Love the impact quality training can make in your workshop but frustrated by the cost? What if you could hire in a manufacturer or specialist certified technician from abroad that brings all the benefit without the training expense and time away from the workshop?
Our Candidate Pool presents migration-ready tradespeople who understand exactly what they’re facing in coming to Australia. It’s not a collection of random CVs, and as registered migration agents we’ve thoroughly vetted them all to ensure they’re suitable for Australian employers. They’re motivated and enthusiastic for new challenges, and often inject a boost of positivity into our client’s workshops when they’re well supported

Keen to know more about how international resourcing of skilled tradespeople can drive your workshop and aftersales results in the right direction? By all means give Nat Richards a call on 0429468754, or drop him a line at [email protected]

Differentiating prepared and unprepared foreign candidates

If you’re advertising for technicians for an Australian automotive workshop, chances are you’ve had people from overseas apply (and probably not enough Aussies to go along with them!). If you’re lucky you might even have had some gold come in, with a technician abroad that has impressive experience or qualifications that would be perfect for your team.

If you’re patient and prepared to invest some time into finding out more, you might then get in touch with this candidate across a time zone difference and interview them for a position. However, we’re told this is where it often starts to unravel for most, as questions about the job itself (easy to answer) are soon replaced by how it’s possible for this person to start (hard to answer), and moving forward becomes a minefield.

From that point, simply hiring a migration agent may not be the solution either, as they are seldom positioned to answer the candidate’s very understandable concerns, which likely centre around healthcare, schooling, income, cost of living, relocation, accommodation and more. They might be great at filing an accurate and dependable visa application, but answering these questions isn’t in the agent’s job description any more than it’s in yours. We know that because we are migration agents, and we’ve worked in automotive!

Furthermore, even if a visa is then approved, how can you be sure your new technician (and perhaps their family) understands how to successfully establish themselves here on the other side of the world, allowing you to benefit from their best work?

That’s where Techs On The Move presents an alternative. Our clients have long understood that when we’re presenting a candidate for your consideration, that candidate has benefited from hours of specialist consultancy and personalised educative content on what they can expect in moving to Australia. Our candidates aren’t just highly skilled and professionally vetted, they’re individually preparedfor making the commitment to relocate, making the process of hiring them not only much easier, but also much more likely to succeed.

As auto-specific Registered Migration Agents, we’re also a 1-stop-shop to make it happen from initial intro to swinging spanners.

We’re also happy to apply these same preparation processes to any candidates you might unearth overseas yourself, ensuring that you’re able to get the most out of the fruits of your own advertising, staff referrals or direct enquiry. All you need to do is let us know and we’ll make that side of your business much easier.

To find out more please contact our lead candidate consultant Nat Richards on 0429468754 or at [email protected]

Do we pump the brakes on the workshop too in a slow market?

It’s no secret that there’s not a lot of fun being had in premium car showrooms right now. The momentum of the last 5 years has trailed off, seemingly overrun by our collective concern over the changing state of the housing market, apprehension before a looming federal election, and the impact of restrictive new rules around finance in automotive.

As we’ve been told recently by one DP, “it’s like someone’s turning the tap off on every revenue stream we had.”

The downturn is real for sure, and uncertainty around the future disruption of automotive sales is more uncomfortable now than ever before.

However, if we hear one thing consistently in our travels around the country visiting dealers and talking shop, it’s that most workshops are still chugging along pretty well, some really well even. In a lot of businesses, there’s still at least one revenue stream well and truly holding its own.

This shouldn’t be a surprise, not just because of the time-honoured assumption that less cars being sold means more cars being kept and serviced, but because businesses seem to be understanding more than ever before that the money is all in the back end now.

That’s right sales-orientated dealers of Australia: if you want to make money in your dealership, you better make sure that aftersales is slick and has the tools to succeed. More than any time in recent memory, aftersales is likely your main breadwinner, and that’s set to continue a while yet, maybe forever.

What this means for different businesses and groups all over Australia during the sales slump no doubt varies a lot. For some, it might mean a greater focus on recouping the time technicians take through their day-to-day processes and minimising wasted effort that doesn’t get rewarded; for others, it might mean targeted campaigns to a customer base for parts sales that drive up labour sales too, as we’ve seen from one forward-thinking Sydney based group recently.

For many though, it might mean that the impulse to clamp down on total spending in a downturn needs to be weighed differently when it comes to aftersales. If there’s work to be done and customers waiting, but not enough techs on hand to meet demand, it’ll remain an uphill battle to meet the targets every retailer needs to hit now more than ever. It’s all about balancing resources.

And it’s not just a question of more techs, but the right techs. Surveying the performance of different teams in our major cities with some helpful service managers, we’re seeing that hiring on attitude often gets the best rewards.

That doesn’t simply mean employing techs happy to be at work (which is important), but techs that are ready to work flexibly and intelligently toward the best outcomes. Brand familiarity comes with time, but techs that start on day 1 accustomed to maximising revenue and CSI scores, as well as nailing warranty procedures, are worth their weight in gold.

Here at Techs On The Move, this is exactly the sort of tradesperson we’re committed to sourcing for our subscription-based Candidate Pool. If you’d like to know more, please drop Nat Richards a line at [email protected] or 0429468754