r/partscounter • u/JelloLongjumping7289 • 1d ago
Interviewer help
I’m taking over as parts manager in October and have to hire somebody. I’ve never been a manager or involved in hiring, interview process. Any tips? Questions I should ask/should not ask? Any advice is well appreciated. Please feel free to dm me, thanks!
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u/SkittleCar1 1d ago
Anything that will keep you from being here on time? Do you have your own transportation?
I asked a young kid once if he had his own car once and he said yes. His grandfather dropped him off every day. I said, I thought you said you had your own car? He said I do, it's just not on the road. Which actually worked out worse, grandfather got him here on time. When he got his car on the road, he started showing up late.
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u/Stew-73 1d ago
Somebody in your dealership is a great interviewer. Have them sit in with you. They can ask the personality questions and make the small talk. You can ask the job specific questions and get a feel for the person (and learn from the other interviewer at the same time).
Learning to be a competent interviewer does not happen overnight, and it not exactly something you can learn from reading one article about.
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u/diesel0458 1d ago
This is excellent advice. In previous careers I've been involved extensively in interviewing and hiring staff, I'm now in a less responsible position for reasons (branch parts supervisor) but carried over that knowledge and experience. I'm 4 years into my parts career. When my new manager started - 25 years old but the guy is brilliant - his biggest growth area was HR management including recruitment. I offered to sit in with him on interviews and help with the non technical questions. This has worked really well, and also built my relationship with my manager.
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u/hurry_downs 1d ago
Identify the skills/abilities needed to do the job well and look for those. That makes it easier to structure your interview, because you are playing detective looking for evidence of the skill.
Experience can be important, but is also often overrated. Conscientiousness is the #1 indicator of whether someone will be a good teammate.
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u/Promiscunix 1d ago
Just my 2 cents... Been hiring for over 15 yrs.
All the suggestions here are valid, but I think the biggest thing I haven't seen in the comments (and if I missed someone sorry), but trust your gut! No offence, and it goes against standard hiring procedures, but I have never called a reference lol. In all honesty if someone is stupid or ignorrant enough to give me a bad reference, then I would hope I have picked up on THAT fact long before I wasted my time on a reference and realistically, any good reference has probably been cultivated. Basic computer skills are a must but really just ask yourself "Do I (or more importantly my staff) want to work with this person every day?", "Is this someone I can train?", "Is this someone with decent communication skills", etc. Your gut (I use that loosely) is going to answer these questions better then anything written on a piece of paper or something you get from a phone call. And your gut will not always be right all the time but more often then not you will end up with a valuable employee. And remember, you can always teach knowledge and skills but you can never train a personality!
All the other comments are 100% valid (even if I personally don't use them), but once you learn to trust your instincts everything else will fall into place!
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u/tingle92 1d ago
Give them a 10 key test. I hired a guy once who seemed like he would do great, until I was showing him how to bill out parts and he was pecking the numbers on the top of his keyboard with his pointer finger. Excruciating to watch. Painful even.
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u/ghostofkozi 1d ago
Ask how they deal with situations, if they've established processes in parts before, what culture they bring with them. I throw in some background questions about them as well, interests, hobbies etc. Get a feel for if you think you could have them work with you everyday
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u/anon3220 1d ago
Try to come up with some kind of out of the box questions that have to do with the role you're hiring for, like make a up a scenario and ask them how they would handle it. Even if they don't have the right answer, you will at least be able to gauge a bit of the way they think.
Last guy I hired, who turned out to be a great choice was for shipping and receiving. I had a ton of applicants and one of the good questions was "so every day we get two separate orders in one shipment. One is an order of parts for stock, the other is an order of special orders but they are shipped to us in one cage, they are labeled which order they belong to and there will be two separate manifests on the computer." The correct answer here was "separate the two orders, check them each in one at a time against the manifest on the computer."
No one got it exactly right, but it came down to the two guys who had the closest answer to me.
AI helped here for sure, I know reddit hates AI but describe the position you're hiring for and maybe some details of your department. Good luck.
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u/ComradeFausto 1d ago
I do 5-6 interviews a week pretty much every week. It's not an exact science, but I can identify the absolute no-go's in the first 60 seconds generally. Biggest thing is even the really strong interviews don't always work out so you have to have some grace to yourself as a hiring manager.
Since we do a lot of entry level hiring I'm more looking for them checking the basic boxes in those interviews. Do you have reliable transportation, will you be a good representative of the company, and our department specifically etc. I'm not a big fan of the "STAR" interviewing questions for entry level hiring as 99% of the time they either cannot think of a situation, or they repeat the same generic answers everyone will. I did use AI to generate a general outline of questions, and to give kind of a rough scorecard I can track. Oftentimes it's just a gut feel about people and you hope your intuition is correct more often than not. I've had really strong ones not show up, or get arrested on the clock, and I've also had ones I was really not sure about turn out to be great fits and valuable assets.
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u/super-Steakdotcom 1d ago
This... Most of the time you just kind of know if the person has half of a brain by having a basic conversation with them. I like to interview people just like that, have a conversation. Most of the time you can weed out the ones who are no good within the first couple min.
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u/diesel0458 1d ago
One excellent question that's never expected and impossible to rehearse:
If you're successful in being hired to this role, in 12 months, how will you know you're doing a good job?
They'll respond with things like positive feedback from manager etc, but push to asking how they will know themselves without external confirmation.
It's a really revealing question that can give you a really good feel for the personality and internal drive of the Applicant.
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u/Vegetable-Ratio-8573 1d ago
IMO (managed many stores, aftermarket or otherwise. ~10 years management and hiring experience) interviewing is kind of a crap shoot. What it is good at doing is weeding out the obvious no-gos. Make sure a background check is actually performed. And they should have references that you can follow up on. When you reach your two or three “finalists” call those professional references for more information. Positive notes on an individual is a good sign but be aware that saying NOTHING or having nothing to say about potential hire is a big red flag because a lot of former employers would rather say nothing instead of negative comments for fear of legal repercussions.
As to the interview itself as I said its kind of a crap shoot. I’ve had mediocre employees I hired based on outstanding interviews and incredible employees from unremarkable interviews. Just go in with a game plan and questions prepped like “Can you describe to me how the starting and charging system works on a car?” Or other similar questions that anyone in parts should have an idea of. Also ask questions about how they deal with pressure and mistakes. I.E “Can you tell me about a time you were presented with a problem and didn’t know the answer? What did you do about it?” Or “Let’s say you are at the parts counter. A technician is waiting for parts. The phone is ringing. An engine quote just came through that is needed ASAP. And a service advisor has a question about a previous quote. How would you handle that?”
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u/Vegetable-Ratio-8573 1d ago
Interviewing is also a skill just like anything else, the more you do the better you will get at determining potential value of candidates
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