By Chuck Ross, PivotPoint Business Solutions, and Todd Downing and Chris Cimaglio, Managing Partners at BEST Human Capital & Advisory Group

Ask yourself these questions: Do you have the right people on your bench? Are you proactively building and sustaining a strong bench for today and the future?

For many reasons, the performance racing industry, among others, faces a talent shortage compared to other sectors. Our demographics further complicate the situation, as many professionals in our industry are approaching retirement age at an increasingly rapid pace. The urgency to prepare our setup and act has never been greater.

The numbers tell the story: Baby boomers make up 25% of the US population but own 61% of all US businesses, resulting in more than 3.5 million businesses changing hands in the next 10 years—a veritable "tsunami" of exits, according to data from the US Census Bureau and Project Equity. Meanwhile, younger generations have different values and interests, with many opting for different tech jobs or other careers instead of industries like ours, as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Outlook Handbook. We can't afford to ignore this trend.

Attracting new talent and early-career professionals remains challenging as the current labor market is historically ever-changing. Thus, we must continue to identify strategies you can put into action to build your human capital pipeline and current employee engagement for today and tomorrow. Attracting talent to your company and assessing fit to not just the job description but the behaviors of the job and culture have many intertwined parts. We cannot stress enough that there is no single magic solution. It requires a combination of HR-related initiatives and new thinking.

Think Like a Candidate

To attract top talent, start thinking like they do. Today's top talent is looking for:

• Social Capital: A strong company culture and reputation.
   
• Training & Development: Opportunities to learn new skills and grow.
   
• Organizational Structure: Structured clear paths for advancement.
   
• Compensation and Benefits: Competitive with current market rates.
   

It is important to note that there is not one solution, but a combination of multiple human resource solutions to improve talent flow and increase retention with happy team members. Talent doesn't follow paychecks alone. They follow purpose, opportunity, and connection.

Hiring for Behaviors, Not Just Experience

A vast talent pool exists outside our industry. Too often, performance racing industry companies focus heavily on a candidate's direct experience with the products, processes, or customers.

While specific experience is one factor, chemistry (culture fit) and behavioral talent are equally important. After extensive research by industrial-organizational psychologists at the Talent Strategy Institute, behavioral talent has proven to be the best indicator of success, followed by chemistry, with direct experience being the least important.

There are four families of behavioral traits to assess:

• Motivation: What drives an individual beyond money?
   
• Action: How do they approach tasks?
   
• Interaction: How well do they communicate and collaborate?
   
• Thinking: How do they process information and solve problems?
   

Hiring for behaviors dramatically creates a broader pool of potential candidates from other industries, a strategy many Fortune 500 companies use with great success, as documented in Harvard Business Review's research on high-performance hiring practices.

To read the rest of this article, and hundreds more like it, for free, sign up for a digital subscription to PRI Magazine on Zinio here.    

Once you download the Zinio mobile app or are logged into Zinio on a desktop browser, you will gain immediate access to more than a year's worth of content, including "PRI Education: Building Your Bench" here and additional coverage in the October 2025 issue here. 

Image courtesy of Shutterstock