It’s probably not exaggerating by much to observe that “Now Hiring” signs appear to be as plentiful as sponsor decals in today’s motorsports world. How will that play out for the industry in 2023?

In some ways, the act of hiring employees doesn’t change much over the years. Sifting through applications and resumes, checking qualifications and references, face-to-face interviews, are all part of a process that would feel familiar to any employer from 20, 40, or 60 years ago. 

But in other ways, the process of hiring employees is undergoing a constantly churning evolution. The job market is influenced my numerous outside factors—recessions, wars, shifts in immigration policy, government regulations, technological breakthroughs, even changes in generational attitudes. 

The most recent disruption to turn the act of hiring people upside down was the COVID-19 pandemic and the response to it from governments around the world. In many important ways, the motorsports industry is still dealing with the fallout from that global shutdown, not least in the area of hiring employees. 

The top echelons of the sport will probably always have more job applicants than openings, so for this article we reached out to a sample of small and medium-sized retail shops, employee relations experts, and automotive-oriented schools for a view on the current state of the hiring process closer to ground level. Based on our conversations, it’s not a part of running a business that many look forward to in today’s market. 

“No one shows up for interviews,” said Tina Bitner Nardo of Bitner Automotive, a shop in Trenton, New Jersey, that does repair, restoration, machining services, and dyno tuning. “If they do show up for an interview and you get lucky that you even think they are going to fit and you hire them, then they might not show up on the day you hire them for.”

For Rick Hall at Rick’s Performance Center in Las Cruces, New Mexico, finding qualified candidates for parts counterperson openings has been a constant battle. He has hired four full-time people and one part-timer in the last year, primarily for entry-level parts store positions such as checking in freight, sweeping floors, and stocking and pricing inventory. “Two-and-a-half didn’t make it,” he said.

“You can’t just pick this auto parts stuff up through osmosis. I would get people who would come in and drop off a resume, and in the interview I’d ask them what their qualifications were. ‘Well, my grandfather had a service station,’” Hall said. “That actually happened a couple times.”

Wade McGowan with Race Part Solutions in Maysville, Georgia, a shop that specializes in forced induction components, has added one machinist position and a part-timer in the past couple of years. “The biggest challenges are finding good reliable people who want to work and have the experience,” McGowan said. “Previous experience is absolutely preferred. We are just slammed busy and really need somebody who doesn’t need to be trained too much. We need someone who can walk in and go to work.”

Mark Osmundson is an agency recruiter with Jamison Search International in Orem, Utah, who focuses on finding candidates for sales, marketing, product management, and operations roles in the automotive aftermarket. He believes qualified candidates are out there to be found, even if it is a challenge to uncover them. 

“I talk to thousands of potential candidates a year, and those conversations generally take one of two forms. One of which is just a general discussion about what might compel that individual to make a change. The other direction is a conversation about a specific opportunity,” he said. 

“What I’m hearing is, there are great people who are open to something new, but they don’t advertise that, for good reason,” Osmundson continued. “If they are gainfully employed, they’re not going to publicize that they are looking for something else or even open to a discussion. So I think there are people out there, but the asterisk to the whole answer is that it is still a candidate-driven marketplace. There are still more open jobs than there are candidates to fill them, generally speaking. Because it is a candidate-driven marketplace, it means that employers have to really employ different tactics to find the people for the positions. The process itself has to be candidate-centric. I don’t think most employers have embraced that. And so from a cultural standpoint, employees look at the hiring process and think, ‘You know what? This company is not for me because the hiring process is more about the employer rather than it being a two-way street.’ The best people have options. It’s a unique dynamic, and it’s more unique now because during COVID, people reassessed their careers and many are saying. ‘Here’s what I really want.’”

Wins and Losses

Pleasant or not, hiring is a necessary part of doing business, even more so following pandemic disruption. In normal times, companies like to keep turnover to a minimum, but those days seem a long time in the past.

“It should be zero,” Nardo said. “What happened to us, was about half-way through COVID, the labor force went into a bidding war. So we lost one technician that we had trained from high school, and we had lost our shop front-end customer service manager, and the machinist. We normally keep eight people on staff, and that includes me and Mark (Bitner, her brother), and our mom, who is the president. Mark is in the assembly room and a machinist, and we have a machinist as well. We have two mechanics, and normally we would have a front-end manager, and a couple of guys part-time.”

To the frustration of the companies we spoke with, many conventional sources for finding employees yielded few successful candidates. “I use Indeed, which costs a lot of money for someone who is a small business,” Nardo said. “I got a lot of butterfly catchers from Indeed. In the summer of 2021, we turned over six mechanics. It was bad, and the ones who were coming through here either ghosted us, didn’t show up on the day they were supposed to start, or stayed for two weeks and were useless. It was horrible. I’ve used WrenchWay, but I got nothing from WrenchWay.”

It was a similar story for Hall. “We pay for Facebook ads to expand the area that it reaches and just don’t get many people looking for a job. Very few applications, and most of those who do apply aren’t qualified,” he said. “We used Indeed, and we received a lot of resumes from people just sending out blank resumes to anybody who will take one. It doesn’t cost them anything, they just click a box and send a resume out. I had people from two states away that were more qualified as a meat cutter than a parts person. That doesn’t work out so well.”

Fortunately, there are avenues for finding employees that yielded better results, including trade schools and colleges. “What we ended up doing was hitting the trade schools,” Nardo said. “Automotive Training Center in Pennsylvania reached out to us as a machine shop because they wanted to give a tour. They brought a group of their soon-to-be graduates in for a tour to see what a working machine shop was like. It turned out that a lot of their equipment was the same as our equipment, and so when our machinist left, that’s when we took one of their graduates, and he’s still here.”

Clay Harshaw is an associate professor of Motorsport Management at Winston-Salem State University, an Historically Black University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The Motorsport Management program is small but growing, and Harshaw said most of his students are aiming for marketing, sales, and media relations positions in the motorsports field. He reported that a substantial part of his program is centered around preparing students for the realities of the job market.

“At the university, we do a lot of development of critical thinking skills. And I think what employers are looking for is people who will take action and take risk. Sometimes you have to do that with the way you think, and be willing to be wrong,” Harshaw said. “I tell my students that I tend to give vague instructions, because that’s what they’re going to get in the workforce. 

“I think there’s a mentality or a mindset for people who work in motorsports, that they want to do whatever it takes to win. That translates to their business management and their marketing plan,” Harshaw added.

Business-oriented social media can also widen the pool of prospective hires. “I’m a big believer in LinkedIn,” Osmundson said. “Whether you’re an employer or an employee, or a hiring manager or somebody who is an individual contributor who is just grinding every day, LinkedIn is a key because there is no better professional networking platform. There is no better professional personal branding platform, and the more you give through the platform the more you get back.

“If an employer has a critical role to fill, my advice would be to get on LinkedIn and start looking at your feed,” he added. “Start connecting with people at companies that you like, that have products that you like, that have cultures that you like. Because the people will espouse that as well. Start connecting with people. It’s amazing how that kind of outreach can pay dividends.”

Networking at ground level, through personal referrals—aka “word of mouth”—also yields good results, according to our sources. “I think there is still an inclination for the employers to do things the old way, which is, first of all, post a job on a job board. And I think the ‘post-and-hope’ strategy is not the best strategy to attract the best candidates,” Osmundson said. “It doesn’t mean that they won’t, but it means that their percentage of success is decreased. I’m a big believer that whether you are an employer looking to fill open positions or an individual looking to make a change, who you know is going to be a catalyst toward achieving that objective. So as employers, I think that post-and-hope is part one of what they need to do. Part two is engage their existing employees to get referrals. Dangle a nice financial carrot, put a referral program together that will encourage their employees to dig into their networks to recommend somebody for any particular job. Generally speaking, those employees are going to refer somebody who they want to work with or know well enough to understand they can do the job.”

A well-thought-out word-of-mouth plan can also be a cost-effective method of finding employees. “The challenge often becomes a financial one. How much is enough? The financial realities of filling an open position are such that it’s costly,” Osmundson continued. “It takes time, it takes effort, and there’s an opportunity cost because you’re devoting time and effort away from other things that need to be done. But the other option is employing somebody like me for a targeted search. Well, my service fee, their investment, is 25% of the candidate’s first year compensation. For a $100k gig, that means $25 grand. On the flip side, if you’re offering $1,000 to your team, you’ve just saved yourself $24,000.”

“Word-of-mouth probably works better than anything. We ask our customers, ‘Hey, do you guys know anybody you’d like to talk to across the counter that might be a good fit here?’” Hall said. One of his all-time best hires was a former customer who raced in an entry-level circle track series. “He was a customer of mine and I saw potential. I asked him if he’d ever thought about being a parts guy. He came back a couple days later and said, ‘Are you serious?’ That was a home run, he was with me 23 years. He was my store manager.”

McGowan has seen similar results in Georgia. “In today’s times, for us anyway, social media is a huge way to reach people not only in our local market but all over the country. That combined with just good ol’ word-of-mouth referrals have worked out the best for us so far and have put together a great team we have in place now.”

Pressing the Advantage

If there’s one thing the motorsports market has going for it, it’s that racing is considered cool and exciting in a way that other industries are not, and therein lie opportunities for recruiting employees.

Mark Bitner of Bitner Automotive reported promising results in hiring high school-age part-timers versus full-timers. “I think it’s easier because the younger kids are at school and they are more excited,” he said. “A select amount of the next generation I think is more in tune to what we’re doing here, which is not just fixing cars but working on hot rods and all the atmosphere that’s here with the engine room and the dyno running, and all that. I think that appeals to more of the younger crowd right now.”

Harshaw has also witnessed how enthusiasm for racing can flare up quickly among university students. “Rajah Caruth is getting ready to start his NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series career with GMS Racing. He’s one of our students. Through him I’ve been getting more phone calls and interest in the program, and the university in general, from all across the country.”

Encouraging employees in their motorsports endeavors is not only a morale booster but an advantage in attracting new hires. “We are all car guys here at RPS and are heavily involved in all forms of the automotive hobby as well as motorsports,” McGowan said. “Racing is definitely our bread and butter, but we have guys here into motorcycles, street and sport trucks, classic muscle cars, etc., and they are always encouraged to attend events that interest them. A few employees we have on our team now came from actually meeting them at the race track. So, yes, I would say getting out and getting involved and getting to know the people who share the same interest as you is a huge benefit to landing both customers and employees.”

“We’re in an enthusiast industry. It’s one of those few industries where people are just jazzed to be a part of it,” Osmundson explained. “The additional benefits manifest in several ways. For one, employees just want to be part of a cool company. They want to be part of a company that makes a product they believe in, or makes their car perform better. That’s a piece of it. The employee discount might be a part of it, or the ability to go to events.

“Because it’s an enthusiast industry, there are opportunities for employers to keep compensation at a slightly lower level. I think it’s not that much less, but they rely on people’s passion to attract them to the company,” he added.

Anyone who has walked through a racing paddock has noticed fans happily wearing T-shirts and ball caps with their favorite brands on them, which also elevates the image of a company. “Some of these motorsports or automotive aftermarket products are lifestyle brands, too,” Osmundson said. “I think the lifestyle element of some of these brands is also an effective way to attract people.”

For Hall, a second storefront at a local track has worked as a way to keep employees engaged with racing. “We have a little store at Vado Speedway Park about 15 miles south of us. It’s three years old, a very nice dirt track. It just had the Wild West Shootout there with all the Late Models,” he said. “It’s quite a facility, and I have a little store there. Anytime there’s a race car on the track we’ve got somebody down there. I consider it a perk. If I was a 20-year-old guy into cars, I think it would be a perk to get into races free and get paid to do it.”

The recent breakdowns in the hiring process won’t last forever. It’s only one anecdote, but Nardo, as the parent of a recent high school graduate, has witnessed recent hopeful signs around the annual field trip to the local technical school. “They used to hire one bus a year to take the kids over to tech school to visit to see if they wanted to do that, and last year when my son graduated, they had to hire four buses to take all the interested kids to tech school,” she said.

For many motorsports businesses, those kids can’t graduate fast enough.

Considering Factors

When searching for a new employment opportunity, Mark Osmundson of Jamison Search International in Orem, Utah, explained, “Every individual is assessing essentially six different factors when they are looking at a new opportunity. Those six things are universal, although each individual will define and rank them uniquely. Those six things are challenge, location, advancement, money, people, and security. Benefits is a part of that, but for some candidates, they’re looking for the challenge and willing to sacrifice on the compensation or benefits if the challenge is spot-on for what they are looking for. Or any number of those other factors.” —Steve Statham

Sources

Bitner Automotive
bitnerautomotive.com

Jamison Search International
jamisonsearch.com

Race Part Solutions
racepartsolutions.com

Rick’s Performance Center
ricksperformancecenter.com

Winston-Salem State University
wssu.edu/admissions/programs/motorsport-management