3 Reasons To Give Young Auto and Diesel Techs a Chance

Hello everyone, so this video is titled three reasons why you should give young auto diesel techs a chance, right? I've been hearing a lot over the past few days and months and weeks about how the current generation doesn't show up for work. When they do come to work they're on their phones, they don't want to work. So how do we determine what to do with these? We need a workforce, right? We're not going to get a workforce by wishing that they were different. We have to figure out how to make it work with these young people. So these are the three reasons why you should give young people a chance. The first reason should be obvious to all of you, especially those of you who are in positions to hire people, and that is it is illegal to judge someone based on their age, right? We know that, right? It's part of the protected classes, age, race, sex, religion, right? No. So that's number one, the obvious one, right? You can't deny someone a chance, an opportunity, or a job based on their age. Now there's a workaround for that, right? Most young people don't have much experience, so a lot of people say, all right, well, you find an entry-level person who's experienced that's willing to come and work in our industry. It ain't going to happen, right? This is a searcher's market, not an employer's market right now. There are too many opportunities out there to get an experienced guy that you know is going to be dependable to work in that, all right? Reason number two. Reason number two to give young people a chance is that you can't judge an entire group of people based on the behaviors of some of them, and I know some of you right now are thinking, some of them? It's almost all of them, all right? Okay, so yeah, yeah, it's almost all of them, right? Maybe so. Maybe you're right, but think about it. Is everybody in this current generation a slacker? Someone who's, you know, not going to show up for work? No, there are some very, very talented, young, dedicated people out there that will come to work and will be good employees, but you won't know that if you don't take the chance on them, right? So I'm going to give you guys a little tidbit that I've picked up. Most of these trade schools, like the one I work at, right, AEI, and other trade schools that we won't mention, but they exist, right? They all have some sort of awards process for students that demonstrate good attendance and good grades, and I've, my office is right next to our career counselor. As a matter of fact, I'm utilizing her office because she's not here yet, and it's quiet, so I have overheard many conversations that our career counselors have had with students about put your awards that you get while you're in school on your resume. So if you are looking for that entry-level technician that is going to be dependable, is going to show up every day, who has the capability to stay off their phone while they're at work, look for perfect attendance award. Look for distinguished student awards. Those awards exist for a reason, right? To help us identify those people and help you identify those people who are going to give you the best opportunities to find the right candidate, right? That is the best thing for you. I, we had a student awards where I passed out six or seven perfect attendance awards and a whole bucket full of the ones where they had to have at least a certain GPA and above 85 percent or something attendance. So they're out there, right? Did the majority of the students get one of those? No, right? And that's where we're at, right? So the majority of those students that didn't get one of those, am I going to judge the, you know, 20 of them that did out of that group by what the rest of the group did? I hope not. I hope we can judge them by their own merits, right? So that's reason number two to give them a chance is because there are really good ones out there that deserve a chance and there are ways to find them and pick them apart from the rest of the crowd if you just look deeper into their resumes and during their interviews and stuff like that. The third way, third reason, right? Reason number three, why you should give these new kids a chance, right? Reason number three is because they may not have had the opportunity to be mentored and a lot of the communities that, you know, the service managers and fleet owners and stuff that are in their 50s and 60s had mentors, had someone that worked with them or taught them or showed them how things were done. A lot of these young people that are coming through today, you know, absentee dads, life circumstances that were extremely challenging, not having the role model to look up to. So the main, another reason to give these kids a chance is because it gives you an opportunity to put them on the right course, right? So maybe they aren't one of the perfect attendance kids or maybe they aren't one of the super high performers. Maybe they're got good attendance but their grades are kind of low because they struggle taking tests or maybe they're really good at taking tests but they had some really bad family drama going on while they were at school and it hurt their attendance a little bit. So there's all those circumstances around that you as employers can help with by providing a trainer and a mentor to help these kids learn the right way to do it. Is every student that you hire going to be successful because you paired them with the right person? No. The chance is better if you pair them with someone who's going to mentor, coach them and help them succeed, definitely, right? The other thing I would like for all of you to keep in mind is I turned 50 this year and I know a lot of people that are in positions of authority as hiring managers and stuff like that are in my age group or maybe older and I just want to remind you about one thing. 30 or 40 years ago there was a group of old guys sitting around saying the same things about us that we're saying about the current generation and there was the group of us that wanted to work hard, wanted to learn, had an interest and a passion and we're like, well, that's not fair. That same thing is happening now, right? We're, as old people, we're not happy with the current generation. We think they're this, that and so forth about them but the good ones are out there and you've got to give them a chance. Give them a chance, see what they can do and remember that communication is key, right? They speak and learn on a different wavelength than us so it takes some effort on our part to learn how to effectively communicate and train these young people but if you can find that key to communicating with them, you'll find that it's really valuable and that a lot of these young people have the same kind of values and that we do but they don't know how to demonstrate that because they've never been shown the correct way to do it. So I hope as this helps some of you recruiters out there to kind of understand what to look for. Look for those perfect attendance awards, look for the guys with good attendance in the interviews. If you didn't see the perfect attendance and stuff, ask the right questions to get more details about the why and maybe you'll find out that a lot of these people will work out for you. Unfortunately, I can't guarantee they all will but that was true of every generation, right? So I hope this helps you guys out there. I hope that we find and get more people in our trade, in the careers, whether it's auto, diesel, welding. I know it's important. I know that it's really, really hard to find people right now. It's really hard to find the dependable people but they're out there. You've got to put in the time and the effort. So again, if you haven't already, please click on the little Mustang right there and subscribe to the channel. Any comments would be appreciated. I love comments. Any kind of detailed videos you'd like to see, whether it's one like this or a training video or something, let me know what topic you're interested in and we'll try to work out a video for you. Again, thank you. Have a good night.