Advice for Auto and Diesel Technician Recruters.

Hello everyone, welcome to Charlin's Garage. So today's topic is going to be how to recruit auto and diesel technicians. So as someone who's been working at trade schools for the past 10 years, I've been on the outside looking in at both groups of people, the employers that are trying to attract talent and the students that are looking for careers in the industry. So I have some unique viewpoints that may help you guys in your search for potential students. So first thing I want to say is that no matter which level you fall into these categories that I'm going to discuss, everyone that comes to a trade school's career fairs and hires students are appreciated because they help the school's outcomes, they give our students a chance to be successful. So don't think that this is bashing any one of the three groups, but basically I want to tell you about the three different groups of recruiters that I have seen over my career and what sets them apart and how they're different from each other. So the first group of recruiters are what I call passive recruiters. Passive recruiters are recruiters that come to a school, they will spend a small amount of time at the school invested in the school's outcome. So I'm talking they'll come to the career fairs, every once in a while they might join a PAC meeting, but that's about it, right? They'll come to the career fairs, they'll come and join a PAC meeting and they're mildly successful with that, right? There are students that are going to be interested in working for them even if they haven't seen them before or they're not that familiar with them and they're going to get a handful of those students. The second group is what I call the moderate group. They're slightly more active than the first group. So like the first group, they are going to come to the career fairs, they are going to be active in PAC meetings and stuff like that, but the big difference what sets them aside from the first group is that they're more moderately active on campus events, right? So they will give a campus support by coming out and instead of just coming out on a career fair, coming by the campus independently and presenting to a classroom, right? These are career opportunities, this is what we do and they might even give us some sort of promotional material to hang up around the school like a banner or some handouts and stuff. So and again, nothing wrong with that. Those guys are coming to campus, they're helping our outcomes, they're hiring our students, we love them too. But I would say that by far the most successful group I have seen in recruiting the way that they want to recruit is what I call active partners, the third group, right? Third, active partners. Active partners do everything that the first two groups do, right? They're going to come to the career fairs, they're going to participate in PAC meetings, they're going to maybe come to classrooms and do presentations sometimes and give us some promotional materials. But what the active guys, what these, what these partners, active partners do is that they become an integral part of that school's culture and foundation. So there are schools that do this really well by having real deep level manufacturer relationships and they leverage that a certain way. In a smaller school like mine, we leverage those active partnerships in the terms of training and training aides, right? So this partner that is an active partner is going to be coming into the school and not only are they going to do a presentation with the students about who they are, what they do, why they want to hire you, what the benefits are, but they're also going to donate time to the instructional staff, right? They'll invite instructional staff to training courses so that the training instructors can stay up to date with the most current stuff out there in the field. They will also help with training aids. So they'll donate an engine, they'll donate an older truck that we can work on or a car, they'll donate an old transmission, they'll hook you up with a discount on the other training aids and they come by the school regularly, check in on the classes, talk to the students and by the time the students are ready to graduate, these active partners are the ones where these students know that recruiter's name. They know the trainer from that place's name because he's there a lot. So they have that relationship. So what I want you to think about as a recruiter, put yourself in the student's point of view for a moment, right? You're not a recruiter now, you're a student. You've been going to this school for a little over a year. Every day while you're at this school, while you're out in lab, you look over at the wall, you see a huge banner and I'm just going to use one of our active partners as an example here. You see a huge banner that says Velocity Truck Centers on it, right? And then you go outside and you see another training aid you're working on but you look at the door of this truck and it says donated by or loaned to by Velocity Truck Centers, right? You spend 13 months doing that plus that guy is coming in and doing a little advanced training an hour here, an hour there with you guys. They're bringing their trainers in, they're inviting you for field trips. By the time you're ready to graduate now, you're walking past all the little booths at the career fair and you know you want to work on trucks and trailers and you see a bunch of different dealerships but then you see Velocity. Which one are you going to go talk to first? It's that simple. Think about it. I mean, it's a no-brainer. You're going to be comfortable with those people, you're going to know them, you're going to be familiar with their equipment, you're going to have confidence that you can work on their equipment because you've been working on stuff that they donated. They're going to come and they're going to migrate to you whether they subconsciously know they're doing it or not. If you are involved with the school on a daily basis, you will get more recruits and you will probably get the higher quality entry-level technicians as well. So again, nothing wrong with any of those three groups. Maybe you don't have the budget to be an active partner and be throwing training aids and help and training and all that stuff at the campus. That's great. We still love you, we still want you to go to our career fairs. We understand that not everybody is going to fall into that furthest category. I really do appreciate the middle tier partners that come in and take the time out of their busy schedules to just present the opportunities to our students and then give us the opportunity to put stuff on our wall that shows potential students that we have relationships with those employers. That's a big recruiting benefit for us but the biggest recruiting benefit for us is the donation of training aids, newer equipment and being able to say, oh yeah, you'll see those guys here a lot because they come by and teach courses for us and do training and so forth. So I hope this makes some sense because I do want, especially at Arizona Automotive Institute, I want to open it up to more partnerships. I want to specifically give a shout out to Velocity Truck Center for partnering with us with the Get Ahead program. We're still learning how that program works and us and Velocity are going to, I think, make a great team and get some of these useful students get some qualifications during their school in here that they wouldn't have otherwise gotten and that'll help them be more successful and it'll also help Velocity recruit more techs that they might need. The other thing I want to point out is on the auto side we have Ford. We have, excuse me, a good partner with Caesar over at Ford who is, I think he's like the regional recruiter for like all the Valley Ford dealerships in the Phoenix area, maybe even further than that, I don't know for sure, but he is always reaching out to us to invite us to skilled competitions so that we can be represented there, inviting us to events like NHRA and stuff like that and most importantly he provide help provide our students with access to the Ford ACE program where our students can log in, do Ford training and get some very valuable certificates and credentials from that site while they're still in school and like I said we we open this up to everybody that wants to work with us. We would like to form more partnerships. We're looking to do things like classroom sponsorships where a company like a Caterpillar or a Vanguard or Toyota or anybody that's out there wants to come in and paint the classroom, you know, it's just the only thing I would ask is that you give us something in return to to get the students excited about that partnership like a training vehicle or something. So think about it though, those are the things I've noticed. 10 years of experience of watching how recruiters interact with our students whether it was at this school or a previous one, those are the things I've noticed and again thank you to all the employers that came out. We recently had a really great career fair and I'm hoping to have another one soon and I can't wait to get out and visit some of the people that came by the PAC meeting so especially like the Glendale Fleet Services, the city of Glendale. I'm really looking forward to that one. So like I've said in the past if you haven't already, please like and subscribe for me. I would really appreciate it and if you have any comments please let me know what you think about this video. Maybe there's something about recruiting in the recruiting world I don't know because one thing I'm not is a recruiter, I'm just telling you what I've noticed as an outside observer about the recruiting process. So I'd love to hear what you have to say, put it in the comments, like and subscribe and thank you for taking the time to watch it. Thank you.