Quarterly Publication of the Quality Assurance & Training Connection

The Quality Link to Recruiting & Training

By Chaunte Johnson, Cox Automotive Group

The core objective of your quality program is to improve bottom line results in customer satisfaction, customer retention, and profitability.  Once you have identified the core competencies that drive business results, you can replicate this process in hiring, retaining, and training talent in your organization. When you know what success looks like, you are able share this information with key business partners in your organization.  The Recruiting and Training Teams are two groups that will benefit largely from your quality monitoring results. Let’s look  more in depth at how your quality monitoring results will help these two groups.  

Recruiting

A quality program with clearly defined key performance indicators will include the many attributes you use in developing job descriptions, assessment tools, and interview questions to measure a potential hire’s likelihood for success on the job.  Such attributes as strong communication skills, ability to build rapport,  sales drive, and great problem-solving skills are defined by your job description and the quality measurements you outline for great bottom-line results.  With this in mind, here are three steps you can take to make certain you are looking for the right talent that will successfully impact your bottom-line results:  

  1. Use call monitoring results to identify both desirable and undesirable key behaviors. Review this list against your job description, assessment tools, and interview guides. Work with your Recruiting Team to streamline your recruiting tools to identify key attributes for success.  
  2. Create an atmosphere where every employee is responsible for recruiting great talent.  Every day recruiting is the key to keeping a healthy pipeline of high potential candidates.   Your quality program captures top performers you can engage to be ambassadors of your employee referral program.  Most employees want to be engaged on many levels of your organization, so allow these employees to share with potential hires the cultural fit, functions, and responsibilities of the job.  To help sell the job position, provide your ambassadors with recruiting business cards to hand out to potential job applicants who exemplify the skills and abilities you want. 
  3. Listen to your top performers’ calls and review their evaluations often to better understand what characteristics, skills, and abilities they possess so that you can replicate these attributes in an appealing job description, to update assessment tools, and create relevant behavioral interview questions.

Training & Development

Your quality program should be born out of your training curriculum.  The company’s philosophy on success, policies, procedures, and the best way to customer satisfaction and revenue generation must be closely aligned with training and quality programs.  Here are some of the key ways to implement this process:

  1. Hold regular strategy meetings with your leadership team, quality team, recruiting team, and training teams to match your policies and procedures with your training curriculum and quality program.
  2. Build a quality curriculum into your training course.  Prepare your quality team to deliver the message to the new hires.  Your new learners will embrace the quality message if they can see that the goals are aligned within your quality and training programs.
  3. Invite your recruiting team to participate in your training classes and quality calibration sessions.  Your recruiting team will come to recognize the strengths and challenges of performance management and will better understand how recruiting great talent can impact the bottom line results. 

In summary, recruiting, training, and quality share a common goal of producing great talent that produces results.  If you are not meeting as a team regularly to share how you will reach the key objectives of your organization, start today.

QATC Board Member Chaunte Johnson presented a popular session on this topic at a previous QATC Annual Conference.  She is Manager of Quality Assurance and Workforce Management for Cox Automotive Group.