8:06 am, March 21, 2025
Franchised car dealers are increasingly looking to outside the automotive industry when it comes to recruiting new staff.
That is according to two leading bosses, who believe that the advent of EVs has sparked a need for the motor trade to ‘evolve’ how it does things.
Speaking at Car Dealer Live, Greenhous Group’s Danny Minshall and Swansway Group’s Peter Smyth both admitted to actively seeking external candidates when filling roles across their businesses.
Minshall suggested that employees from outside of the industry are more attuned to customer behaviour and offer a more personable level of customer service.
He also revealed that Greenhous is opening a multi-brand high street store, in which nobody has come directly from the motor trade.
Speaking on stage at the British Motor Museum, Gaydon, Minshall told host James Baggott: ‘The high street store we are about to open is a multi-branded, three car showroom and not one member of the team has been employed through the motor trade. We’ve just taken somebody on who was a manager at Sketchers.
‘Consumers are finding it hard to be offered a test drive; Sketchers won’t try and make you buy a pair of shoes unless you’ve tried them on. Will Heather insist on test drives? Probably. But our retail sales execs don’t always.
‘I walked down a row of car dealerships last week and went into four showrooms, about an hour-and-a-half on site in total, and I didn’t get approached once by one retail sales executive.
‘The next day I went into some BYD and mainstream brands in London. Clearly not car salespeople but every single person in each shop I attended, they knew the product and they knew the range.
‘The stark experience difference between going into those high street types of places compared to the actual main car dealerships was really interesting.
‘That’s what next we will have to evolve to.’
From Swansway’s perspective, Smyth said that the Car Dealer Top 100 group is currently looking to take on ‘IT savvy’ young people as apprentices.
He added that recruiting people without prior experience of the motor trade allows the group to ‘train them in our way of doing things’, admitting that working for Swansway could be considered ‘Marmite’.
Smyth said: ‘As a company, Swansway is a little bit Marmite – if you come to work for us you either love us or hate us. We’re now taking on more apprentices and we’re training them in our way of doing things.
‘My father used to sell washing machines in the 1950s and 60s and they were very very expensive things then – a couple of hundred quid – but what it did was change people’s lives fundamentally and it made life easier.
‘With electric vehicles, I think there’s a certain amount of fiddling about you have to do but I think once you get to a price parity, and people think its worth having to think about charging and range etcetera, then we’re really enthused about the future.
‘We think we need to take young people on who are more IT savvy to be able to fix these cars in the future. EVs frighten the living daylights out of the independents but just think bring it on!’
You can read all the headlines from Car Dealer Live here.
