Psychology plus planned expectations makes for good hires!

Bringing the right talent in the door is perhaps the most important thing you can do for the future success of your dealership. Did you know the cost of losing one professional is generally accepted to be one times their annual salary? So, if the average salary is $150,000, then losing twenty employees over the course of five years because of unmet expectations adds up to a tidy total of $3 million.

Additionally, making the wrong hiring choices that end up being poor fits and/or unproductive employees is also costly to the dealership, costing dealerships in lost productivity, morale, and inefficiencies, not to mention turnover. John Paul Kotter, a noted author, speaker, and authority on business leadership, defined the psychological contract in his classic article, "The Psychological Contract: Managing the Joining Up Process," as "an implicit contract between an individual and the organization which specifies what each expects to give and receive from the other in the relationship."

There are four sets of expectations in this hidden contract between the Dealership and the prospective employee. For example, when a new hire expects to receive a promotion after one year on the job, but the employer is not prepared to give a promotion that quickly, there is a mismatch or initial misunderstanding of their individual expectations. Consequently when the employer can and does promote the new employee after a year, there is match. Kotter’s research confirmed that most of us would expect that the greater the matching of mutual expectations, the greater the probability of job satisfaction, productivity, and reduced turnover.

In the psychological contract there are two parties and four sets of expectations
  1. What the Employee Expects to Receive
  2. What the Organization Expects to Give
  3. What the Employee Expects to Give
  4. What the Organization Expects to Receive
The bottom-line is that if each of these expectations can be met at the time of hiring in your Dealership, your "hiring batting" average will increase significantly!