Before Toyota Financial Services announced its move to Plano, Texas, four years ago, the company averaged a respectably low 5% attrition rate with little turnover year over year. But when the move was initiated, suddenly there was a need to hire hundreds of new employees to replace those who opted to stay behind in southern California, the captive was forced to overhaul its hiring protocol.
“Because our historical attrition rate had been so low, we did not have the organizational readiness to address the volume, to address the changing expectation,” said Kim Cerda, the captive’s vice president of human resources, at the Auto Finance Risk & Compliance Summit last month. “We had managers who maybe worked 20 years and hired one person. So, this shift was significant.”
Back in California, the low turnover rate meant that TFS “never had to work very hard to attract the talent we needed,” Cerda said. But with the high concentration of financial services companies in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, TFS realized that it had to design a best-in-class experience for candidates.
TFS started by developing what it referred to as a “candidate-first experience,” which centered on the idea that the hiring process is the first impression people have about what the organization is like. To that end, the captive established a process rooted in the idea of treating job candidates the same way it treats customers.
“As people discover Toyota not as a car company, but as a place where they might want to work, what do we want that experience to be like?” Cerda said. “We looked at how we connected with people, how we touched every single candidate – what that first meeting was like, what that interview process was like, the offer process.”
The goal was to create a future Toyota customer – simply based on the hiring process – even if the candidate ultimately took a job elsewhere, she added.
Turning Hiring Managers Into Salespeople
