The Tech You Lost Wasn't a No-Show. He Got Hired Faster.

The technician shortage isn't your problem.

Your response time is.

I'm seeing this problem creep back into our hiring work so I'm going to address it again so members of this community don't get clobbered by it.

Every owner I talk to says some version of the same thing: "No one wants to do this kind of work anymore." And the labor market's tight — that part's real.

But it's not what's costing you the techs you actually want.

The good techs aren't sitting in a pool waiting for your ad. They're not unemployed. They're employed and mildly annoyed.

They're standing in a bay six miles away, having a bad Thursday, half-wondering if there's something better.

That's the window. And it's narrow.

A good tech who decides to look is gone within days. Not weeks. Days.

So think about how you've been handling applicants. Between the alignment rack and the front counter. "I'll get to it when I get a sec." Answering Tuesday's applicant on Friday.

That tech you wrote off as a no-show? He wasn't a bad applicant.

He was probably a good one who got hired somewhere faster.

Have you been blaming applicant quality for a problem that was actually your clock?

That's not cheap. An empty bay runs about $175K a year in gross profit — that's about $700 per day.

And the meter runs every day that bay sits dark. A slow response doesn't just lose you one tech. It keeps that bay empty another month while you start the whole search over.

So the next time an application comes in and you think I'll deal with it later —

remember you're not competing with the other shops' ads.

You're competing with the clock.

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The Tech You Lost Wasn't a No-Show. He Got Hired Faster.