TWO OPEN POSITIONS. WHICH ONE DO YOU HIRE FIRST?

Chris Lawson

1d • 📣General discussion📣

Most shop owners pick the wrong one. They chase the loudest pain — not the real constraint.

In this post:

The one question I ask owners stuck between two hires
Five answers I hear — and what each one tells you to hire next
Why hiring two at once burns out your manager (not you)
Eight things that double the minute you stack two hires
The Monday sequence that ends the cycle

3 min read. Short on time? Watch the walkthrough video below.

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The position you think you need to hire isn't the position you need to hire.

When a shop owner comes to me not sure which one to hire first — tech or advisor, advisor or CSR, second tech or first apprentice — I don't look at the org chart.

I ask one question:

"If your car count went up 20% tomorrow, what would break first?"

Long pause.

Then they tell me what they actually see when they picture Tuesday morning with 20% more cars on the lot.

And that answer — not the title they walked in wanting to post — tells us which position to hire.

Here's how the answers sort themselves:

"Quality. Write-ups would get rushed. ARO would drop." → Front-counter constraint. The problem isn't in the bays. It's at the desk. Hire the advisor or CSR first.

"We couldn't write them up fast enough." → Same lane. Desk first.

"We physically can't touch that many cars." → Bay constraint. Hire the tech.

"Cars would sit in the lot for days before we could pull them in." → Bay constraint. Hire the tech.

"My manager would burn out." → That's not a hiring problem. That's a systems problem wearing a hiring costume. Different conversation.

A good chunk of owners I ask this question give me an answer that doesn't match the position they walked in wanting to hire.

Here's where the wheels come off for a lot of owners.

They run the question, see both constraints, and say: "Fine. I'll hire both at once."

I get it. Both roles are open. Both are bleeding you. Stacking them feels efficient.

It isn't.

When you run two hiring campaigns at once, everything doubles:

Two daily ad budgets, not one
Two inboxes of resumes, two sets of filters, two standards to hold
Twice the phone screens, twice the scheduling
Two working interviews — two days your shop runs disrupted, not one
Two rounds of reference checks and background checks
Two offers to negotiate, with different pay bands and different expectations
Two new humans onboarding at the same time, on top of everyone else's real job
Training load — usually carried by your manager — doubles on top of a shop that's still running

Here's what almost nobody sees coming: the person who pays the price of hiring two at once is rarely the owner. It's the manager.

When the manager is training two new hires while keeping the shop moving, one of three things happens. Training gets rushed. One of the new hires quits in week three. Or the manager starts looking for the door themselves.

I've watched all three. I've watched owners lose a good manager over a hiring decision the manager never even got consulted on.

Sequencing isn't slower. It's how you actually finish.

So here's what to do Monday:

Run the question in your shop. Write the answer down.
The position that answer points to is the one you hire first.
Take that hire all the way — hired, onboarded, producing — before you open the next one.

The exception: if your bays are empty and revenue is collapsing right now, the math changes. For most owners, it doesn't.

Sequence, not stack.

If you're sitting on two open positions and you're not sure which one to hire first, that's a Hiring Strategy Call.

I take 4 a week. Not a pitch — a diagnostic. We'll look at your shop, find the real constraint, and I'll tell you which position I'd hire first and why.

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