NDM Interview Series | Tom Wiederin, HR & Recruiting Manager at Crew Car Wash
A discussion about the challenges and excitement of scaling a retail business and the methods used to ensure success.
The Non-Desk Matters Team had the opportunity to learn more from Tom Wiederin, a leader and HR & Recruiting Manager at Crew Car Wash.
Topics we discussed:
· The significance of automation when scaling a business
· How retail teams communicated with pager notifications in the past
· The importance of having one communication tool
· Changes in recruiting methods for the newest generations
· How real-time communication can increase awareness and drive growth for employee satisfaction
· And more…
This interview has been minimally edited for clarity and context.
Tabitha: What was your first job?
Tom: My first job was working at a newspaper office. A neighbor of my parents ran the local daily newspaper. After school, I would go to the office and take calls from people who did not receive their newspaper that day. Then at six-thirty, I would bundle all these papers up, and I would put them in my moped and deliver them.
Tabitha: So you learned some pretty great customer service skills?
Tom: Yeah, they were upset usually because most of them had a specific time that they would read the paper. I didn’t get done until six-thirty, so if I had 20 of them to deliver, it might be seven o’clock before they received their paper. So that was my first job.
Patrick: How long did you do that?
Tom: From age 13 until I was 19. So when I went to college, I came back and worked [at the newspaper] on breaks. But, I did different stuff later on. I supervised the insert people; all those inserts were put in by hand. That was the final thing that I did — it was great. It was a fun position and fun company to work for.
Patrick: Is that newspaper still around?
Tom: They are. But now they’re twice weekly, no longer daily. Daily papers are hard to find.
Patrick: You see where that business is heading.
Tom: For sure.
Tabitha: How did you end up working for Crew Car Wash?
Tom: Good question. In a previous life, before Crew, I managed a department store. I went through opening a new department store. I had to do a lot of hiring, about 400 people, to open this department store. I think you have one in Louisville, it’s Von Maur.
Tabitha: Yes, we do.
Tom: I worked for Von Maur and went through the process of opening a new store in Indianapolis, which is what brought me to this area. I really liked the hiring game, I call it. This was because there was a lot of educating people on the company and convincing them to leave their current place to come to us, somebody they’ve never heard of before. It was a retail schedule with very daunting, long hours. I saw that Crew Car Wash was looking for a recruiter — this was back in 2000, 2001. So, I reached out to the owner. I just called and said, “Can I speak to the owner?” and they put me through.
Patrick: Wow! Well done.
Tom: This was a position they were having a challenge filling. And so he said, “Come in.” I came in and talked to a bunch of different people. So, I was the company’s first recruiter.
Tabitha: Look how far you have come! Now you’ve got multiple recruiters you manage.
Tom: Yeah, I have recruiters recruiting recruiters. So that’s how it all started.
Tabitha: When you were in retail at Von Maur, how did you communicate with your team?
Tom: Truthfully, pen and paper. They were behind the times for sure. As a store manager, I got a computer in 1999. The functions that I could perform on that computer were controlled. So, I got an email, but I was the only person in the store to have a Von Maur email address. So there wasn’t even email. I had a pager and so did the rest of my management team. If associates needed me in a certain area of the store, they would go on the phone and they would hit my pager number and they would hit: 914 — meant come now, 912 — meant come soon at your convenience, and 913 — meant no urgency, I’ve got an issue we need to talk about.
Patrick: I didn’t know that was a thing. Interesting.
Tom: I had team morning meetings. Whoever was working would come together and talk about what’s happening today. All the good things happening, you know, kept it all positive. It was pretty basic, aside from the pager for sure.
Tabitha: Now that you have electronic tools, what would you say is the greatest challenge in your role at Crew Car Wash?
Tom: Making sure things are scalable — are we going to be able to do the same thing in new markets that we are able to do in our established markets? So scalability is a hot button for us and making sure that everything we are doing as leaders, every decision we’re making, is scalable for the company. So whether we have 30 carwashes or 300, it is all going to work the same and we’re going to get the same results.
Communication inconsistency is still a challenge, even with all the great communication tools that we have because you’ve got remote sites with people in different cities under different leadership. Whether you’re trying to roll out benefits from open enrollment or roll out a new initiative, you have limitations unless you’re physically going to every site and having a face to face presentation. That’s the challenge. I think it will continue to be as long as we have remote locations in different settings and different states.
Patrick: I’m curious, more or less you’ve been in the hiring game for almost 30 years. What’s interesting is you’ve done it in retail and now you are now doing it for Crew. There’s a ton of ink that has been spilled over the last two years about the new emerging workers and what’s valuable to them. What’s your perspective on what has changed? Has anything really changed in 30 years of hiring younger workers, 16 to 25?
Tom: Everybody talks about millennials and how challenging they are to manage. Every generation has uniqueness about parts of their workforce. So, I can’t say every millennial operates the same way. You can’t say every Gen X operates the same way. We need to know what’s important to a generation, but we’re not going to change and make extreme changes because we’re trying to adapt. Because, we’re going to do it again when Gen Z comes out and so on.
I think you need some basic principles for managing people. We are a retailer. The challenge there is having work-life-balance. We’re a seven day a week company and those seven days a week we are open 14 hours each day. So that comes with a whole list of challenges that I think any retailer or restaurant can side with. The way people look for jobs is completely different now and it’ll continue to evolve. The running ads days are gone. You have to know how the age group in your workforce is looking for jobs. That’s continuously evolving. There are new products that come out, apps such as Snapchat and Instagram. People are looking for jobs that way. That’s the part that changes that I have to make sure if I’m not up on it, somebody on my team is up on it. All of my recruiters are millennials and they keep tabs on TikTok and all the new apps. This is how certain age groups are communicating and this is how you have to communicate with if you want them to see that you’ve got a position. So that’s what’s changed the most. Otherwise, the process is pretty consistent.
Tabitha: While the overall mission and the culture is staying the same, how do you see Red e App as a valuable tool within your organization throughout those changes?
Tom: With having all these different apps as a company you can become very siloed with this app or this system does this and this system does this and before you know it nothing is a cohesive process. I truly believe this — I think Red e App would be one of those that we could take to the next level in the future and either eliminate something else we’re using because of something you’re offering. But, we need to eventually work on our systems. We’ve done it somewhat with our payroll and our ATS and all of that talks to each other.
“What’s great with Red e App is the Paycor feed and the API. We have some things that we use that don’t have those feeds and so there’s a manual process with it and that’s not scalable.”
So if we’re doing it [manually] for 30 people, we can’t do it for 300. As much automation as we can bring into some of those things, those are going to be the winners for us that we will enhance with, for example we’re not going to use this or that anymore because Red e App has it. So let’s merge or keep building. So that’s how I see Red e App.
Tabitha: Do you have any interesting use cases of employees using the app?
Tom: The biggest thing for us is getting people away from all the different communication tools that we’ve used in the past. I think we’re there now, after almost a year. But that was the challenge — to get people to stop using Join.me, Meetup, or whatever some of the other apps were and use Red e App.
Tabitha: Have you seen managers using the app to help increase employee satisfaction?
Tom: Yes. We use a third party to measure employee engagement, it is called Amplify. They have sixteen drivers for employee engagement that they have identified. Every store gets a report on the drivers that they are knocking out of the park and the drivers they really need to work on. Now it’s becoming a KPI for 2020. Next week will be the first Amplify Engagement Survey of 2020 that will be counted towards their midyear 2020 and into end of year 2020 KPI. It’s now an item on their performance summary. Their location and final summary is going to include employee engagement. Any time you make something a KPI there becomes a laser focus, right?
“Now, they’re using Red e App to talk to each other about the [engagement] drivers and what’s impacting their store and what each person is doing about it to help drive that KPI number.”
It helps when you make something measurable. When we just talk about something but we don’t make any kind of consequence about how it will be measured, it’s not going to get focus.
Tabitha: If you could trade jobs with anybody, who would you trade with?
Tom: I think it would have been great to trade jobs with Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart to see how that behemoth was built. I’ve been in retail my whole life. I mean, we sell services, somebody else sells goods. So it’s still retail. But, I think that would have been an interesting one to trade jobs with. Especially in the early days of building that company in that business.
Thank you to Tom for taking the time to share with us!
