When COVID-19 made in-person recruiting events impossible, Tom Masano Auto Group in Reading, Pa., got creative.

The group organized a career night this summer to seek out new employees. And it had plenty of positions to fill.

The group, 60 miles northwest of Philadelphia, consists of four operations: a Ford-Lincoln store, a Mercedes-Benz store, a BMW store and a used-vehicle supercenter. Despite the turmoil of the pandemic, the stores needed to recruit a business development center representative, sales specialist, service adviser, vehicle delivery specialist, commercial vehicle sales specialist and vehicle product specialist.

But Tom Masano formatted its June event differently from its usual semiannual recruiting events, which are typically chock-full of meet-and-greets, networking and refreshments. Instead, the gathering took place over Zoom, Kevin Pitts, general manager of BMW of Reading, told Automotive News.

The group advertised the event on Facebook and the job site Indeed. It required candidates to send in their resumes to get the Zoom link, allowing the retailer to weed out applicants that did not fit the criteria early.

Though in-person interaction can be important in hiring, Pitts said Zoom allowed a different type of interaction. He said the group hired four employees, based on their engagement with others on the call, from the approximately 25 or so candidates who participated in the career night.

“I hired one kid off of just the interaction that he had with a lady that was trying to get her video activated. I ended up hiring him, and he is in our BDC, just for the sheer fact that he was a problem solver and someone to jump right in,” Pitts said.

“I thought that was pretty impressive for a young guy to do that. Even in a time when you didn’t get to meet him face-to-face, you got to see the personalities come through, which to me, was pretty powerful.”

The group also hired the woman.

The virtual event proved more efficient.

“It reduced the investment of time for us, without having to interview and interview and interview for all the different positions you need to hire,” Pitts said.

“When you’re in a room and you’re hiring, you might have some salespeople in there, you might have some technicians in there,” he added. “Your Type A sales staff is going to dominate an in-person. This allowed you to interact with more than just that Type A personality that’s going to jump out and be comfortable in-person with anybody. They’re sitting at their house, and there isn’t the pressure of it.”

The switch to virtual saved the group the usual event-related expenses, such as catering. Pitts estimated that the group spends about $500 on refreshments alone each time it holds an in-person hiring event.

Through September, Tom Masano Auto Group sold 3,312 vehicles, 1,182 new and 2,130 used, down from 1,315 new and 3,044 used in the first nine months of 2019.

The efficient hiring process also enabled the retailer to press ahead with a plan to restructure and centralize the business development center this year, Pitts said.

“We decided in the middle of March that we were totally redoing our BDC. We rewrote our sales procedure, redid everything with the BDC, how the BDC approaches sales calls and service calls and really turned it into a BDC instead of just a call center,” Pitts said.

Part of that process was to reconsider what the center’s role would be and what talents it needed.

“Traditionally, the BDC would prospect customers, prospect the phone calls, prospect the emails, and BDC would be active in our CRM activities,” Pitts said. “We totally pulled all of that back.”

Now, he explained, the center doesn’t prospect.

“We want to get [the customer] to the experts faster. That way, our BDC can concentrate on keeping our fixed ops operations healthy by making outbound calls for service appointments with our three franchise stores.”

Despite the pain of the coronavirus crisis, being forced to shut down in the spring gave the group an opportunity to develop a better way of operating, he said.

“Because at that point, we just went back to the drawing board and said, where do we need the biggest improvements?”