Remarketing


You can’t get the staff


Like many other industries, the remarketing sector is in the throes of an acute labour shortage. Jack Carfrae asks how it is affecting the industry and what it means for fleets.


ou get the impression that recruitment companies and auctioneers have the same problem. Employees and used vehicles are both very scarce, and anyone who needs either has little choice but to pay through the nose. Their trickiest job, at the moment, is finding someone, or something, to sell.


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The same shortage that is keeping the recruiters busy has borne down on the remarketing sector, among plenty of others, as staff is lacking big time. Steve Nash, CEO of the Institute of the Motor Industry, explains the extent of the drought: “The non-manufacturing side of automotive, which includes the sales and distribution as well as the service and repair networks, employs over 600,000 people in the UK, but is facing unprecedented skills shortages. Currently, the sector has over 23,000 vacancies, which equate to 4% of the workforce.”


28 | May 2022 | www.businesscar.co.uk


It is not just skilled labour, either. Auction companies, in particular, rely on low- skilled roles for logistics – fundamentals such as moving cars within or between sites and vehicle appraisals – and such employees are just as hard to come by. The remarketing industry’s one saving grace is that used vehicles are not abundant either, so it can arguably handle slightly fewer hands on deck than usual. Emphasis on slightly, though, because a prolonged dearth of staff cannot fail to have a knock- on effect on its customers, namely fleets and leasing companies.


It is not strictly used vehicle sales, but the garage sector is closely related to remarketing, and it is a good indicator of just how tough things are on the recruitment and retention front. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a senior figure working with a large garage network specialising in fleet tells Business Car that garages are deliberately not publicising


anything to do with their technicians or their qualifications, due to the probability of staff being approached by rivals with offers of employment.


“Because there’s such a shortage of technicians – and this has been going on for at least the past 12 months – garages are quite shy about publishing the qualifications their staff has. Other people can see this, so they try and poach each other’s staff.


“It’s so competitive at the moment, and if you were a garage owner, the last thing you’d want to do is publish your list of technicians.”


Anecdotally, we have also been told that technicians have applied for and accepted higher-paid positions at competing workshops, only to use the offers as leverage for pay increases and remain with their existing employers.


So acute is recruitment and retention, that it was the subject of the Vehicle


Remarketing Association’s (VRA) April webinar. The organisation gathered a series of specialists to discuss the scope of the problem and explain how auction companies and their ilk could tackle it. “Never has it been as difficult as it is at the moment,” Helen Crooks, director of Wright People Human Resources and a former transport industry specialist explained during the webinar, “41% of the workforce will consider leaving their employer this year. It’s been referred to as ‘the great resignation’.”


She pointed out that the cost of an employee leaving the business is estimated at 30% of their salary, and went on to detail a series of reasons why so many are leaving their existing posts.


“There’s a very high level of job vacancies and higher pay, [but] this is really important: employees who had resolved to leave [their job] in 2020, but hadn’t because of the Covid effect. They


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