Penske's Best Dealerships To Work For success delivers recruiting advantage

Nearly half of this year's Automotive News list of the 100 Best Dealerships To Work For is dominated by a single company: Penske Automotive Group Inc.

The nation's third-largest new-vehicle retailer has long had a strong standing in the annual ranking, which has honored top dealerships across the country for 11 straight years. Best Companies Group selects the winners based on surveys of U.S. dealership employees.

In 2021, 35 Penske dealerships made the list. This year, that figured swelled by 11 to 46 — a record for the number of stores by one company ever on the annual list.

Margaret Lane, Penske's talent and development officer, said the retailer over the past five years has increased its focus on expanding the number of its dealerships making the list.

Penske's store general managers are "naturally competitive" but also have adopted a long-term view that goes beyond doing well on a one-time survey, Lane said.

"They're really looking at it as a yearlong process," she said. "And they've also kind of decided that this particular program is upping their game, and they're listening to their employees. And I think that's what's driving the momentum for everybody."

While Penske has ranked stores this year that are located across the country, many of its dealerships garnering the accolades are located in the company's east region where Lane formerly headed human resources. She said the focus placed by that region's leaders and store-level managers on the Best Dealerships To Work For program — which has included efforts to be more inclusive and to encourage employee feedback — has spread across Penske's regions.

The retailing giant uses its success on the list as recruitment and retention tools, with the rankings featured in job postings and used in social media posts. CEO Roger Penske boasted about his company's 2022 Best Dealerships To Work For accomplishment during the company's second-quarter earnings call in July.

"This is an outstanding achievement and continues to set us apart from everyone else," Penske said.

Lane said the company's rankings success gives its recruiters an advantage in hiring. Penske has 15 recruiters, a figure that has grown over the years and is up from the four it had in 2017, to help find the best talent and screen potential hires before store-level interviews, Lane said.

"That's a huge benefit to be a winner on there from a candidate's perspective, because if you're consistently winning, increasing the number of stores, that shows that the company takes employees' opinion seriously," Lane told Automotive News. "But for a candidate, they understand that the employer wants to improve the workplace culture, listens to the employees and wants to make it a good environment."

Penske also has focused attention on improving communication with employees.

The retailer in September 2021 launched its PAG 360 app as a way to communicate and provide information to its work force. The voluntary app now has about 7,700 users and reaches about 47 percent of the company's employees, Lane said. So far, more than 1.4 million interactions have occurred via the app, she said.

Such efforts have helped keep Penske's turnover rate lower than the industry average. For 2022 through August, Penske's overall turnover rate was 20 percent, Lane said, adding that the measurement is consistent with the company's turnover rate for all of 2021.

Average industry turnover was 34 percent in 2021 — the lowest level in the 11-year history of the National Automobile Dealers Association's annual Dealership Workforce Study — and down from 46 percent in 2020.

Garth Brown, general manager of the Jaguar-Land Rover Paramus and Jaguar-Land Rover Englewood dealerships in New Jersey, which both are honored in this year's rankings, said the Best Dealerships To Work For awards are celebrated and used in communicating with potential job candidates.

It's helpful "if they can see that we're a forward-thinking company that looks after our employees, looks after our customers," Brown said.

"An accolade like this isn't easy to come by. It's pretty challenging. And we certainly lean on it when we're talking to prospective hires."
Brown said the Englewood store first was ranked on the Best Dealerships To Work For list in 2021, its first attempt at competing for the honor. The Paramus store didn't make the top 100 list on its first try, so dealership leaders launched an improvement program and had store employees suggest things to stop doing, what to keep doing and what to start doing, he said.

"We just knocked off as many of those things as we could," he said. "And then we were successful the next year."
Now the Paramus store is a three-time honoree, being ranked in 2019, 2021 and again this year, Brown said. Penske sat out of the competition in 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Brown, who has led the two dealerships since the late 2010s, said he aims to ensure his employees feel empowered and equal and that they "feel like it's everybody's business."
The Best Dealerships To Work For program helps the stores retain staff, he said.
"We talk about promoting from within and succession planning, and I think that gives people a reason to stay," Brown said.