Hire mechanics before the spring rush

Every shop owner knows the calendar. The first warm weekend in spring, the bench goes from quiet to three weeks out. The mechanic you should have hired in February is the one you are now trying to find in April, when every other shop in town is looking too. By the time they have learned your process, it is June.

Hiring early means running a small hiring process in the quiet months, alongside everything else. That usually means applications in one inbox, notes on scraps of paper, and a vague memory of which candidate was good on the phone. ATS keeps it in one place. Each role has a pipeline, each candidate has a record, and you can see at a glance who is waiting on you.

ATS is part of erp.io, in the same workspace as Service. Candidates are stored as people in the erp.io CRM, so someone who applied last season and a rider who became a candidate are the same record, not two.

A mechanic's resume tells you where they worked. It does not tell you whether they can true a wheel, bleed a set of hydraulic brakes without contaminating the pads, or set up a Di2 derailleur without guessing. The only way to know is to put them on a stand. ATS has a technical interview type for exactly this: schedule it, name who is running it, and record the result on a scorecard.

Write down what a good bench test looks like in your shop and use the same one for every candidate. A wheel with a known wobble, a brake that needs a bleed, a bike with a mis-indexed rear derailleur. The scorecard notes say what they did, how long it took and what they missed. When you are choosing between two candidates in March, you compare notes instead of impressions.

Keep the phone screen short and practical: which systems they have worked on, whether they have done e-bike motor diagnostics, when they can start, and whether they are looking for full-time or seasonal work. Move them to the next stage the same day, so a good mechanic is not waiting a week to hear back.

The day someone accepts is when ATS hands over to the rest of the suite. Add the new mechanic to the erp.io workspace with the right role. Role-based permissions are live in Service today: the workspace role, from crew to lead, manager, admin and owner, sets what each person can do, so a new mechanic on the crew role can fill in a tune-up checklist and close their visits on day one without being able to change the template or reschedule the week.

Then give them your standards. Courses lets you build a training course on your tune-up procedure, your safety inspection and your e-bike rules, and assign it before the first shift. The checklist in Service makes sure the standard is followed on every bike. The course makes sure they understand why.

Scheduling them works in a simple form today. The Service week view lets you assign visits to the new mechanic by day, the Today page shows them their work, and they clock their time against each visit for a manager to approve at the end of the week. Bench-capacity limits per mechanic and hour-by-hour slots are not built yet.