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GREENFIELD — The same company that brought the hard-to-miss car vending machine to the north side of Indianapolis is hiring Hoosiers.
Carvana lets customers browse, research, and order cars online. In 2018, it opened an inspection center in Greenfield, where employees get cars ready to list.
With business booming, Carvana is expanding, with plenty of opportunities for Hoosiers looking for work.
As a cosmetic associate at Carvana, Phillip Hale essentially works in an auto body shop, prepping cars to be listed on the company's website. With previous body experience, Hale has been able to build on his skill set at Carvana.
"I started in the inspection area where I did cosmetic inspection where we would find defects on the car inside and out," says Hale. "I trained about ten people over there, and then they moved me over here to the paint building."
One year into his job at Carvana, the 29-year-old has already been promoted and is working towards his career goals.
"It has changed my lifestyle dramatically, coming over here I have been given a lot of opportunities to learn about bodywork," explains Hale.
It's employees like Hale that Josh Evans, the general manager of Greenfield's Carvana facility, is looking to hire right now.
"Phil, he started on our inspection line with relatively no experience at all. He was a cosmetic associate that was just expecting for damage, not performing any work, but just identifying any defects," explains Evans. "And within the last year, he actually has been promoted twice. He started on the inspection line, worked his way up to the paint prep area, started doing bodywork. And now he is in the paint booth and is painting cars and has nearly doubled his income in the past year."
This facility supplies the Carvana website with cars, from an auction or the public, goes through an inspection process at the Greenfield inspection center, and then are repaired to meet the necessary standards to put them on the market to be sold across the country and delivered right to the customer's door.
It is a new way to sell cars, bringing new opportunities for new jobs.
"Providing paths for them to grow into new challenges, new roles, and to do something in the industry that has not been done," says Evans. "To produce this amount of cars out of one single site, a lot of people in the industry and outside the industry has never really seen."
The Greenfield Inspection Center opened in December of 2018 and took on about 200 employees, now they are expanding and need to more than double their staff, with an additional 300 people. There are positions for all skillsets.
"At the inspection center from start to finish, we do everything internally, so we have entry-level positions ranging from entry-level detailing, our photo associates, our inventory associates, lot attendants," explains Evans. "And then we have our skilled positions, which are our technicians and our cosmetic associates. So within our skilled positions, the skill ranges from you have never done anything related to that skill before up to the expert level and everything in between."
General Manager Josh Evans says Carvana offers excellent benefits and generous paid time off, but possibly the most attractive part of a career at Carvana is the opportunities to move up through the company.
"We have hands-on training and education for all levels," says Evans. "And we have career pathing from inventory associate all the way up through master level painter or master level technician if that is what you want to do. Our facility based on how they operate, we have a career path for each position."
Monday, March 16, Carvana is hosting a hiring fair from 11 a.m. - 7 p.m. For more information on the event and how to register, go to joincarvana.com.
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