Finding professional, reliable, experienced employees for your lawn care company can be like finding a needle in a haystack. So, what are some strategies to help you find qualified workers for your business? Ones that you can trust with your lawn spray equipment and your clientele? We’ve done some digging, and here’s our best advice to avoid bad hires and strengthen your team in 2019.
Establish a Quality Selection of Applicants: The hiring process begins with recruiting prospective employees. There are several ways to go about this, and combining them is your best bet:
- Get the Word Out: You’ll get out what you put in if you do it right. You don’t have to shell out a fortune on advertising. Using online platforms like Facebook and Craigslist to publicize your available positions can help speed up the process. Tell everyone you know – friends, family, and the entire social media world. You never know who knows somebody that would be the perfect fit. Include “help wanted” language on your trucks, website, and in newspapers.
- Network with Vendors: Build a relationship with your vendors to achieve a level of comfort where you can ask for possible employee referrals.
- Offer Referral Incentives: Want more quality employees like some you already have on your team? Offer your staff a bonus if they refer a new hire who stays for at least a few months.
Fine-Tune Your Hiring Process: Once you’ve acquired a good pool of applicants, it’s time to narrow your options down effectively.
- Provide detailed job descriptions and know the exact type of person and qualifications you want for your vacancies. The overqualified are a better bet than those on the other end of the spectrum, but any applicant should be willing to grow and change according to your business’s culture and needs.
- Reassess your interview questions to make sure you’re hiring someone with the skills, experience, and knowledge required for the position.
- Ask for references and check them! What references say (or don’t say), and how they say it, can tell you a lot about an applicant.
Of course, establishing a great group of employees means keeping the ones you already have. No matter how advanced your hiring process is, if you can’t keep employees on board, your company is going to struggle to grow. Provide your team with the appropriate mentoring and training to deliver unbeatable service. Acknowledge their work, verbally and with tangible rewards like gifts or raises and bonuses. Make your company one that everybody wants to be a part of — current employees and prospective hires alike.