Finding, Hiring, and Retaining Great Employees for Your Landscape Business

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes and you're listening to Landscape Business Course podcast you might be watching on YouTube or Facebook. I want to say thank you for joining again here on Landscape Business Course. Today we are talking about hiring and we're talking about how to find great talent, great players for your team. Now, today's big. We're talking about hiring everything. But I want to go really deep with it, with this subject with a lot of you because we're going, we're in spring rush. A lot of you are trying to find great people. We're overloaded with work right now. The economy is good, things are booming, people's companies are growing. You're getting tons of calls, phone's ringing off the hook, emails are coming in, leads are coming in from your online contact forms. And you're wondering, how do I find the people that are actually going to perform the work and going to run my company? If you have estimators and project managers and office managers in play, but then just doing the work, mowing the lawn, installing the mulch, trimming the trees, who's gonna do this work? And how can I find good people that are actually going to show up to work and do a good job? I want to go really deep with this subject with you on an online webinar. It's going to be a live webinar and it is going to be held on May 20th. So it's a little bit less than a month away. It's about three weeks away. May 20, 2pm it's open to everybody. It's completely free. This is not just for the Pro plus members, but it is completely free. May 20th, it's gonna be at 2pm Pacific time and we're gonna talk about how to hire great people, where to advertise that you're hiring and how to do that, how we've done it in ways that have worked and ways that haven't. We're gonna be talking about how to create a career fair. We're gonna be in step by step exactly how we've done it. We are going to talk about the legalities of hiring people and how much it really costs you to hire a C player and have to fire them and why this process is so important. We're gonn.

How I found them, hired them and then retained these top talent grade A employees and how you can too. It's going to be a great webinar. It's going to be probably an hour or so long with Q and A and you can ask all your questions about hiring. It's going to be an absolute blast. So check it out. You can go to landscapebusinesscourse.com and on the very, very top you will see a little link that says free webinar and and register here or register now. Click that button and it'll give you more details. If you are a course member, you'll need to log out to see that button, but it is on the very top banner of the homepage. You can also register for the online webinar by simply texting Landscape Business. One word. Landscape Business without a space. It has to be Landscape Business without a space. Text that to 44222 and then it'll ask you for an email. You'll give you the email and it will automatically sign you up for the webinar and it' you notifications before to make sure you're registered and make sure that you are ready to go for the live webinar. It's going to be an absolute blast and I'm going to have some pretty cool things coming up in that webinar we're going to give away. So check it out. Landscapebusinesscourse.com top banner or just text landscape business. One word to 44222 and you will get signed up for that webinar. But today I'm going to give you kind of a high level view of what that webinar is going to be about. Just one aspect of it. I'm going to share the two ways that we do hiring in our company and how we have created the team that we have within our organization. So there's really just two ways we've done it and I'll explain why we've done used certain ways one way or the other and what we're doing now. So you've heard me talk before about career fairs and I'm a big, big fan of career fairs. The reason is because you get a massive amount of applicants together and you can weed them out very quickly. And and so we've had a lot of success. We've only had one career fair where we walked away from the career fair and didn't end up hiring a great player. We've hired someone for every single career fair, but there was one that we hired someone and then ended up firing them after two days. And so you don't want those experiences as a business owner. You don't want those experiences for your team that you currently have where you're constantly firing people or worse yet, where people are getting hired and then leaving A lot. You don't want that. And so how do you find, hire and retain great people? And so one of the ways we've done that is career fairs. And so what we'll do is we'll advertise that and get as many applicants as we can to get 20, 30 applicants. And the reason for that is because then you don't have to interview them all. You don't have to do 20, 30 interviews. So this is really what we use in the spring. So we've had three, yes, three of these career fairs this spring. And we got a whole bunch of people together. Like I think I was looking the other day, like 108 people have applied to work for our company. And you know, we did have a link. Augustaloncareservices.com careers they can fill out their form and then if we're having an upcoming career fair, the office will then just invite them to that career fair night, tell them the time and which offices it's at, and then they show up. The great thing about the career fair is it saves you so much time when you are trying to get 20, 30 people and hire one or two.

To really get a good objective. Listening and then asking questions and then calling on references. All of that for 30, 40 people is pretty like a very big investment for you as a business owner to be spending that much time on to find one person and maybe not even find one person if you're patient. Like, if you're really looking for great people, you might go through 100 people before you actually find the one you need. And so for these career fairs, we get as many people together and we save ourselves the time of going through a whole bunch of resumes and then going through a whole bunch of interviews and then going through a whole bunch of references. And we save ourselves the time by having one evening where we come together, we talk about the company, talk about our future, talk about our past, how we've grown, share what the job entails, and literally it weeds out like 75% of people. 75% of people won't even end up. Like more than 75% of people won't even sign up for the next day, which we have, which is kind of like, so there's really, for the career fair, we have a three day process. Number, number one, the first day is going to be the career fair night itself. When we get together, give them some food, we have a presentation, I present and talk about the past, how we started the company, where the future of the company is all that Good stuff. Second day is really second day of the career fair is they can come and work basically for about an hour, and we pay them minimum wage for that. It's important. We'll talk about that in the webinar. So that second day, they come, they work for about an hour around the shop doing simple stuff. They don't need to have a whole bunch of technical abilities or knowledge about landscaping. It's to see how they work together with other individuals, how they lead, who leads, how they communicate with other individuals that they're working with and just see if they're a good cultural fit. That second day, the third day is interviews. 80 to 90% of people that show up for the career fair don't end up even having an interview. And so we weed out a massive amount of people that would. Otherwise we would have spent a bunch of time and energy trying to interview and reference check and all those things. So we come down to several people, and from that pool, we then get really good people. And then we even weed it down even further and hire individuals out of that pool. So that's the first way that we've used and that's the way we've done it for the past few years. And it's worked really good. And it's just been phenomenal. The amount of people that. The amount of applicants you get and you look at them, you're like, oh, my word, there's no one here. But when you actually do a career fair and the work fair, the second day and then you do interviews, then becomes very clear which 1, 2, 3 individuals out of the 20, 30 are actually the ones you want to hire. The reason I like that method is because it saves me time. But then two, it also makes it very clear to the applicants that, hey, we take hiring serious. We aren't just going to have you show up for an interview with your resume and the next day throw you out in the crew and try you out, we're not going to do that to them because we value our team and our culture so much. And it makes a very clear statement to the applicants when they see the amount of time that you're investing in a career fair and the workfare and making sure your people, my existing team, are there, then interviewing and then following up on every single reference, that's super important. And they see that this is not the average employer that is just trying everyone else, trying everyone else out and just having a big turnover. We don't want that in our company. And they see that, they see that we Take this serious and in turn will take their job a lot more serious. So that's the first way is career fairs. The second way I haven't talked about very much. And that's the way we do everything after the spring rush is really doing it one by one by one. However, there are certain ways to do this. We don't just tell people to come in for an interview. We don't just tell them to send their resume online. And then we set up an interview, we weed them out. So basically we take an individual and if they call or they want to get a job, we say, hey, go to our website, go to Augusta LawnCareServices.comcareers and fill out the form. That's their first step. They don't need to send a resume, they don't need anything like that. That form is very basic. You can check it out if you want. On our website, it's very basic. It basically gives us a few criteria that we're not going to hire someone over, like things like smoking, felonies, things like that. If they fill out any of that stuff, like we're not going to hire them. We have a drug free, smoke free workplace, so those things are important. But then we just basically give them a box to type whatever they want. And it just says, tell us about yourself, tell us about your experience, tell us about your hobbies. And you really get to know someone just by what they put in that box. If they put one line, they're probably not going to be a good fit for our company because they're probably trying to apply for a gazillion other jobs. If they explain themselves, are articulate.

Are showing that they actually care about this job, and are willing to put together some thought to make this paragraph look good and really read well, then this is someone we're interested in. We can look at their experiences and their age and what kind of role they're going to be fitting in to the company and are they going to be able to handle the workload? So our office takes that, takes all that information and weeds out the people that like right off the bat. We're not going to hire them. People that aren't going to fit our culture, they just won't. We'll email them back and say, hey, we've decided not employ you. And so that's the first step. The second step is they're going to call that individual and kind of do a short, kind of get to feel how this person is on the phone even. And then if they kind of pass that next step, then they set up an interview and that would be with me. So literally, probably about 30% of people actually get through those first couple steps of filling out the form. Because some people just want to send their resume to a gazillion employers and cross their fingers and hope something sticks. We don't want those individuals. We want people actually going to fill out the form and are going to go through the steps in the process and want to work at our facility, not just anywhere where they're gonna give them a paycheck. So they gotta fill out the form, go through the phone interview, get it set up for an interview, then at the interview, I am going to interview them. And I've really changed the way I've interviewed a lot in the past. And an interview can last anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour, if not more, depending on how I feel they are progressing towards where we want them to be. And so what I mean by that is basically when they first start, when they first come in, obviously we chit chat, get them comfortable a little bit. But then my default now is basically working through the places they have worked in the past. And I start most recent, where have you worked? Then after that I go down to the next one. I just keep going down. And at every single workplace I ask the individual for, I just say, hey, when I call, who there at that place of employment would be a good contact for me to do a reference check on. Because a lot of times they're not going to write all the references down on their resume even, and they aren't going to tell you the places that they don't want you to call. So what you do is you look for hesitation when you ask them. So for instance, yesterday someone was working at a pizza shop here. I said, who would you give me as a reference for that? And right away the individual seized up because there was no reference for that employer on their resume. And that's a good sign that there might be something up. And right when I said it, you could tell right away they didn't want to give me that information. And they kind of jumbled around and said, who was there a manager? Was there an owner, someone I could talk to? And so finally they give me a name. I don't just stop there at the name. I say, okay, make sure they know that I'm going to call that reference. I say, how do you spell their last name? And I write it out in front of them. And then I say, Mr. Jones, if I was to call Mrs. Smith, when I call Mrs. Smith here. What do you think she's going to say about you? Not if I call, but when I call Mrs. Smith, that's the reference they just gave me. What are they going to say? What do you think they're going to say about you? And when you make it very clear, you're going to call this person and they will be very honest with you. It's pretty amazing the things that they will say. And then when you actually do the reference check, they literally match up because you made it very clear, hey, we're serious about this. We're serious about getting these reference checks. And we just had a candidate go through all the steps the other day and was literally like we were about to hire him. But one of his references said something that he said in the interview that didn't match up. And it turns out the candidate wasn't telling the exact truth. He kind of said they split because of differing opinions and that he didn't really agree with their management style. When in reality there was other things going on. And so I see that one time in reference and immediately the candidate is dropped. I don't care all his experience, anything else like that, the candidate is dropped. If he wasn't going to be telling me the upright truth of how he left an employer and what actually went down, he was fired and not just walked away because difference in opinions. And yeah, it didn't happen like that anyways. So reference checks to me have become very, very, very important. Like, if they weren't working very well at a previous employer, there's a good chance they're not going to work very well for you. And I always ask at every single step as I go down their resume or their work experience, I ask, how did it end? How did it end when you left that job, was it on good terms? Were you mad about something? Were you fired? I always want to know how did it end? Because if they left their previous employer by calling them names, tearing them down, being mad at them, there's a good chance if something goes south in your relationship with that individual, they're not going to just peacefully leave. They're going to make L and I claims, they're going to try to make other people within the organization mad at you. They are going to try to get even with you, and you don't want an employee like that. And so this is what you're looking for in those references. So every single work experience that each employer, I'm getting a reference from that individual asking them what they think that employer that Reference check is going to say when I call them and getting that feedback. And then I basically say, hey, if we are interested in having you come back for another interview with our whole management team, we'll give you a call. And then I go and do my reference checks and I go through it. And this is what you're listening for. This is the sign of a great employee when you call their reference check. Not the ones on the resume, because they know those ones are gonna be good. They know those are gonna be good. You call using this method of asking them for a reference or not even a reference, just who is your. Excuse me, who is your manager at that place of employment? They give you the name, take the name, and then say, is it okay that I call them? And they say, oh, yeah, that'd be fine if you call them, I guess. And then they're like, oh, my, they might be. They might be saying, oh, my, this isn't good. Then you ask their name and how you spell it. And then you ask them, what will they say when I call them for a reference on your employment? And they're gonna get really honest with you, even if it's bad. You're looking for people that aren't gonna have any bad things to say about their employers. And when they did leave places, it was because of circumstance or they had to move or better opportunity or something like that. And then when you call the employer, you're looking for someone that says something along these lines. You have no. Like when I call a reference, when I call a previous employer and they say something like, you'll never regret hiring this candidate, or they were the best employee I've ever had, or their work ethic is outstanding. I've never seen anything like it. And then you ask the employer, why did they end up terminating the relationship with that employee? Was it because they got fired? Was it because they just had to move? Was it because of other circumstances that have nothing to do with the work performance of the candidate? And then figure out that those are the kind of two ways that we've hired people. Number one is career fairs. Number two is the way that we use after the spring rush. So after we need to get a bunch of people in the spring, the rest of the year we're still open for hiring. Now we're always accepting applications, we're always interviewing, and we are constantly hiring people. And I'd rather have a little too many people than not enough. And so we are making that transition right now into the case of hiring year round. And by doing so, we will be able to make that second way of hiring that's interviewing people as we go. Finding, weeding through people's candidates and their references and finding out references are so important to me now. It's incredible just how much I've changed as far as my interviewing methods and things. I can get to know someone pretty good in an hour and kind of get to know their feel. But when you start calling people's references and you make sure they know you're gonna call people's references, they start to tell you things you would not have ever dreamed of. And it's pretty amazing. And so I, I would definitely recommend trying to use both of those methods. If you're looking for several employees, it's probably fastest to get employees via the career fair because people will sign up for a career fair a lot easier than for an interview. So you can get a whole bunch of people for a career fair and then filter out the great candidates. So those are the two ways. Those are the ways we're going to dig really, really deep in on the webinar. So landscapebusinesscourse.com top little bar there. You can click Register now and fill out your information. You'll see a little bit more about what we're covering in that webina about how to create a strategy to find great talent. And if you don't want to go on the website, wherever you have a phone right next to you right now and you're listening on the podcast, pull out your phone, text 44222. That's 44222 and text one word. Landscape business. No space in between Landscape business. And it'll sign you up and register you for that webinar on May 20, 2pm I did it on a Sunday because I don't want the excuse of I'm out working or mowing lawns. We did it on a weekend because I Everyone has a chance to be in attendance. Check it out. Landscapebusinesscourse.com I'm Mike Andes. Until next time. Be great because nothing else Pay.