A short how-to/tips video by Mike Andes offering four practical hiring strategies for lawn care businesses: (1) tune the application process as a filter to control applicant quantity/quality, (2) ask applicants why they left their last job to spot red flags, (3) prioritize checking direct references for punctuality, teachability and reliability, and (4) evaluate whether candidates ask thoughtful questions as a sign of initiative and cultural fit. The advice targets small landscaping businesses preparing to hire for spring.
Today we're going to talk about four ways to hire great team members for your business.
Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes with landscapebusinesscourse.com today we're at Command center here at Augusta Lawn Care. But today I'm going to talk about four tips when it comes to hiring. As we head into the spring, you're probably going to be hiring a few employees, and I want to give you four tips that I would recommend you use as you look for new employees. The first part is the application process. Now, this is really the determining factor of how many leads or applicants you're going to get. The same way we look at, like, marketing for new customers, and we look at, you know, spending more marketing dollars to get more leads. I look at the application process as really the way to determine if you need more applicants or less applicants. Now, if you're not getting a lot of applicants for your position, the job that you've posted, I'd really recommend taking a look at your posting and asking yourself, do I need to add more information or am I making it too hard to work for me? For example, if you're getting 100 applications for a position, yes, you can add more stringent requirements and levels of experience and licenses and all the rest of it. But if you're only getting one application after a week of your job posting, you probably might want to think about making a little easier to work for your business. Maybe you don't have to have that line that says the ability to lift 100 pounds over your head. Like, those are things you might want to take out if you're not getting enough applicants. So I'd really look at your applicant list as, like a filter, your application process as a filter. If you're filtering too many people out, you might want to make the application process easier. If you're getting too many leads and you're getting 100 applications and a bunch of them are trash, then you want to make the filter stronger. You want to filter more of them out by the application process. A couple ways you can filter more people out is requiring them to come to your website and actually fill out an application. It could be that they have to send a resume through your portal, not just send you a random resume along with another hundred people in, indeed. Like where they just click, click, click, click, and then send 500 applications to different businesses. Definitely by adding more filters in the application process, you're going to remove the amount of applications you get. But again, you've got to balance that with, are you getting enough Applications, the application process. By either adding or subtracting filters, you're going to reduce or increase the amount of applications you get. Number two, you want to ask them when they do come now for an interview. So they've gone through the application process. You like them, they look good on paper. You have them come in for the interview process. Now I want you to ask them this question. Why did you leave your last employer? This is a really important thing to bring up because if they start trash talking their last employer or their last manager, there's a really good chance they're going to do the same thing to you. He's as good as you think he might be. If they did that the last place they work and they're talking about how bad they are and everyone was against them, them and all the rest of it, there's a really good chance they're going to do the same thing to you. It's definitely a red flag if in an interview someone just starts going off about their employer and talking about how bad they were and how unfair they were and how rude they were. Like, that might be true, but if someone's bringing that up in the interview process, probably not a great sign going forward. All right. The third thing when it comes to hiring is you need to put more weight on the references. That is the people you're going to call and ask how they performed, when they worked for them. And what you're looking for is direct reports, the people that they actually directly reported to in the business. So if they work for a 40, 50 person firm, you might not actually call the owner. You're hopefully going to call their manager that was directly working with them all the time and actually can give you some good feedback in terms of their performance. Whether or not they showed up on time, whether or not they were teachable. Those are the type of things you want to ask. And so references are super, super important. We've had great interviews, people that we thought were definitely great hires. But as soon as we called the references, we found out, oh, they literally just left a few days ago, didn't bring back their uniform or their credit card or their keys and they just disappeared. Like that is definitely saving you from a bad firing, literally just a few weeks later. So getting great reference is important because we've had the same thing happen. The flip side, and that is we interview. It's kind of like they're okay, but then we call their references and they're just out of this world. They're like, this person is amazing. I would Hire them back in a heartbeat. And, and so you definitely want to make sure that the references correlate with the reasoning why the person left their last employer. Because if the employer like, oh yeah, everything was great, everything was wonderful. But then you ask the employee why they left. You want to make sure those things match up. Ideally, they've moved and they had to leave that place of work. That's when you're going to get the most honest feedback from that company that they worked for their past manager to really get what their performance was like working for that company. So ask them hard questions, ask them what their performance was like, ask them if they were a good learner, a good team player. That's number three. References. Very, very important. Number four is during that interview process, when you're asking them questions and going through things, yes, you can ask them questions. But another thing that really points me in the direction as to whether or not they'd be a great fit for our culture is do they ask good questions back to me? So after I'm done doing an interview process, I ask, hey, do you have any questions for me? If they're like, no, that's basically, it sounds great. If that's all they got, they're probably not the type of person that is going to be a high achiever, that is really looking out for their best interest for getting their career to the next level. And that's the type of people I want to work around. So if I'm just trying to work for someone who wants to show up and punch a time clock. Yeah, like someone who just answers my questions and then shows up to work and does their thing, that's fine. But if I'm looking for someone that's a go getter, wants to get to the next place in their career, drive the business forward, they want to improve, get new skills. I'm looking for someone who has great questions. Maybe they ask about the schedule or like pay or benefits or what their role in the company would be as it grows. Those are all great questions and I like questions. I want to see a potential applicant or interviewee actually have good questions because it means that they actually care. They actually are thinking about the future with the company and how their interests are going to align with it. So don't take it negatively if they start questioning about pay or, or about the future of the business, what the mission of the company is. Those are all very, very good questions that lead usually to very good applicants. So hopefully those four tips are very helpful as you begin to get into the spring rush, you start hiring lots of people. It can be overwhelming or it can be underwhelming. If you're not getting enough applicants if you're not getting enough applicants, go back to number one application process. What do you need to do to incentivize and make it look better to come work for you? How can you stand out from the other 500 landscaping companies around you that that just put work hard. Here's your dollar per hour. What can you do to stand out? Whether it be pictures, whether it be videos, whether it be the text, the verbiage that you talk about your company in the future, these are all things you can do to stand out at the crowd. I'm Mike Andes, landscapebusinesscourse.com, we'll see you next time. Best of luck out there. Hiring.
