I Stopped Hiring ‘Hard Workers’ After This Mistake

All right, let's talk about actually getting applicants to show up for interviews. These are people that want to work for you. Where do you find them? And then how do you get them from random Joe Blow to in your office doing an in person interview. Now, first off, you want to make sure in your website you have a really good careers page place where they can apply, a place where you can show employee testimonials. And we literally have dozens of videos of employees working in Augusta that are just talking about their experience. That's going to separate you from everyone else that has absolutely nothing on their website when it comes to careers. Also have a place on your website, ideally where they can apply, but also see things about your culture. A Day in the Life of Let's give you a quick look into a day in the life at Augusta Lawn Care.

Yes, you're going to hire someone to come in for a video for a day or two. You're going to pay them some money. But I promise you, any dollar you spend towards Indeed or Facebook or any job posting, you're going to have better return. If when they get to your website, it shows off everything about your culture, about your employees, about your team. Now, after they've applied from your website, or potentially a website like Indeed, where they submit their resume directly to you and they apply there, I need to communicate with them quickly. I really recommend using whatever platform you possibly can. I would email them, I would contact them through Indeed. I would also then text them. I would call them as fast as possible. The same way that you're trying to jump on the phone with a customer calls, we should immediately, if we're looking for hires and application comes, we should immediately be jumping on the phone, texting them, emailing them and messaging them through Indeed. You're like, well what if they get overwhelmed? Well, then they might actually show up for an interview. And in a really tough labor market, we need to be as fast as possible jumping on these applicants when they're applying. So I'm going to be touching them at all potential aspects of communication, text, phone, email, and through Indeed. I'm also going to have a process that's going to keep them warm up into the time where when they actually show up for the interview. Because my goal is to get them to the interview, not just like to set up the interview. Cause you might only have 10 or 20% of people actually end up showing up even once they've applied. Like, well, I think they want the job so they'll show up. Not true. They have a bunch of other applications they've sent out too. And they might just get distracted and forget about the appointment they set up with you. And so I'm gonna have a sequence of text messages, phone calls and emails that go out to this potential applicant and keep them warm. I'm gonna tell them about our Audible program. I'm gonna their career progression and the way that they can move up inside the organization. I'm going to tell them about Pay for Performance. I'm going to send them a link over to the video in the careers tab of our website where they can watch videos about A day in the Life and hear from other employees. I'm going to spread that out. Just like I would be warming up a client to accept an estimate, I'm going to warm up an employee. So by the time they show up for the interview, they already know about Pay for Performance. They already know about our profit sharing program. They already know about Audible and all the team meetings and what we do for safety and A Day in the Life. This is what makes you different than everyone else they're applying for is having this sequence to make sure they actually show up for the interview and they're excited for it. Speed ultimately wins. The faster you get back to an individual and an applicant, the better chance they're going to actually show up for interview. Once you've got an application, you do not have a hire. You simply need to now follow up the same way you would on an estimate to make sure they convert into someone that in person you can actually conduct the interview. Where do we actually go to find these applicants? The number one place right now in terms of job boards is indeed it's the number one place. And that will change probably over the next few years. Things come and go. There used to be monster, used to be able to place on Craigslist and get good applicants. Used to be able to post on Facebook jobs and be able to get good applicants. Right now, Indeed is really the big boy now. The problem I have with Indeed is they don't allow for a lot of videos and pictures and creative. It's mostly text driven and so I need to be able to have links that will go to my careers tab that will go to my YouTube page and share more creative ways of highlighting my company and separating me from the path. So Indeed is just someone you got to pay. And yes, you're going to pay a daily rate usually or you're going to pay a per fee for each applicant that comes in. I've seen a blend I don't Necessarily have one that works or doesn't. Just know that if you're not responding back to applicants and you're not denying them, you could potentially be paying more. Now, one thing that can work, and this is actually an example from our Facebook group inside of Augustination, and that is one of the owners did this, and that is you simply make a Facebook post, but then you boost that post to your local area for the age demographic you're targeting. So if you're like, well, I'm wanting to target between people between 20 and 40 years old, you can target that demographic in your local area and then just make a regular post as if it was a job ad and then boost it to those individuals. This is him over on the right hand side over the course of several hours just getting tons of applications and he was driving all the traffic from the Facebook boosted post over to his careers page inside of Augusta Lawn Care, where people were just submitting applications. Those applications are of the highest value because they've seen our testimonial videos. They've seen the day in the Life. They've seen what pay for performance is instead of just randomly, someone, Indeed even submitting 20 applications to any labor position that they can possibly see. Now, even once they've applied and you got the application, as I've said, speed to get them in the door for an interview is very important. I recommend having a template that you copy and paste, just like this one we have for Augusta. These are the type of templates you want to create throughout the entire hiring process. So you're not always typing these up. So copy and paste from a template exactly what you want to say at every single stage in order to be able to get them to the interview. Once you've got an applicant to an interview, the game is not over. We still need to interview them correctly and make sure they're a good candidate for your business. So the interview process is very important. Now, if you're just getting started, it can be intimidating to have to interview people to work for you if you've never done it before. What I recommend is printing off an actual process and system for your hiring questions. Literally, what we have @ Augusta is 17 questions that you're going to ask one right after the other. For example, what do you know about Augusta Lawn Care? Number two, have you checked us out online? And the reason it makes it a little bit easier if you have the questions printed off is when you're asking the questions, they know that you're simply reading off the paper and they just Assume like, well, this is part of the problem process. I will answer the questions. And if you get nervous or you start to forget what you're supposed to talk about next, you just go to the next question. So having a great interview, questions that are pre planned, I would recommend doing this for your first few hundred interviews. Until you've done a few hundred, it's very difficult just to have someone walk in. You're complete stranger, they're nervous, you're nervous, and trying to strike up a dialogue that's actually going to lead to a good business decision when it comes to hiring or not a new applicant. So first off, have great interview questions, have a system around that. So we have a little hiring and onboarding process. Like before the interview, during the interview, here's the questions, here's the things we're going to observe. These are the type of things that once they leave, I'm actually going to kind of grade them on. Like for example, did they have fidgety body language, did they have eye contact, did they have good questions for you? These are things to actually have in writing so that when once you finish an interview, you can accurately judge them the same way every time. Because guess what, you're going to have good days, you're going to have bad days, and you don't want that to affect your interviewing decision or whether or not you hire them. So get the questions printed off, make a system out of it. Next thing is, don't sit behind a desk. Honestly, a lot of people, they're just super nervous coming for an interview and you sitting behind a desk, you're hiding half of your body and it puts you in a weird power dynamic. I've found it's usually helpful to just pull your chair around and sit like at a 45 degree angle from them. I'm not going to do knee to knee. All right, mister, let's talk like shoulder to shoulder against them, you're immediately confrontational. Give them a 45. Give me a 45. Open things up and make it a little more conversational. Sometimes it's helpful to walk them around the office real quick, give them a quick joke, you'll give them some water, get them to chill out a little bit is a lot of times the way to break down some of those stress barriers. And there's their nerves and actually get to know them as to whether or not they'll be a good fit for your culture. When it comes to reference checks. And I would love to have reference checks after every single interview. And I actually do ask for them in the interview process because it can tell a lot as to whether or not someone's actually a good fit is who are they giving for references? And what do they say when I tell them that, like, hey, yes, your last manager. Fantastic. What are they going to say about your performance when I call them? And if I call them, when I call them starts to like, their brain starts turning. And now all of a sudden you hear, oh, actually I got fired. And last, it wasn't a layoff or whatever it might be. But furthermore, when it comes to actually doing reference checks, I would love to do. And in the past, my best hires have usually been when I do call two or three of the references. That being said, if you're in a really tough labor market, there are times that a really good candidate will have four or five job offers within 24 hours. And I don't have the time to wait around collecting reference checks. So a lot of times if I have a really good candidate in front of me, and I really think they're going to be a good fit, based upon our interview question, everything, just nailing it, there's a good chance they're going to have a job offer by the end of the day. And. And a lot of times, just like your leads out in the field, when it comes to customers, the person that gets the estimate to them first wins. If someone's really good in front of you, I don't mind you locking them down right away, offering the job and trying to get commitment that gets them to stop going to more interviews and sending out more resumes. And you don't have sometimes three, four, five days to hear back from all these reference checks. And yes, that's the more methodical way of doing it. But for laborers out in the field, especially entry level laborers, that is in a really tough labor market, sometimes they will have a good candidate will get three to four job offers in one day. And if you're not the one that's first, you don't even got a shot. Okay, so let's assume that you got a new team member, they're hired, they got their first day on the job scheduled, and you're rocking and rolling. The first day is super important. I recommend that being an orientation day for the employee, even if it's only a half day. I'm not a huge fan of like, here's your uniform, there's the truck, hop in, good luck. That sort of preparation and commitment to the employee is what you can expect in return. Like, if you're not going to trust them. If you're not going to commit to them, if you're not going to train and invest into them, why in the world would they do that to you and your business? On the first day, what I like to do is actually sit down with the new team member and go over their orientation packet. In the orientation packet we have a few page document. In fact, this one is four pages long. But it's going to go over like what they actually want to know. The things that usually take a couple of weeks for them to figure out. Iron these things out. It'll make them feel much more established and have a foundation at the company instead of having to like pick up on all this stuff over the course of a few weeks. Uniform policy, other ways to make money, how to get promoted, how to make more money, how to, to get ahead in your career, the profit sharing program. These are like the things that they need to understand right from the get go. And there's a signature for them as well as a signature for their manager. Ultimately I need them to understand this because even though they signed their employee handbook, that employee handbook is like 25 or 30 pages long. I need them to actually read and understand these four pages. And I'm going to read over it line by line, word by word. I'm going to sign off on it and put it in their employee profile. I'm also going to go over the training checklist. I'm not going to throw them in the truck. I'm going to be like, go figure everything out. Even if they're just mowing grass, I don't want them back up the trucks day one. I don't want them on a zero turn on day one. And I don't want the trainer having to train them on everything in day one. I want them to get efficient and profitable on one task. Line trimming, edging and blowing. That's all I want them to do for the first three days. And this walks through the different ramifications and expectations of every single aspect of their job. Of those first two weeks, we expect all of our team to be trained up and be able to do all the tasks within two weeks. If it's going to take way longer than two weeks, either A, the services are too complicated or B, they don't have the skills or the desire to be able to learn the skills to the job correctly. And then we're gonna have a trainer assigned to every single trainee and they're going to actually rank them either as productive, needs improvement, or not productive on every Single one of the tasks that they're supposed to learn in those first two weeks. This is going to be filled out every single day by their trainer. And then we give a bonus to the trainer. Assuming this gets filled out every single day, the first 10 days of them working with us, having some sort of orientation is really, really important. And then secondly, what's their first week or two going to look like in terms of training and then having a way for them to be able to know whether or not they're meeting requirements. And if they're not, you should have a standard as to what happens if they don't hit requirements after two weeks. Like, if they're not going to be able to learn the skills, there's no reason to keep the business going through unproductive labor and people making mistakes if they're constantly not able to do the skills required to do the job by themselves. And so having a system in place is what's going to keep. Keep the culture high. It's going to allow for new trainees to feel welcome, be have orientation to the culture, and then be able to be successful inside of the team. When it comes to building a great team and a great culture, the number one thing that actually sets that standard is not fun to talk about, and that's firing. No one enjoys firing. It's. It's never fun. It's always a lot of tension inside the team, potentially even you, emotionally, it's just. It's just pathetic. It's bad for everybody. However, it's extremely important you, as a leader, take it very seriously as to who you fire and when to fire. Firing is ultimately the thing that will create the standards inside your business until you fire someone over it. It's just a suggestion. If you want to make it a standard, you'll have to fire someone over it. One of the things that at Augusta Lawn Care we, you know, really believed in is having where you don't talk negatively about people and you don't have drama going on. I remember the very first time when we hired someone that had a ton of experience and they actually allowed us to get into paver patios, retaining walls, excavation, because they had a lot of experience and they're older. They had probably about 20 years of management of, like, a crew and all sorts of hardscaping projects. It was great. They trained our team. I still remember the first day that I made that change and Lee was the estimator and having to sort of give direction to the crews. And that included this individual that had a lot of experience and felt entitled to be able to tell everyone else what to do. And he did not take it well. He kept giving an attitude as to why he should be the boss and that Lee should not be the one that was sort of leading the team. And although he didn't say it directly, it was kind of baked into the way his attitude and then some comments he could kept underhandedly saying, like, you don't need to tell me that, like, I know that and like, you don't need to be telling me what to do. Immediately I fired him. And the reason for that was because I was not going to have the decision of leadership of Lee, that being passed off to Lee, being undermined by the person that was the most experienced, having some sort of grudge or wanting some sort of position inside the company. And so if you're going to set a standard that, like, that's not the way we're going to operate, you're going to have to fire up based upon it. It's not going to be fun. But if you don't want people to, you know, if you want them to stop showing up 15, 20 minutes late, fire someone over it. And then the team meeting be like, oh, the reason Bobby got fired is because he kept showing up late. Now all of a sudden it is the standard to show up on time.

Most states are what's called at will, which means you can fire someone for no reason whatsoever and you don't have to give them a reason to let them go. In most scenarios, it's honestly better just to fire that way instead of giving a reason. Otherwise the person can contrive all sorts of craziness and potentially see you. The very first person I fired literally made up a story about getting hurt on the job and then sued me for a lot of money. And then I settled with them outside of court. It left a really bad taste in my mouth. But it taught me the lesson that if you're going to fire someone, you don't need to give them a reason. Because if you make up a reason, they'll use it against you and they'll say it's discrimination. They just go off the rails. So sometimes it's just the best to not give a reason. And if you're going to give a reason, make sure that that whatever that reason is was in the employee handbook that was signed. So if you have your rules and regulations inside your employee handbook and they sign on that, then you can fire upon the fact that they didn't uphold that standard. But you, if you're going to fire someone just because they're not really a good fit, or they're not really pulling their weight or they're not doing a job or you don't like them or something like that, make sure you just fire them and you don't say anything as to why, which stinks and don't like it. But if you want a step by step guide of starting a lawn care business specifically from zero to past $100,000 in revenue, watch this video right here.