Have you heard of the Great Resignation? Well, it’s real, and it affects how your landscaping business will do this growing season. If you can’t find employees for your commercial lawn care company, you’ll need to cut your client load.
While work ideas are changing, these new ideas aren’t all bad. And while you may push your sales team to sell, sell, sell … you may find that you’re getting backed up when you’re short-staffed.
Instead, you can improve how you onboard your new hires, create a career page that sells your company’s culture, and consider your employees’ needs for work-life balance.
How your company recruits new hires determines if you’ll have enough teams to go out in the field.
Take a Look at Your Company’s Culture—Would You Want to be a New Hire at Your Lawn Maintenance Business?
While we may call the younger generations “snowflakes,” stop for a minute to think back to your 20s and 30s. Yes, a strong work ethic is essential, but too much of a good thing—including too much overtime burns out the most energetic employees.
You also need to ensure that your company’s culture and work-life balance are in place. For example, you may mistakenly think that since lawn and landscaping maintenance is only a nine-month gig, your employees have plenty of time off between January and February to recharge.
Think about it. If you worked out in the hot sun for 10-12 hours a day, Monday through Friday, you’d want your Saturdays and Sundays off to recuperate from the extreme heat too.
And your workers still have family and civic obligations to fulfill in their off-hours. Plus, emergencies don’t wait for January to happen. Indeed, your employees still need PTO (paid time off) to go on vacations, attend weddings and funerals, and take a rest from work.
Gen Z and Millennials value a work-life balance, and you need to provide it for them if you want to recruit and retain loyal employees. Also, don’t demand that crews work every Saturday during the peak season … unless you’ll be working every Saturday alongside them.
Everyone needs downtime. While you may look only at your bottom line when selling lawn maintenance services, consider your employees before taking on more projects than your company can accomplish during the workweek.
Today’s workers are savvy, and they demand to work in a company that recognizes them as holistic human beings who need downtime during the week to recharge. When you look at your new hires holistically, you’ll find your recruiting efforts are more successful.
9 Tips for Partnering with New Hires
You may need to change your hiring process before recruiting for seasonal hires. Here’s a checklist for hiring employees for your commercial lawn company:
- Design a hiring process that’s efficient and able to attract high-quality candidates with the goal of them sticking with the job all season long.
And don’t forget to create a robust onboarding program. Don’t leave new hires to figure out how to use equipment, clock in, or mow commercial properties on their own.
- Use technology (online job boards, digital want ads, social media, and your website) to find new hires. Improve your career page to include photos of workers having fun together. Use multimedia, especially videos, to capture those fun moments.
Learn more: 7 Ways to Utilize Outdoor Lighting to Help Enhance Your Commercial Landscape
- Make sure your job descriptions are accurate and honest. You don’t want to add or completely change the job description during the interviewing or the onboarding process. Instead, you want to list what the job entails on the job board and your website.
You should also go into detail about what’s expected from each position, not posting a paragraph that says the candidate will be mowing, blowing, and edging.
Also, translate all of your information from your career page and job description from English to Spanish so everyone can understand what you’re looking for in a new hire.
- You can teach job skills (and you should be spending time making sure your hires know how to do their jobs), such as mowing lawns, raking leaves, and cleaning up flowerbeds. However, you can’t change a person’s work ethic or attitude toward others.
Instead of only looking for job skills, pay attention to the candidate’s ability to be coached, emotional intelligence (especially if they’ll be dealing with the public), temperament, and motivation.
- Consider using video-conferencing with your team to interview potential hires. Both the manager and the crew leader will add a perspective to help you hire suitable candidates.
As part of the interviewing process, take your interviewee along with a manager to a job site so the potential new hire can see for themselves what a typical day at the “office” looks like.
- Keep moving forward with the hiring process. Most good candidates are snatched up within 10 days after a job posting.
Read more: Managing Your Landscape Business in This Crisis
- Reword your job description by adding the benefits of working for your commercial landscape company. Studies have shown that qualified applicants want to see what your company can do for them (think salary and benefits) rather than what you expect of them right off the bat.
- Increase the value of working at a commercial lawn company. Industry experts recommend showing the new talent that while they may start mowing lawns for you, they won’t be doing that same job five years from now if they work hard and learn new skills.
- Tell your story about how you started in the green industry. Did you start your own mowing business when you were 16? How did you rise in the ranks to become a landscape business owner? Motivate and inspire new hires that the green industry is an upward mobile career.
Save Time and Money When You Get Your Landscape Equipment Parts from MowMore
Late winter is a perfect time to shop for replacement parts for your lawn and landscaping business. Get your equipment parts and other tools now before the spring rush.
Go to MowMore.com to find everything you need to efficiently run your green industry company. If you have any questions about your mowing equipment and replacement parts, call our customer service today at 1-800-866-9667 or fill out our contact form.
Sources:
BusinessNewsDaily.com, “7 Ways to Improve Your Hiring Process.”
Entrepreneur.com, “5 Best Strategies for Hiring Entry-Level Employees.”
SingleOps.com, Give Them Purpose.
Ibid, Employees Have Lives—Work/Life Balance in the Green Industry.
Ibid, How to Plan for Onboarding in Green Industry Companies.
Ibid, Show Them the Way.
TurfMagazine.com, Need Employees? Your Website Is the Key to Recruiting