The age old question of “How do you find good people?” is not going away anytime soon. It is one of if not the hardest aspect of running a home service business. It is not an easy task, but I believe it comes back to culture and recruiting and should be approached methodically.
It starts with the company owner and what the company culture currently is. The owner needs to ask, “Would you work for you?” This may be a hard question to answer. You need to design the company as a place someone would want to work in. It’s extremely difficult to get someone excited about joining a poor work place environment and culture.
Once the culture is in place and you are offering an attractive position, then it comes down to recruiting. Going after prospective candidates to join your company should be no different than marketing for more clients. Companies will spend $10,000 on a marketing campaign for clients but won’t spend $1,000 on hiring web-sites to attract local A-level players.
At Revive Washing, we are constantly hiring A-level players to join our team to help us continue to grow our company in the exterior house washing marketing in Surrey, Langley, White Rock and the surrounding cities. ‘Always Be Recruiting’ is the name of the game. This is how we do our system:
- Pay a Recruiting Bonus – Current team members are compensated for recruiting friends in their network. Over the past 3 years growing Revive, my best hires have come from friends of my current team members. We pay $200 for a seasonal hire and $400 for a year round candidate. These bonuses are paid out after the recruit has stayed through the applicable season in our company. One of our technicians this year got a cheque for $600 because he recruited 3 of his friends to join our company. Here is a photo of the recruiting card that we use to attract candidates.
2. Design the Culture – As mentioned above, we work super hard to make this a fun place to work. We pay our team members well and give them bonuses for hitting their key metrics and collecting 5 star reviews. We do our absolute best to take a non-glamorous tasks of pressure washing and gutter cleaning and make it not about the task itself but make it more about the experience of having our team member join our team.
We leverage 2 technology platforms including Jobber as our CRM and slack as our internal communication to keep all our team organized and aligned. Jobber keeps all our crews organized and Slack allows our team to share wins of the day and talk to each other daily.
3. Post Ads Often – We refresh our ads online at least one time per week. With our online channels this year, our best candidates have come from Craigslist. We do this in a specific way however. Prospective candidates are directed towards a landing page with an online application form. This form takes at least 10 minutes to fill out and ensures that more serious candidates fill out the form. We do get less candidates, but the ones we get are of higher quality.
Here is a link to our online application form. Prospective candidates are directed here to apply for a job with Revive.
Recruiting is a never ending game. When you run a service business, your business is only as strong as your people. It is something I spend a lot of my time in and a lot of time designing systems for how we can get the best people to join Revive Washing.
