When you hire employees, you only want the best. You will need to pay them fairly, sure, but an employee who provides value proportionate to what you pay them is indispensable. You’ve probably had a few bad interviews with people who weren’t qualified or didn’t care, and now you’ve got to be wondering how you can find a source of great employees. Luckily, it’s not hard!
To find the best lawn care employees, you have several options. Many websites, such as Indeed, are specifically tailored to finding quality employees that suit your needs. As you make connections in the lawn care industry, you could use those connections to find employees, whether they be friends of your current employees or material suppliers. You could even steal employees from competitors.
There are plenty of rich resources for good employees if you know where to look, and you’ll be happy to know that they’re not that hard to find! Read on to learn more about these excellent resources that can help you find the best employees possible.
Indeed
Indeed is one of the foremost and biggest job-searching sites, and as a lawn care business, it can be a valuable resource to find employees at any level, whether it be administrative or lawn technicians. Studies show that over 79% of job seekers use some sort of online tool as they hunt for a new job, and Indeed is one of the most trusted names in the job-searching field.
With Indeed, you can view the resumes of applicants without even meeting them in person, allowing you to decide who you do and do not want to interview at a glance. This saves both you and the potential employee time and money, so you can find the best employees for you, and the job hunters can find the best employers for them.
Alternatively, you can use Indeed to search for the best employees and invite them to apply! By using Indeed’s algorithms to find employees that fit your needs, you can take a more active role in the hiring process and find specific people who will make your lawn care company the best it can be.
The best part of Indeed is that it’s free! You won’t have to pay any money to put out an ad, and you can hire employees without spending a cent.
You can post a paid ad, however. If you’d like to keep the ad as visible as possible, you can pay a small fee to keep it ranked higher in Indeed’s search results, and the job listing will only be visible to employee candidates who meet all the criteria you ask for.
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Pay For Ads
Unfortunately, many good things aren’t free! If you want to find the best employees, you may have to be willing to dish out a few dollars. In the long run, being cheap almost always ends up costing you money, whether it’s regarding tools, vehicles, or employees!
There are many options for paid ads. You can take out a billboard to show that you’re currently hiring or print out a magnet or sticker to put on the side of your work truck or van. It’s worth looking into putting ads on your local television and radio channels; many smaller channels are always hungry for ad revenue. One good tactic is to pay for yard signs, and offer your customers a discount if they allow you to put the sign in their yard!
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Use Your Current Employees
If you don’t currently have any employees, you might be out of luck on this end. However, if you do have employees- and especially if they have experience in the lawn care and landscaping industry- they might have friends who are looking for a job, and if your employee is in the lawn care field, their friend might be as well!
Of course, you’re not going to want any random person off the street, so you’ll need to conduct as thorough an interview as possible. Thankfully, most of your employees will not want to upset their boss, so they will only recommend their most trustworthy, hardworking, and experienced friends.
To incentivize your employees to bring more people in to interview, you may offer them something of a “finder’s fee.” Whether it’s cash or some other valuable bonus, rewarding your employees for bringing other employees into the company is a surefire way to stock your company with nothing but the best people!
If you find yourself worried about your employees recommending all their friends to get a quick buck for cheap, you may want to institute some sort of delay on the finder’s fee. You could make it so that the referring employee only receives the bonus when the referred employee has worked for the company for a certain amount of time, or when they have worked on a certain number of jobs- without issue, of course. You can’t have somebody sticking around and causing trouble or doing poor work!
Talk To Your Suppliers
In any industry, especially in any given area, most business owners, employees, and vendors all know each other to some degree. If you are in regular contact with a material supplier, the odds are that you are at least acquaintances with several people in the supplier’s company.
These connections are worth expanding on. Just as material vendors will often send their best customers gifts to keep the customers buying from them as much as possible, you can send your material suppliers a gift to foster a good business relationship. You would want to keep your customers happy and coming back for more, right? You are your vendor’s customer, and they treat you the same way!
As vendors are usually heavily ingrained in a community, especially when concerning specific industries, they will have many connections and know a lot more people than you do. It’s worth the effort it takes to build business relationships, just so you can ask if your suppliers know anybody in the industry looking for a job. The odds are likely that they do, and as they want to keep you as a customer, they’ll only recommend the best employees. Your vendors are not going to want to risk making you angry by recommending you a lazy flake of an employee- that could drive you away, and is a potential loss for the suppliers!
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Poaching Employees From Other Companies
By poaching, we don’t mean ‘illegally hunting’- that’s illegal on several different levels, and generally a horrible idea if you run a legitimate, trustworthy business. Maybe a landscaping or lawn care business in The Hunger Games could get away with poaching employees, but in the real world, you’ll have to abide by real laws.
By poaching, we mean offering your competitors’ employees better wages or benefits to come over to your company. Unless another crime is committed along the way, this type of poaching is perfectly legal- you’re merely offering something better than their current employer! America operates under a free market, and in many states, employees can quit for any reason. Even if they live in a state where they can’t just quit, laws usually allow employees to leave if they receive a better offer
The only catch to this is an employee may be under contract, in which case they may face a hefty fee if they break the contract. If your landscaping or lawn care company is particularly successful and you want this employee, you may want to pay their contract fees. It’s important to note that this could be very pricey and is only worth pursuing if you are dead-set on hiring this employee, or your company is successful enough to have money to spare.
Conclusion
In conclusion, you have plenty of options for hiring great lawn care employees. Everybody needs to work to some extent, so there will always be a market for a job- and you will always need great employees, so there will always be a market for employees! No matter how you choose to search for employees, it’s not difficult. If you make yourself known as a good, reputable company that treats its employees well, people will be lining up at your door for an interview!
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Frequently Asked Questions
Should I hire my friends?
If you trust your friends to do good work for good value, yes! It’s usually advised against hiring your friends, as it can get messy if you need to fire them, but you know your friends better than strangers. If you can trust them, go ahead!
Should I post job listings on Craigslist?
You can certainly post job listings on Craigslist if you’d like, but it’s worth mentioning that Craigslist listings do cost money. Additionally, due to the nature of Craigslist, the people who respond to your ad may be of variable quality- you’ll be paying for a mixed bag of people. If you’re less picky or want as many people to apply as possible, Craigslist is a great option!
To learn more on how you can start your own landscaping business, check out my startup documents here.
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Meet Shawn Chun: Entrepreneur and Landscape Business Fan.
I’m a happy individual who happens to be an entrepreneur. I have owned several types of businesses in my life from a coffee shop to an import and export business to an online review business plus a few more and now I create online resources for those interested in starting new ventures. It’s demanding work but I love it. I do it for those passionate about their business and their goals. That’s why when I meet a landscape business owner at a job site, driving down the road or anywhere else I see myself. I know how hard the struggle is to retain clients, find good employees and keep the business growing all while trying to stay competitive.
That’s why I created Landscaping Business Boss: I want to help landscape business owners like you build a thriving business that brings you endless joy and supports your ideal lifestyle.