I’m sure that either you or another contractor you know in town has said that there’s no good help available. There are contractors out there who are finding plenty of good help by not recruiting and hiring the same way as most other contractors.
Perhaps the best way to do it is hiring for attitude and aptitude and training people before they develop bad habits. You have to be willing to make the investment in training. Some contractors spend a lot of money sending new service techs and plumbers to a school like Ultimate Technical Academy in North Little Rock, Arkansas.
When Ed O’Connell was running O’Connell Plumbing in the San Francisco Bay area, he trained his plumbers himself. They would be joined at the hip for a year while Ed taught them simple tasks and graduated to more complex service problems. At that point, the new plumber would get his own truck and his own new helper to train just like he had been. The cycle continued.
If you’re running an ad on Craigslist or similar, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Our Contractor of the Year, Mike Agugliaro of Gold Medal Service, told a room-full of contractors recently that they had to get rid of their self-limiting beliefs. I heard Agugliaro talk at a water and wastewater equipment show in Indianapolis.
In the past, Agugliaro hated his employees right after he hired them. They won’t live up to expectations, they’ll smoke dope on their lunch hour, they’ll do the work wrong, or they’ll steal. You program your brain for the outcome, he said, and that’s the outcome you’ll get unless you change your thinking.
“You can’t take on a new skillset without a new mindset,” said Agugliaro.
Contractors have to create a company culture that makes the company an attractive place to work. Your culture is whatever you want it to be, and it should be as inviting, open, fun and consequential as you can make it. By consequential, I mean that employees need to feel that their work is important and that they’re making the world a better place.
Agugliaro pointed out that there is no cookie cutter approach to company culture and hiring because it has to fit each company. What works in New Jersey wouldn’t work in Alabama or in Colorado. The contractor has to establish his culture and that culture influences the type of employees that he brings in.
Your company already has a culture, even if it just happened by accident.
Creating a culture on purpose forces a contractor to know himself and to define his company — what is the company’s self image and what are its values? Once you know that, you can create a model of an ideal employee. It’s like picking a spouse. You’ll know what you want and, more importantly, what you don’t want. Once you know what an ideal employee looks like and how they will fit into the culture you’ve created, now you know what to look for.
When Agugliaro interviews a prospective employee it’s a two-way interview — here’s what I can do for you and tell me what you are going to do for me? The contractor must give prospective employees a vision for the future that includes opportunities for professional growth.
Agugliaro never stops recruiting. Even if he doesn’t have a job opening today, he creates a “hot list” because he may need somebody three months from now. Agugliaro is also willing to pay his people well, but the culture is what keeps them. It’s a good example to follow.