How to Find Employees for Your Landscaping Company

With 36% of people feeling unmotivated recently — over a third — professional relationships can be difficult. Finding new employees can be a challenge, as it's important to find the people who are willing to do good work for your company (and demonstrate exactly why they should).

If you're looking for employees for your landscaping company, you're likely going for people who are not only motivated but hard-working, trustworthy, and reliable. How exactly do you do that?

This is how you find the best landscaping employees possible.

• Hire at the right time
• Advertising your openings
• How to sift through applications
• Conducting the interview

Hire at the Right Time for Your Landscaping Company

If you need landscape employees, it's essential to find the right time to hire them. If you own your own business, you might be reluctant to bring others on board and wait too long — or you might do the opposite and hire them when there's not much work going around. Finding good employees means finding that sweet spot so they join your company with work to do, but without feeling overwhelmed.

Sit down and really think about the time you plan to hire new employees. Is there too much work for you? How many more employees do you need to cover it?

Having a plan of how many people you want to hire and ensuring the work is likely to come flowing in will help you find the best people, who'll stay motivated to work for you.

How to Advertise Your Openings

Now, it's time to decide how to advertise. You have a few potential options:

• Social media posts
• Word of mouth
• Online advertising
• Flyers

What you want to do will ultimately depend on what you're looking for. If you landscape in a small area and would like to keep employees local, you can post flyers around with some contact details. You can also find neighborhood groups on Facebook and post on Nextdoor to keep things to a tight geographical circle.

If you're willing to higher from further out — or you cover a whole city or county with your landscaping business — you might want to advertise online. Linkedin and Indeed are great job boards, with many more besides.

It's also great to use job boards if there's a lot of information to cover in the ad.

One thing to consider is that by posting on job boards, however, you're likely to attract a lot more applicants. This means ensuring you have the time and capacity to go through all of that paperwork.

How to Sift Through the Applications

If you have certain requirements for the job, you can quickly weed out people who don't meet these. For example:

• Do you have a driver's license?
• Do you have X years of experience?
• Does this pay range work for you?
• Do you have a highschool diploma (if this is required)?

If you've posted on job boards, it's a good idea to ask these questions upfront and get instant answers so you can trash the ones that don't meet your needs.

After that, you can read through the people who've contacted you. If they've included cover letters and/or resumes, those are a good place to start. A study found that a recruiter only takes six seconds to decide if a resume is good enough to move forward with the application process, so you may not have to spend too much time on this. 

From there, you'll have to decide who you want to interview. You'll want to interview about three people for every position you have open, and no more than five as that may be too much. 

Conducting the Interview

First thing's first — you need to give a good impression yourself! Candidates are judging you as much as you are them, and the last thing you want is to miss out on a good candidate because you didn't conduct the interview well.

Prepare your questions in advance. Make sure you show up on time and dress well. Be prepared to tell the candidate a lot about the company they'll be working for, as they likely want to know.

For the most part, you should keep your questions professional. You can also keep your tone friendly and the atmosphere casual to put them at ease and really get a good picture of the person though.

It's also essential to educate yourself on what it's not okay to ask, if this is your first time interviewing. Candidates do not have to disclose having a disability to you (and you don't need to know, unless it's something that would very much impact their ability to do the job). It's also illegal to ask about their age or their future plans for children in case you worry about them needing time off.

You also need to decide what you value in a candidate. Is experience or attitude more important to you? Would you rather have the unfriendly person with ten years of experience or the eager hard worker with two?

There's no right or wrong answer, but you need to know what works for you.

This Is How to Hire Great Landscaping Employees

Hiring great employees for your landscaping company might seem like a daunting ask. You could be worried about not finding the right fit or hiring the wrong person entirely.

As long as you do your due diligence, advertise in the right places, and conduct your interviews well, you'll find the best person or people for your team.

Want the best software in the industry for your landscaping business? Whether it's online payment systems, automated responses, or something else entirely, contact us today and let's see how we can make your company even greater.