Having an effective recruitment strategy is an investment that many landscape business owners undervalue. On a recent episode of the Landscape Disruptors podcast, Kelly Dowell, hiring strategist and Keldo Digital founder, discusses the different recruitment plans lawn care and landscape management companies should be using to streamline their operations and improve their hiring strategies. The LMN professionals are here to share a few proven methods and tools that can help you elevate your landscape business in the long-term by using a better recruitment strategy.
Broaden Your Hiring Pool
Recruiting talent effectively depends on the individuals you are able to engage. While career fairs and postering have been effective and proven methods in the past, there are newer and modern mediums that can better engage the up-and-coming generation of contractors. For instance, some business owners have found great success using Facebook ads to generate job interest.
Social networks like Facebook, Indeed and LinkedIn have all disrupted how human resource reps narrow or widen their hiring pool for landscaping businesses. What makes these recruitment tools effective when it comes to hiring is their affordability and targeting.
Unlike a poster, job notice, or career fair, digital job postings can be used to target a specific segment of the broadened job market. For example, landscape business owners can target individuals with interests in gardening, contracting, or landscaping with Facebook ads.
With targeting, not only are you improving the cost efficiency of your hiring strategies (about $6-9 per application), you are also adjusting your hiring pool to individuals who are more likely to be interested in – or have experience with – the landscape industry. But effective landscape hiring isn’t only dependent on the quality of recruitment tools you use; it also depends on your network of landscapers.
Grow Your Landscaping Network
As effective as these digital channels are for contracting positions, senior roles are often quite difficult to fill. Attracting, finding, and retaining qualified senior talent is a challenge for many lawn care and landscape businesses. But rather than relying on third-party channels for your talent pool, it can be more productive to create your own hiring network altogether.
Landscape human resources networks can be extremely valuable for two reasons: insight and connections. The connections you make within your landscape network can help connect you with other industry professionals who you could onboard, should an appropriate position open up.
For leadership or management roles, connections like these can help you accelerate the hiring process while also guaranteeing a group of qualified, vetted candidates. Similarly, having a solid network like this can provide additional insight and knowledge about hiring strategies that may be useful. All companies, not just lawn care and landscape businesses, should always be looking for ways to improve their existing hiring processes. This is one way to do so.
Build Your Ideal Candidate Profile
One of the most significant pieces of insight from LMN’s CEO Mark Bradley’s discussion with Dowell was that candidates are researching businesses as much as businesses are researching them. Identifying this relationship is important when developing job postings because it can help inform hiring strategies. After all, you cannot target a candidate type if you don’t know what they are looking for.
By creating a candidate profile, landscape human resources leaders can connect their hiring practices with the interests of their ideal applicants. This can inform not only how you engage applicants but also how you interview and onboard candidates successfully.
If a landscape business owner is to take anything away from LMN’s approach to hiring, it is that developing well-informed, data-driven hiring strategies is the best way to upgrade and harness the efficacy of your landscape company.
To learn more about the hiring side of the landscape industry – and how you can recruit rockstar staff – sign up for the LMN Academy today.
