Hosted by Mark Bradley
Running a successful landscape business depends on the skill, knowledge, and motivation of your crew. As direct as this may seem, landscape business owners are running into one recurring problem: a lack of qualified hiring candidates.
In a COVID-19 pandemic economy, unemployment is high, and finding skilled labor is challenging. Lawn and landscape companies will have to optimize their hiring process to maximize the productivity of their crew and, ultimately, the profitability of their business.
To help aspiring landscape entrepreneurs adjust to the new labor market, the LMN team has provided a breakdown of the skilled trade shortage, the hiring problem, and how to overcome both of these obstacles to help your landscape business during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Navigating the Skilled Trade Shortage
Prior to the recent global health crisis, organizations across North America were starting to feel the effects of a massive skilled trade shortage. PBS News Hour reporters examined the Seattle plumbing market as an example of this increasingly growing trend.¹ As the younger generation of professionals begins to favor office and tech-related job opportunities, the trades market is beginning to suffer from an ever-growing labor vacuum.¹ Fortunately, there might be a few ways to navigate this challenge and sustain long-term success for landscape businesses.
Solving the Skilled Labor Problem
As extensive as this skilled trade shortage is, it isn’t all-encompassing. Landscaping industry experts have identified there are still several demographics that have been untapped with regards to overall labor potential with women being the most significant.
The COVID-19 pandemic, according to McKinsey, has the potential to set women back half a decade in terms of progress, employment opportunities, and representation.³ This is largely due to many of the socio-economic challenges presented by the global health crisis and the burden many women and mothers have had to shelter.
While the landscape industry is not the same as plumbing, they both present lucrative opportunities in historically reliable trade markets. Overcoming the skilled trade shortage and navigating your landscape business during the COVID-19 pandemic may be as simple as reaching out to a broader audience of qualified female candidates for every role.
Even if this were the only solution, it would still require an effective, reliable hiring process to back it up. Thankfully, LMN CEO Mike Bradley has created a landscape business guide on how to hire talented, skilled, and qualified crew members on a consistent basis.
Creating a Hiring Process for Landscape Business Success
A lot of LMN’s growth and success can be attributed to our motivated and talented workforce that delivers high-quality products and experiences for our clients. We attained a productive and qualified team through an established hiring process. Here are a few proven items that you can adopt when creating your own success-driven hiring process.
Develop an Effective Screening Process
You can’t have a talented workforce without talented candidates. In difficult financial times, it can be tempting to hire the first decent candidate that walks through the door. But this is not a long-term or success-oriented approach. By effectively screening and interviewing your potential employees, a landscape business owner can minimize hiring inefficiencies and improve company productivity and profit while also broadening the knowledge, training, and culture your business possesses.
Invest in Well-Written Job Descriptions
One of the most reliable ways to productively narrow your labor pool during the COVID-19 pandemic is to provide clear job descriptions that define company expectations, highlight job responsibilities, and reinforce accountability. Honest and informative job descriptions like this can help filter out unmotivated candidates and ensure the quality of your selections.
Reinventing your hiring process is a time-consuming effort, but one that offers a huge return on investment. After all, navigating your landscape business during the COVID-19 pandemic starts with the quality of your workforce.
Remember, hiring is only half the process when it comes to maximizing the productivity of your crew. LMN’s suite of cloud-based landscape management software allows business owners to coordinate their teams and optimize their productivity. Still not sold? Try LMN Free today!
