CHAPTER 2

Determine Landscape Hiring Needs

All too often, landscape companies don’t think about hiring until the busy season hits or when they get tired of redoing shoddy work or repeatedly losing employees to competitors. They start to panic or wonder what they’re doing wrong. 

Landscape hiring should be a year-round initiative, designed to meet the specific needs of your business. You first have to identify your goals and what’s needed to achieve them. 

SWOT Analysis

Examining the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) that are impacting your business is a great way to get started with strategically planning your landscape hiring process. You also need to set clear, tangible goals that you can share with everyone on your team so you can rally together to solve a problem or achieve a desired result. Common goals for landscaping companies include reducing customer turnover, increasing customer satisfaction, or improving productivity.

Skill Gap Analysis

Once you know your goals, you can get a better handle on your long and short-term landscape hiring needs by analyzing workloads and identifying upcoming projects. Conducting a skills gap analysis can uncover opportunities and areas for improvement. It helps leaders see what skills are missing from their business, including both landscaping skills as well as business, leadership and technical skills, and what needs to be addressed with either training or development for existing staff and new hires. 

Download our free skills gap analysis template.