The War For Talent
16 October 2017

The War For Talent

Jeff McLanahan
Contributing Writer
Service Experts/Enercare

I read a quote recently by Hank Jackson, President of SHRM. He said, “The war for talent is over and talent won.”

In the home services industry, this quote is absolutely correct. The sea of qualified applicants looks more like a wading pool. As an industry, we continue to dip our toes into the same recycled pool of applicants. When someone quits or is fired from one company, they are unemployed only as long as it takes them to drive down the street to the nearest competitor. In many cases, after making the rounds, they eventually get hired back by us.

We need to end this vicious cycle. We need to make better hiring decisions, properly onboard new employees and increase our engagement and retention activities.

How do we get started? We need to ask ourselves and our teams some tough questions and start thinking with a new perspective. This will most likely mean changing some of our existing hiring practices so if you are not up to the challenge, you can probably stop reading now.

Here are some questions to ask ourselves and our teams:

  1. Why do employees leave our company? Some of the common answers by those that have left include; lack of onboarding, lack of training, and no professional growth.
  2. Are we hiring employees for the right reason? Do we review applications or just read until we see that they have previous experience? Do we use structured interview guides and behavior-based questions or do we “go with our gut?”
  3. As a company, are we meeting our employee’s expectations within their first 90 days of employment? Do we welcome them and provide an initial training plan? Are we communicating our expectations, meeting with them 1-on-1 to review progress, and establishing ongoing goals beyond their initial 90 days?

Your responses to these questions will help identify the next steps to take. Answers may vary but here are a few suggestions to turn hiring and retention problems into opportunities:

  1. Determine those attributes that make you the employer of choice in your area and highlight them during the recruiting and selection process, but more importantly, demonstrate those to employees on an ongoing basis after they are hired.
  2. Utilize a structured interview guide for each position that contains behavioral-based questions to use in determining past performance of applicants. Don’t have a structured interview guide? Feel free to reach out to me for assistance.
  3. Create and conduct a new hire orientation for every employee. Use it to welcome new employees, set expectations, review benefits, share career paths, etc.
  4. Begin recruiting employees outside normal avenues. This may mean that you will need to provide training and development to move employees along the career path, so have this content and process in place before beginning to recruit.
  5. Provide continuous training opportunities for your team and recognize achievements. This training can be from equipment or product vendors, or from you and your leadership team in daily team huddles. When training is applied on the job, celebrate the success of the team.

Uncontrollable items that impact your business will always be present: Increasing wages, more stringent regulations, tough labor laws, etc. Don’t use these as an excuse for not recruiting and retaining the best people for your company.