8 Training and Recruiting Strategies for Your Plumbing Business
Like any other business, the plumbing business is often bombarded with its fair share of rewards and challenges. Plumbing professionals need to be abreast of proper technicalities alongside stocks and kits to meet the requirements and needs of various clients. On the other hand, plumbing companies have to keep enough materials, merchandise, manpower so that they can handle any types of emergencies and urgencies.
If you’re a plumbing business owner, you might as well be aware of numerous facets of growth prospects. It’s crucial for you to create a pool of existing skilled plumbers to maximize your bottom line. But, the plan is easier said than done as retaining and recruiting technical roles are two of the critical pain points in managing a plumbing business successfully.
In this blog, let’s discuss the importance of proper selection and recruitment, including the top eight strategies you’re probably not using right now that can significantly improve your training and recruiting process.
The Importance of Operative Recruitment and Selection
First, let’s dive in on the importance of proper recruitment and selection. As a business owner of a plumbing business, you desire a team that you can ultimately count on to get things done properly while focusing on other aspects. But finding good and loyal talent is hard nowadays. That is why taking time to develop an effective recruiting process is necessary if you wanted to hire the best talents in the industry. A thorough and excellent recruiting process not only finds you talented employees but also saves you money and time on replacing and training new people.
· On finding quality candidates
The number one goal of every employer is to have good and quality employees. Hence, the very first step you need to do is to establish a job description. Next, advertising in places where you’re sure you can attract talents with the right set of skills. It’s crucial to determine which tasks you have to recruit to achieve completion and whether or not you’re capable of training them.
Do research on how your competitors pay for the same position and the list of benefits they offer. Most excellent employees will choose to work for an employer paying a little less if there are benefits like retirement and health plans. Establish a budget and seek a candidate who meets the skill requirements for the job and make sure to pay them fairly.
· Saving money and training time with Proper Selection
To determine if the candidate is able to fulfill the job requirements, go through a methodical set of questions. Doing so will help establish confidence by simply knowing that you have logically done a recruiting process and selected people based upon the outlined metrics rather than your gut feelings. If you’re successfully implementing this strategy, you increase the chances of getting someone to succeed in the work.
Improve Your Recruiting and Training Procedure Using These Strategies
1. Develop a comprehensive recruitment technique
The recruitment procedure you have to develop must set a certain amount of time to ask/invite applicants. You may employ the first and second job interview process alongside another process to further review applications. A comprehensive selection procedure includes technical tests, work samples, personality or aptitude tests and even presentations. Engaging other professionals like senior staff members or a board member in the selection process can also be very helpful.
Also, you have to prepare key questions in order to explore the applicant’s past job performance while covering all essential functions. There’s another type of approach that might help you and it includes tailoring questions to make way for some work-related topics for conversations. Doing so will help you determine how knowledgeable and experienced the applicant is.
Another important consideration you have to take is to make use of plumbing software. This software has the best features that give you real-time updates on everything. In case if you don’t know, this specialized tool is one click-away and has everything you need — tasks management, scheduling, time-tracking, and many more.
2. Develop relationships with training institutions
Training institutions are a great source of professional and skilled plumbers. You may want to get hold of a substantial number of plumbers right from these training centers. These centers generally have either newly qualified or are about to qualify. The institutions also know when other technicians and plumbers are looking for work. It is often the new plumbers are usually recruited. You may put recruitment rewards to make sure only top and reliable candidates are recruited.
You can also offer a small fee to your existing employees for referrals. Therefore, maintaining a relationship with any local training institutions can help you determine the best talents from the pool who are about to complete the apprenticeship.
3. Use social media channels
Nowadays, there’s a profound reverberation of the upsurge of social media. Did you know that it can be used as a powerful tool for recruiting people as well? Social media has become a place for professionals and people where they can hang out and interact with each other digitally. Popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and a handful of others offer recruiters a real-time opportunity to connect with potential candidates.
Here are the following channels that can serve as your recruiting medium.
· Craigslist — this channel can prove to be anyone’s secret weapon when hiring someone. It can bring you a flood of plumber professionals. In fact, you can also attract potential prospects who are looking for plumbing services. In addition to this, you can hire through cold-calling efforts as well.
· LinkedIn — LinkedIn is mainly designed for niche recruiting since it broadcasts your job posting as the primary recommendation for professionals who are perfectly fit for that niche. And since you’re looking for plumbers, you can easily attract a good number of talented plumbers who fit into the role.
· Facebook is perhaps the most popular social media platform thus far. Facebook can serve as an excellent recruitment tool since you can quickly target many people. Some Facebook ads are very much effective in attracting your desired plumbers. And most importantly, it’s also cost-effective since many folks can share your post if it’s compelling enough.
4. Incorporate an effective retention strategy
Recruiting and forming a skilled team of plumbing professionals isn’t adequate. So rather than being complacent about it, you need to develop ways to retain them for a long time, especially the millennials. The truth is it’s no less a nightmare when one of your top workers resigns out of the blue. Not only do you need to find the best replacement immediately, but you also have to offset the impact of the employee’s departure. That’s why job satisfaction and employee retention must be on top of your list of priorities.
Read “Attracting and Retaining Millennial Employees” to get helpful tips on this matter.
5. Build a Library for Video Training
When new employees join your company, how are they trained? Today, most plumbing companies follow a certain practice — to pair a newly-hired employee with a seasoned one and then turn them loose. Yet, how can you be sure that your seasoned or experienced employees are mentoring the new ones in the proper way? Note that not all of your seasoned employees are following things you want because some aren’t great mentors.
So, determine your top employees and let them start recording. Create a list of every job’s ideal workflows and best practices, then record your workers doing all of these. Implement this strategy both on your expert’s service calls and for office employees who both answer immediate calls from clients. Remember, do not record any face-to-face conversations with customers. And once best case scenario recordings are already done, move on to more puzzling topics to equip all of your employees on any types of eventualities.
6. Acknowledge your successful employees
Provide generous, frequent and avid recognition to all your best employees. Through awards nights, contests and Top Performer announcements in the newspaper, you must be acknowledging your employees regularly for their amazing performance. You may start thinking that this is a retention strategy, but this is a powerful training and recruiting strategy. It’s because some workers at other companies aren’t experiencing recognition from their employers.
If you follow such a strategy, your employees will model successful behavior and amazing work performance when rewarded generously.
7. Never stop training
Today’s plumbing professionals have difficult jobs as they need to keep up with the latest and emerging technologies like project scheduling software. To perform more than the service requested and to deliver the necessary experience, there’s intense pressure on the newly hired plumbers to get the job done the right way. If that is the case, you need to provide them a rigorous training intermittently. When a continuous peer membership, customer service methods, product education are provided in between, your plumbing team will obtain various skills they needed to perform their work well.
In view of this, the industry’s best practices are crucial to establishing a strong workforce. Hence, this continuous education breeds confidence in several associates, particularly your newest plumbers. In scheduling training for your new members, you can use a specialized software tool designed to help you and your team monitor and track everyone’s progress while being trained.
8. Use Construction Scheduling Software
When you begin training your recruits, you find yourself and the rest of your team struggling to keep in touch with everything. Supervising and monitoring is a challenging task for most project leaders. And it’s tougher when doing the same thing for new hires. It’s important that you learn to keep everything and everyone in one place so that you can best monitor every involved element.
Make use of a project management tool! It comes with the necessary features you all need to effectively plan your projects, respond to issues, manage all existing resources and keep your team and new members involved in one central place. Having the best subcontractor scheduling software can significantly impact your recruiting process, training programs, and even business operations.
Request a FREE live demo to learn more about this software and its other features.
Key Takeaways
In hiring, you have to hire the right people — talented and skilled professionals who will represent you right away to your clients and prospects. In training, you have to prepare various preparation programs where your skills can be honed and improved, resulting in a much better work ethic and performance. A great success in your business comes from your existing pool of excellent employees!
