Articles Tagged with ''hiring and recruiting''

In most restoration and remediation firms, the (techs) front-line guys and gals are the money. Yes, other departments play a role, but the dollars are realized with production techs. They produce the work, fill in forms; either paper or digital, create sketches, write estimates, set, monitor, move and pull equipment and smile for the customer who sometimes isn’t always peachy.

This is the second article of a multi-part series on employee burnout in the restoration industry.  Part one introduced the nature of burnout, and summarized findings from a study on burnout in the restoration industry. 

The numbers are pointing to this being a solid year for restoration and remodeling contractors. Despite new home construction being a bit sluggish, remodeling and maintenance spending grew as expected thanks largely to storms and continued recovery efforts from hurricanes in 2018.

In a market where labor is in short supply for all departments, it’s the production side of the house that needs some focused attention. The attention I’m referring to doesn’t mean tossing a few dollars at any of the online job boards, as helpful as they may be.

In last month’s article, I wrote about taking a longer view with hiring given the current challenges to find people with the right skills and the desire to work in, or make a career of, the restoration industry. Let’s shift the focus back to the present and the challenges of finding good people to staff your growing business.

We all know how hard it is to find good employees. We’ve all heard it: “People don’t want to work.”; “Don’t hire anyone younger than 30.”; “Everyone has an entitlement mentality.” Blah, blah, blah. 

Whether we like it or not, change is constantly happening all around us. You have to decide whether or not the change works for you or if you just want to keep on doing what you’ve been doing. We can whine about how it used to be, but the reality is we can only control how or if we respond to the change in the future.

Too many business leaders have been misled by the “accounting mentality” and think paying their people too much (whatever that means) results in uncompetitively high costs. Seriously?