Hiring the right employee for a painting and remodeling business can be a critical and time-consuming process. Employers spend days and months promoting the open positing, shortlisting applications, vetting candidates to find the best fit for the job. Moreover, one has to create an inviting workspace to attract these potential hires to join their company. A poor hire can have a wrongful impact on the company’s reputation apart from creating time and financial drain. Indeed, with the right recruitment hacks, one can eliminate all these hurdles and pick the best contractor for their business.
This article has enlisted the top 5 recruitment hacks for painting and remodeling contractors to help them hire a vibrant talent without going through a series of unfortunate events.
1.  Advertise post openings on the right platforms
While you have a myriad of options to advertise your open position for a painting and remodeling contractor job, that doesn’t mean you should post on every recruiting site you found on the web. For instance, ads on sites like craigslist often look suspicious. Instead, try to post ads on reputable sites like Indeed, Simply hired, etc.
When talking about recruitment, how can we miss LinkedIn? With 500M+ registered users, LinkedIn is one of the most popular social media platforms catered for career-seeking individuals and industry growth. Undoubtedly, pooling great candidates from LinkedIn for your painting and remodeling company is high compared to other platforms.
2.  Avoid complex and flowery terms in the job description
Keep the job description simple and to the point. Instead of playing with complex adjectives, be direct about your expectations from the candidates. Lay down sufficient information about the job, including a brief description, duties, wage rates, hours of work, etc. Mention your requirements in clear terms so that applicants can determine whether they are qualified to apply for the position. Above all, don’t forget to drop your email address or a link where applicants drop their CVs.
Specific rights, responsibilities, and liabilities
Describe the duties of the contractors to hire, including delivery timelines and standard of works to maintain.
Mention the responsibilities you as an employer will undertake, such as providing technology, systems, and information. For instance, will the employees have to bring their laptops to work, are you providing leads, or have to find it on their own, and so on?
Although you will still get employees who avoid reading the descriptions, the undesirable responses will be lower.
3.  Ask the right questions during the interview
While industry experience and past achievements remain the core factor in hiring an applicant, however, there are some factors you cannot comprehend from a piece of paper. Hire someone based on their character and not someone just by the skills they possess. Characters tell a lot about a candidate- their conviction to the job, their will to work, ethics, and many more traits that eventually benefit your company. You can only uncover the true character of an applicant by asking the right questions.
To know if the candidate is serious about the job, ask them questions like “what can you tell about our company and services?”
“How would you pitch our services to a client?”
Follow these questions by some experience-based questions such as:
“Have you got behind schedule during a project, and how you managed to get yourself back on track?”
“If you are late to a client meet because your car broke down, what would you?”
“If you arrive at work early and no tasks are assigned to you, what will you do?”
After judging their work handling skills, test their job conviction with the following questions:
“How long are you willing to work with us? Be honest?”
“If you get a good offer from another company in six months of joining us, would you leave our company?” Justify your statement.
4.  Develop strong lead painters and crew leaders through coaching training and leadership
Your job as an employer doesn’t end after hiring an employee. Think of your company as a car and the employees as the engine. To ensure your vehicle runs smoothly, the engine will need to be maintained and fine-tuned. Most employees leave their current jobs due to a lack of learning curve and opportunities. Therefore,
Job turnover is the primary concern among employers, especially for small-scale companies with limited employees. That’s because when employees leave a company, most of their clients go along with them as well. This is undoubtedly a huge loss for you as a painting and remodeling contractor.
Problems like job turnover can be controlled through developing a solid coaching training and leadership program. Apart from a pay scale upgrade, employees join your company intending to enhance their skills. Training your employees is a great way to make them feel valued and ensure they have a great future in the company.
5.  Search for quality talent through referrals
According to a study, hiring is candidate through referral takes 29 days on average compared to 39 days through job positing. Further, it takes 55 days on average to hire a candidate through career sites.
Besides the time factor, hiring a managing an employee through a referral program makes a perfect cultural fit, and you require less onboarding. It also is cost-effective as you can pool talents without investing in paid ads or paying heftily to an agency.
For instance, if an agency charges 20 percent for a $100,000 hire, you will pay them $20,000. Even if you spend $2000 towards an employee-referral bonus, you are still saving $18,000.
It also aids in employee retention as current employees feel trusted and valued since they contribute to the company’s future. Meanwhile, new employees feel engaged as they already know at least one person from their new job. According to a survey on the employee referral program, more than 56 percent of participants say they are in their current role for more than five years.
Conclusion
There are two ways to recruit a painting and remodeling contractor. You can hire an independent contractor or a full-time employee for your company. Now, there is a considerable difference between the two. While traditional employees receive a series of training for the job, independent contractors are experts who bring their skills to a project or a task. Suppose you are hiring both independent contractors and employees. In that case, you have to create specialized policies and rules for both parties as both have different sets of work culture, pay scale, and compensation.