A Permanent Strategy for Hiring Temps

"If it's not our biggest challenge, it sure is in the top five," McCutcheon says. "During the winter, things slow down and you can't carry all the employees. But as soon as spring comes, you need people. So we prepare at the moment that they leave. That's when we come up with the next summer's budget—how big we're going to need to be and what we can spend to hire."

Then, McCutcheon says the company recruits at colleges and high schools with horticulture programs. "Those kids need summer jobs, and they may end up being a good, full-time employee for you in the future," he says. "What's easy in this business is buying equipment and trucks—we do that everyday. But if we don't get the right people to operate the equipment and trucks, we'll inevitably fall short."

Fortunately for McCutcheon and other independent landscapers, there are more ways to recruit needed summer help. Every year, for example, the Professional Landcare Network (PLANET) sponsors the week-long Student Career Days, in which students from more than 50 schools interested in landscaping careers come out for networking and competitions. "It's such a big event," says former PLANET president Drew St. John, who won first-place in a Student Career Days competition while attending Mississippi State University. "In our business, we use a lot of interns, especially during the summer months," he says. "You need a pipeline of young talent. And you find that this young talent often brings in other good, young talent. Good people attract good people after all."

Today, as vice president of business development at Draper, Utah-based Symbiot, which secures landscaping contracts with major, Fortune 500 companies nationwide and then manages the work as conducted by smaller, local landscaping operations, St. John is well versed in the benefits and challenges of hiring temps to boost summer staff. In addition to the Student Career Days annual effort, he has found that landscaping-aligned universities are helpful via their co-op programs. With these programs, students study for a semester, then go out in the field for hands-on work, then head back to the classroom. "This has always been a great opportunity for our landscaping companies," he says. "You have employees that are right there, trained and ready to go. And when they're finished with school, they often assert themselves into a mid-management position that you may need."

Hiring Spanish-speaking workers for the summer has, of course, emerged as a controversy nationwide, with heated debate over the employment of illegal immigrants. The national Minuteman movement, in fact, has resulted in video-camera surveillance of various landscaping companies. But, if a company is using best practices, these controversies can be avoided. The Department of Labor, for example, offers the H2B program, which allows landscaping companies to tap into a pool of foreign employees with temporary work visas that allow for seasonal hiring in a perfectly legal manner. "It allows you to staff up and staff down according to the variations of our industry," St. John says.

Besides, knowingly employing illegal immigrants can result in unneeded headaches down the road. "We owe it to ourselves as employers and responsible citizens to only employ valid, legal citizens or visitors with valid visas," St. John adds. "The government is really clamping down. Besides, hiring an illegal resident sends the wrong message to your other employees."

Develop Good Interviewing Techniques
When it comes to hiring the right temp, much information can be gained at the beginning. Take the employee's application: Has he switched jobs every year? Does his work experience seem unrelated to the long days and heavy rigors of landscaping work? "It's field work," St. John says. "It's laborious. If someone was flipping burgers, that's not the right background. I look for someone with some landscaping experience, obviously, or some kind of agricultural or construction background. When you conduct the interview, you need to get a sense of whether this employee really does have this kind of background—if they do, you'll know. They'll bring up the proper buzzwords during the conversation. You also need to check references to get a sense of the candidate's approach and work ethic." It's also beneficial to conduct a basic skills test to determine if the candidate can identify and has proper knowledge of key equipment.

At HighGrove, McCutcheon has come up with a standard set of interview questions that are critical in evaluating candidates. "At some companies, the interviewees do more preparation than the interviewers," he says. "We want to avoid that, so we have questions that are asked in every interview. And you need open-ended questions, so you can get some elaboration from the job candidate. If I ask, ‘What was the most challenging situation you ever dealt with?' I'll want to follow up with ‘How did you deal with it?' Now, if the candidate says, ‘My boss was a jerk,' that could be a red-flag. But if he says, ‘A customer had a problem, and here's how I resolved it,' you've hit upon a potentially fantastic hire."

Train Right
Training is another critical area for temp hires. They need to have both classroom training and hands-on experience with the equipment, along with a solid sense of the landscaping operation's culture. "You lay out the expectations on the front end," St. John says. "You tell them this is where you park your car and this is what we wear. You demonstrate to them what a finished product is supposed to look like. You tell them to bring a lunch because we only get 30 minutes to eat and we eat right there on the site. Anything and everything that has to do with the day-to-day operations of completing a job needs to be established."

Another kind of hiring and training also is crucial when it comes to temps—that of your on-site foreman. The foreman is the face and voice of your company to these temporary workers, so employers need to hire and promote people to this position who are strong leaders with model work ethics. He or she needs to be able to connect to a diversity of cultures and backgrounds. He or she needs to understand the nuts and bolts of man-hour budgeting, with respect to making the temp force meet its goals. "If I have 30 man-hours budgeted for a job, he needs to build his crew of temp and permanent workers together into a cohesive team so that that job is done, and done well, within or less than 30 hours," St. John says.