Hiring Lawn Care Employees: 6 Ways to Hire Lawn Care Professionals For Your Business

There are over 1.2 million people working in the landscaping industry in the United States. The best ones are already taken by the existing companies, while the new start-ups are struggling in hiring lawn care employees who are efficient as well as professionals.

As far as the statistics are concerned, an average American home spends around $500 annually for their gardening and lawn care needs. This shows the demand for lawn care companies around different localities in the US.

And the businesses are looking to hire lawn care employees who can match the service quality expectations of the company as well as business customers.

In that pursuit, you must be strict on adopting a few ways to streamline your hiring process for lawn care employees.

6 Simple Ways to Hire Lawn Care Professionals for Your Business

Running a lawn care company in a demanding region where people love gardening and landscaping is a profitable decision. But planning out a business and executing it with the right quality and satisfaction are two different things. 

A perfect lawn care business management without the right employees and field workers will eventually fail. As a business owner, you will be marketing your lawn care business, bringing in customers for your lawn care business, giving lawn care price estimates, and calculating revenue. 

But the journey between a service request confirmation and final payment comes with the main task of assigning the job to a professional and getting it done with utmost quality. And this is the most important part of running a lawn care business. 

There will be some goals and milestones in your mind with the idea of starting a landscaping business. And to fulfill that, you will need a team of professional landscaping employees who are skillful and disciplined in their work. 

Whether you are commencing with a new business or are about to start hiring landscaping employees to your existing company to add new skills to your operations, you will need to follow a strict process. 

Following are a few ways for you to adapt to hiring a recruit or a group of employees for your landscaping business.

1. Know when your landscaping business is ready to hire new employees

When you started your own lawn care business, you were probably the only employee working on your team. You handled all of your business operations by yourself. You took the projects, rented the lawn care tools and equipment, went to work, took the payment, and managed your revenue. 

But over time, when your business grows and you start getting more projects in hand, it will be difficult for you to manage it alone. You might initially hesitate to hire and pay lawn care employees to do the job, as you won’t be able to trust others to do the work for your customers as you did. 

With this reluctance though, many business owners often hold their decision on hiring employees and asking for help. It is the wrong approach!

Do not wait till the time you are flooded with inquiries or projects. If you start hiring at the last moment when the workload increases, you will either lose the project due to late hiring or might hire the wrong person.  

Analyze the demand for landscaping services that you are offering and predict the need for hiring a new employee or group of employees beforehand. 

So, deciding upon the right hiring time is the first consideration for you in the pursuit of hiring landscape employees. Hiring early also gives you the benefit of having ample time to train the new members of your team and help them match your company’s job efficiency and quality history.  

Prepare a lawn care employee handbook to give a brief about your company to the new joiners. Make sure you mention the rules, regulations, and policies your company follows and requires the new employees to abide by them as well. This should be done before the training begins!

2. Decide on the types of employees you would need

Yes, there are different types of landscape employees that you can hire for your business. Your choice of employees will depend on the support you need for your operations. 

There are two types of employees that are suitable for the lawn care industry. Depending upon the service demands and your budget, you can either hire permanent employees or temporary/seasonal employees. 

The permanent employees will be in a long-term association with your company on papers. They will help your company build stronger relationships with customers and will also grow with their individual skills over time. 

The permanent workers will have higher wages because they work just with you throughout their employment. It saves you the hassle of hiring new employees for regular landscaping projects.

On the other hand, temporary/seasonal employees are the best fit for the businesses when there is an increased surge of job requests. In most cases, the gardening or landscaping demands are often high during spring and summer. Hence, such temporary or seasonal workers are fit to hire when there is a demand. 

Hiring them is a better decision to have the flexibility of dealing with overstaffing situations without letting go of the permanent or existing employees. 

When you are starting a new landscaping company, it is better to look for part-time job seekers to start with cost-effectiveness. When the projects start to increase beyond the handling capabilities of your part-time worker, you can then gradually grow your team over time by considering the work volume and intensity. 

Be strategic while choosing from two of these types of landscape employees, as your business capital should not take a blow. Having a mix of both will be better to manage the business costs and still get the job done for maximizing profits. 

After hiring the field workers, when you eventually have a big team, you will need to hire administrative staff to manage customers and workers. When your lawn care organization grows to a certain profitable point, you might need to hire an accountant or bookkeeper to manage the company finances.

3. Write and post a proper job posting to attract the attention of job seekers

The job posting or description will explain the job responsibilities, tasks, skills and experience the company expects the applicants to have. Apart from that, the lawn care job description (JD) also mentions the experience needed for using landscaping equipment and tools. 

It is a perfect start for the actual hiring process, where you will be giving out information to the job seekers on what they can expect from your company. 

Apart from what the company needs, the job description also highlights the perks that the company has to offer for landscape workers. These perks include health insurance, home allowances, paid leaves, and travel allowances. 

But just like any other post, the job ad should not be something that is just written for the sake of giving out information. It should be strategically written with a few specific considerations. Some of these are:

• Use job titles that are commonly being searched by the seekers. 
• Mention all of the industry skills and keywords that relate to landscaping experience. 
• Give a pay range for temporary or permanent hiring over your job description. It is not mandatory for you to mention it.

After creating a great job posting, you next should decide on the platforms where you can post to get maximum response from eligible candidates. 

You can print flyers or give out a newspaper ad for the job post, but posting it online would get maximum attention. Some of the platforms that are perfect for you to post job descriptions are Indeed, Monster, and LinkedIn. 

Around 77% of the recruiters are actively searching for candidates on LinkedIn. It is mostly because you can check the work history and experience proficiency of any candidate that responds to your job post.

4. Schedule interviews for the best candidates from all the responses over your post

When you have an ample number of eligible candidate responses to consider for new hires, it is time to schedule the interviews. Filter out the applicants who are highly qualified for the post and meet all criteria mentioned for the job title. 

Screen all the resumes properly without a miss to match the expertise and skills of candidates with the JD. To start with the interview, you need to follow a systematic process, which goes as follows:

• Schedule phone-call interviews

  Get in call with the candidates individually and ask them about themselves for a start. Let them explain their skills and why they are fit for the company. If you like their pitch and feel confident in their explanation, you can move ahead with those resumes or candidatures.

• Schedule in-person interviews

  When satisfied with the telephonic round of interviews, you can schedule an in-person interview for selected candidates. You can take the interviews yourself if you don’t have an HR team in your office. During the interview, you need to test their experience by asking them questions related to landscaping, lawn equipment, customer handling, and their specialized expertise.

  The Small Business Association (SBA) has approved the use of the STAR (Situation, Tasks, Actions, Results) method for judging the potential of any candidate in face-to-face interviews. 

  Here, you will be giving them a situation, and based on their responses, they have to elaborate on the tasks, actions, and results.

5. Give an offer letter to the selected employee(s)

Take time to finalize who to hire among the selected candidates and draft an offer letter for them. Call all of your potential employees and congratulate them on clearing all the interview rounds. 

Ask the new hires about their preferred joining date within a specified window decided by your company. The offer letter should have information on the joining date, job duties, compensation, perks, and employment conditions. 

Your new hires have to take a print of this offer letter, sign it, scan it, and send it back to the company to show their agreement to the role expectations. They are now your employees and can join your company from the given date to be assigned to their first job. 

On the joining day, welcome your recruit(s) and give them an induction about the company and the job role in brief. Draft a document with all of your company policies, and ask your lawn care workers to sign it. 

This document is important and will come in handy if the new employee fails to meet your expectations and violates the disciplinary rules of your company.

6. Add the new employee to your lawn care scheduling software

Being a modern business, it becomes important for you to have lawn care scheduling software to synchronize your garden care business operations. 

You can start assigning jobs to your new hires by jutting and adding their names to your scheduling software and start assigning them jobs. You can also train them on how to use the functions of this tool.

FieldCamp: A New Way to Manage Your Business in Clicks

Every new hire who joins your company needs to be part of your workspace by following the culture and policies. Using FieldCamp, the lawn care workers can get involved in a digitized workspace, where everything will be updated for them over a software.

The employees will get new jobs, depending upon their availability. Moreover, you can also check the progress of the jobs (pending, ongoing, and completed). Once the job is performed by your member, you can generate an invoice and accept payments in clicks.

Book your 7-days FREE trial trial today, explore our product features, and understand their benefits for your business.