Refocus your marketing efforts on employee recruiting and build your culture and employee retention programs.
As I mentioned in my last column, the big topic at the ISSA/ARCSI Convention last month was employees: how to find them, how to train them, how to discipline them, and how to keep them for a long time. As a result I am going to devote the next several weeks to a series of columns on what Cleaning Business Builders calls the employee life cycle. The first part of the employee life cycle is recruiting.
One of the keys to recruiting is to realize it is really the same thing as marketing and it is just a critical as marketing for clients in your business. This means you need to give it the same focus and often spend the same kinds of money to recruit employees that you do to find a new client. So first remember that you are marketing your company. We are entering a period of low unemployment. That means there is a lot of competition for every new hire. Job seekers do not need to work for you, as they have plenty of other choices. You advertisement needs to get them excited about working for you. It should cause them to pick your company out of the crowd. So here are a few pointers on what should be in your advertisement.
- Spend some time and or money on copywriting. Make your advertisement unique. Make it clear that you spent time thinking about the advertisement and convince them that you do really want them to work for you.
- Lead with all the reasons you are a great place to work BEFORE you list the qualifications. I have seen this mistake so many times. If your recruiting ad is nothing but a list of qualifications and lists of reasons people why should not apply, your company will not sound like a good place to work. Don’t drown them in rules before they even work for you. Yes, you need to list the qualifications but keep it brief and towards the end AFTER you have sold them on why they should want to work for you.
- Make it easy to apply. This is another error I see people make. They make it hard for people to apply, or they put some task into the advertisement to see if people read directions. This is not the right time to be screening people out. You want as many people as possible to come into your recruiting system, so make it easy to apply.
- Include lots of pictures of all your happy employees,
- Give them a feel for your company culture.
The goal at this step is to get as many people as possible to apply for you advertisement. Next week we will talk about where to place an advertisement.
A successful cleaning company will need to refocus their marketing efforts on employee recruiting and to build out their culture and employee retention programs. Fortunately, Cleaning Business Builders has tons of resources to help you meet this challenge. Our class on Recruiting and Hiring, delivered by American Maid founder/owner Liz Trotter, sets you up with the basic elements of the recruiting and hiring system used by successful and still-growing cleaning companies. The key is that this system goes beyond simply giving you a list but also provides guidance on how to evaluate candidates – what are good, mediocre, and bad answers to application and interview questions, for example. Click the button below to learn more.
For a free preview of the Recruiting & Hiring webinar, click the play button below.
