As your business grows, inevitably you’ll need to hire more employees, and that’s why we’ve put together this pool hiring guide for you.
In this guide, you’ll find out everything you need to know about pool hiring, including:
By the end of this complete guide, you’ll have the power to become a pool hiring pro. Start finding and hiring the best pool service employees for your business today!
By far, the main key to pool hiring is knowing when it’s time to grow your team.
Use these pool hiring questions to help you determine when it’s the right time for you…
When you feel like you’re consistently swamped, then it’s time to hire a full-time employee.
Before you consider hiring a new employee, you need to have enough time and resources to properly train them to be an amazing addition to your team.
If you don’t know how to make your pool cleaning clients happy, then you can’t properly train your new hires.
Since new employees won’t start out with 100% efficiency, you’ll need to be able to handle a short-term profit loss until they can become an efficient worker.
Before you can consider hiring new pool techs, you need a process in place for new hires.
You’ll have to be ready to:
If you’ve answered a resounding “YES” to these questions, then you know it’s time to hire a new pool service employee.
Now, you know it’s time to hire a new pool technician, so let’s talk about the best strategies you can use to find them.
Just like you utilize marketing to find new clients, you’ll also use marketing to grow your team.
In order to find great pool techs, it’s important to exude the presence of a professional, trustworthy, reliable employer with strategies like:
By far, Google Ads and Meta Ads are one of the most effective ways to quickly and drastically increase the number of qualified candidates applying for the job.
However, it’s important you know what you’re doing before you take advantage of these effective tools.
Generally, your vendors know everyone in your area with experience in the pool service industry.
In other words, your vendors are an excellent networking tool for finding skilled pool service technicians looking for jobs in your area.
Get to know your vendors and ask for referrals whenever you’re looking to fill a pool service technician position
Your best employees, friends, and family can be a reliable way to get trustworthy referrals.
After all, these referrals are free, effective, and they can help you to find candidates in your local area.
Consider posting something on your personal social media that your employees, friends, and family can share.
For instance, you could post something as simple as, “My company, XYZ Pool Service Business, is hiring. Share this post if you know anyone who might be interested and qualified for this position. We take care of our employees, and we always pay on time.”
First off, when you know it’s time to hire your first employee, you’ll need to make sure you follow the proper legal proceedings.
If you’re in the United States, then you’ll need to acquire an Employee Identification Number (i.e. EIN) from the IRS.
However, if you’re in Canada, then you’ll need to acquire a Social Insurance Number (i.e. SIN).
Once you have the proper legal procedures out of the way, you’re ready to interview your candidates.
Take a look at this quick, three-step process for interviewing new candidates:
When you pre-screen your best candidates over the phone, you can quickly eliminate the ones who don’t have the right personality or pool industry experience.
Plus, a phone screening is a great way to get a good feel of your candidate’s raw, unscripted personality by tossing in one or two curveball questions.
These are a few pre-screening questions you can ask your candidates on the phone:
As you’re talking with your candidates, don’t forget to listen to your gut feeling. When in doubt, if something doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t.
Now, your candidate has passed their phone interview pre-screening, and you’re ready to interview them in person!
Sometimes, candidates will have inconsistencies if they lied to try to get the job in their phone screening.
For this reason, it’s a good idea to ask some of the same questions in your in-person interview as you did in your previous phone screening (plus some new questions too).
Here are a few questions to ask candidates:
Also, as you conduct your in-person interview, you should be paying attention to what your candidate is not saying as much as they’re saying.
For instance, take notes on non-verbal cues, such as…
If your candidate passes both the verbal and non-verbal aspects of the interview, then you’re ready to consider whether the candidate is right for you.
Even though a candidate might seem perfect in theory, they might not be a good fit for your business.
Before deciding if someone is the right fit for your business, make sure you’re able to fulfill each other’s needs…
These things are important because you want to hire someone that’s going to grow with your business.
As you’re deciding whether the candidate is right for you, these are a few signs you shouldn’t hire someone:
Always remember, that you’re running a business whose sole purpose is to earn sustainable profit for successful growth.
You’ve found the perfect candidate for your pool service business. Now, let’s talk about how to attract and keep the best tech.
Before we get started, let’s talk about non-compete clauses.
You might have heard of some business owners requiring employees to sign a non-compete clause.
These clauses are tough to enforce, can hurt employee performance, and can turn away great employees.
Rather than forcing your pool technicians to give up on their dreams of starting a business, consider asking them to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
A non-disclosure agreement will protect all of your pool cleaning business’ intellectual property, such as:
This way, you can protect your intellectual property without holding back great, ambitious techs.
By far, one of the best ways to attract great pool service technicians is by properly compensating them.
Here are a few ways you can properly pay your pool technicians and attract great candidates:
Every time you lose your top talent, you lose their experience, overall employee morale drops, and your plans can leak out to the competition.
For these reasons, it’s important you keep your best technicians.
In order to keep your best pool service technicians from getting poached, you need to find ways to keep them happy.
Use these top expert tips to keep your star employees:
Problem employees are one of the biggest pains of owning a pool service business.
While this can be a difficult decision to make, you can use numbers to help make the decision a little easier.
By the way, when you use a robust pool service software, like Service Autopilot, you can utilize the employee management tools to gather the hard data you need.
Here’s how to deal with your worst pool service employee…
Instant invoicing
Better scheduling
Manage your clients and employees all in one system
When an employee stops caring about their job, they can cost you more than their wage.
Your worst employee can damage your pool service business by:
Since this is a touchy subject, it’s important you remove emotion from the decision and mostly focus on the number to back up your decision.
Usually, it’s best to first try to give your employee a chance to fix their issues before you fire them.
Here are a few steps you can take to start that process:
If these efforts fail, then it’s time to consider firing them.
Sometimes, firing bad employees is the best decision you can make for the health of your pool service business.
If you want a fresh start, and you’re sick of dealing with bad employees, then it can be tempting to want to fire everyone and start over.
However, this is an unrealistic option that can be detrimental to your business and can cost a lot of time and money.
Use these two strategies to help you fix all of your underperforming employees as well as hire better next time:
Even though hiring might seem intimidating, it’s much easier when you know the right steps to take.
Use these best practices to find, hire, and keep the best pool service employees in the industry.
Now, you can take advantage of the advice and tools in this pool hiring guide, so you can start hiring like a pro today!
Related: How Much to Pay Your Pool Technicians
Originally published May 27, 2021 3:47 PM updated on April 9, 2024 at 1:54 PM
Tags: Business Operation, Featured Post
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