Episode 36: The Hiring Crisis for 2021

Episode 36: The Hiring Crisis for 2021

Brandon Condrey:
Whatever your job post is you need to get funky with it, make it witty, have a funny title. Our office job posts says like possibly the best admin job of all time or something ridiculous like that. And it's all in caps. So if you picture a job seeker, this is the person that you want to get. They're actually out looking for a job. They want a job. If they're going through all these ads and they see one that just really sticks out because it's ridiculous. It's funny. That's how you got to make yourself stand out.

Brandon Schoen:
Hey everybody welcome back to the Profit Cleaners! We've got another awesome episode for you today. Guys one of the biggest questions we've been getting asked recently is how are you guys hiring? What are you guys doing right now to counteract the hiring challenges of 2021? It's definitely a crisis out there. It's really hard to find good employees right now. So we're going to be sharing this episode, what we're doing to get those employees, some of the strategies behind the scenes, make sure you stay tuned until the end. We're going to be giving out our exact processes, walking you through what we do, our job, postings, our templates, everything that we're doing to get these great employees, even during these challenging times. So stay tuned for that guys towards the end. And we'll jump in!

Announcer:
Grow your cleaning business, make more money, have more time. This is the Profit Cleaners podcast with your host Brandon Condrey and Brandon Schoen.

Brandon Schoen:
Welcome back back everybody. To another episode of the Profit Cleaners, you're in the house and the right place to be learning from the top 1% of cleaning business owners around the world. And I'm your host, Brandon Schoen I'm joined by my cohost..

Brandon Condrey:
Brandon Condrey that's me!

Brandon Schoen:
Again, guys, we're here for more content. We're going to deliver even more value to your life. And today, an exciting episode, actually, even getting a lot of questions from you guys about this and that is simply how are you guys hiring right now? Everyone's having these challenges. And so the title of this episode is the hiring crisis of 2021.

Brandon Condrey:
Hopefully it's temporary the crisis of 2021 the whole year. This is the unintended consequences of the pandemic.

Brandon Schoen:
Absolutely. And we're going to talk about difficulties and challenges and how the pandemic has kind of shifted things and things have gotten more virtual and there's ways you can stand out and retain those employees better and just grow a better business in general.

Brandon Condrey:
Absolutely.

Brandon Schoen:
So let's dive in.

Brandon Condrey:
Why is hiring so difficult right now? I mean, you call it a bunch of things. People don't want to come out of their house because they're still scared of the pandemic. They don't have a vaccine yet, but the assumption that we're all operating on is that the stimulus checks and unemployment checks have created this environment where for cleaning in particular, we're just at a situation where, okay, we've talked about this before. So like we're in New Mexico, New Mexico pays $250 a week for state unemployment. The America rescue act rescue America act, whatever was signed recently by the byte administration that provided $1,400 stimulus checks, but also a $300 a week, federal unemployment on top of whatever the state was in New Mexico, you're making five 550 a week on unemployment, New Mexico in particular removed the for job seeking where you had to be going out to apply a bunch of jobs to keep qualifying. It's just kind of like Kurt blush. You're an essential worker. You got laid off. Boom, here's your unemployment. Very little questions asked on the one hand. That's great for people that really needed that when restaurants were closed, but the situation that we find ourselves in now as COVID cases in New Mexico or practically nonexistent, we're just kicking ass right now. And we have a lot of vaccinated people, which is also very good for economic recovery. But the situation that we find ourselves in now is that there are businesses that are trying to open restaurants and bars and things like that, but they just can't find people to come back to work.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, there's 22 million jobs lost. I don't know how maybe there's more or less, but 22 million jobs lost during the pandemic. And that's crazy. We actually thought last year, I think where it's coming back, but there was this expectation that there was going to be this huge boom because of all these jobs lost. I was just driving around yesterday and noticing so many signs around town now hiring now, hiring everywhere. And there's obviously a lot of people without jobs and a lot of people trying to hire, but where's the holdup we're trying to hire well, but we're not having as good of experience that we had in the past. And there's different variables.

Brandon Condrey:
I think the situation that we're in is okay, so if it's 550 a week, that's 1100 bucks every two weeks, we're paying about that. That's what our net pay is usually after taxes. We're a little bit even above that when you consider the taxes, but there's no taxes on an appointment. So the net pay for our check versus your unemployment's basically the same sort of class of job where it's a service job, whether it's in a restaurant or with a cleaning company, those are the people where you're getting as much or more from the unemployment. That's what the holdup is and bringing people back. So if you had a PhD in something and you got laid off during the pandemic and you went down from a hundred thousand dollars a year to 550 bucks a week, that was a huge hit. So you're going to go back to your job as soon as it's available, but these service employees, because depending on the state that you're in, you may not have the requirement that most States have, where you have to go out and apply for two jobs a week to continue getting your benefit. I know that's varied by state, but ours does not have the requirements. So there's very little incentive for you to go back to work if you didn't want to. And right now I believe that the benefit goes until September the federal benefit from our standpoint, we're looking at being in this situation for the entire summer, which is not great. So what are we going to do about it? What are the moves that we're going to make to try and correct the situation?

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, Absolutely. And we're going to share with you guys specific things we're doing to counteract this and stand out, do better. But I think in general, yeah, we're just seeing, I think our sales guy, Matt was saying even like, cause we're actually not just hiring for cleaners guys. We're hiring people in our office and other management positions and things like that. So even in the higher level positions, we're experiencing a lot of weird things happening. Like people are literally just submitting resumes and their resume doesn't even fit for the job. And it's almost like they're just doing this to show that they're submitting job applications to continue getting like their stimulus.

Brandon Condrey:
And For New Mexico, that's not a requirement, but it may be that they're in a different program to do that. So there's varying levels of unemployment that we have on the state because it's just the way they have it set up. Some of the things that we've tried to counteract it, whatever your job post is, you need to get funky with it. I mean, like make it witty. I have a funny title. Our office job posts says possibly the best admin job of all time or something ridiculous like that. And it's all in caps. And so if you picture a job seeker, this is the person that you want together, actually out looking for a job. They want a job. If they're going through all these ads and they see one that just really sticks out because it's ridiculous. It's funny, whatever. That's how you got to make yourself stand out. So it's on our website already, but we'll give you the job posting in the show notes. So you can kind of see how we have it worded. So you got to get a little bit weird with the job posting. The other thing I encourage you to do is post the pay. A lot of job postings will give you a range. It's between 10 and $800 an hour, depending on experience, you're going to be disappointing people. If they're looking for a $25 an hour job, and you're only paying 10, so be up front with what you're going to pay that way. You've managed expectations for everybody. They're all going to come in knowing exactly what boat they're in already. This other one, depending on your market, you may want to point out something about the competition. You're not trying to drag people through the mud, but one that we're planning on being a problem later this year is that we've got an Amazon fulfillment center that's opening. It's the only one in the state. In other cities, they have starting pay as high as $17 an hour, which we can't beat. It's just, we're going to have to raise our prices to a point that's going to price us out of the market, working for Amazon though, if you read the accounts online is not an enjoyable experience. It's a high throughput warehouse. You've got to seal up and tape package every 11 seconds or something ridiculous like that. And there are stories of people, urinating and bottles and leaving them on warehouse shelves because they didn't have time to go to the bathroom. Cause it's across the warehouse, the warehouse isn't climate controlled, those types of things. If you know what the working conditions are like at your competitor's job, you got to find a creative way to put it in the job posts. Maybe not without saying don't work for Molly maids because they do X, Y, Z. You would know that that might get you in trouble with somebody. But if you could say something along the lines of work without direct micromanagement supervision or something like pointing out some of the benefits of how you were in your company compared to how the competition runs their company.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, absolutely. And focus on what makes you guys different and better because you oftentimes don't want to drag down the competition and talk bad about them obviously. Cause it doesn't leave a good impression of your brand. Just things that you can do. Brandon mentioned that job title it literally every time we would have someone come in for an interview for that position, they were like that job just really stuck out. It just sounded so different. And a lot of job postings are just generic and just kinda.

Brandon Condrey:
They come from some corporate like HR desk. They have a template, put the bullet points about the history of the company, put the bullet points of the job description. Then don't tell them how much we're going to pay. Yeah. If you're able to differentiate yourself, you're the small business owner. You can do whatever you want. You can be nimble and change it however you want to be.

Brandon Schoen:
And that's really the beauty of this is a lot of the big companies have to fit in this box and they can't say certain things because it's all bureaucratic and have to get approved. You can be nimble and quick as a local business owner and you can be really fun. What's your culture? What are you trying to cultivate here? Is it fun and a good attitude and all these like, well then put that in your job post.

Brandon Condrey:
If you guys do potluck breakfast on Fridays, put that in there. Like, Hey man, there's we do live music on or whatever. Let people know what it's like to work there. That would actually make them want to work there. So that's an easy one. That's a free one. You can adjust that, that doesn't cost money to change the copy on your job posting. That's when you can make an adjust right away.

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Brandon Schoen:
Hey everyone, are you part of the TRIBE? If you're not, then you're going to want it because it is literally one of the most awesome masterminds in the cleaning industry. And there's tons of people in there. We're talking about stuff to grow your cleaning business. It's free. One of the best parts about it. It's free and you're going to want to be part of it. So let's tell them how to, how to do that.

Brandon Condrey:
So to join, head over to Profitcleaner.com/FacebookTRIBE

Brandon Schoen:
See you guys on the inside.

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Brandon Condrey:
If you're still struggling, the answer to a lot of these problems is money. So you can pay more. If you have the ability to do that, you want to be wary of that. If everybody in your company has a base pay of 12 bucks an hour and you suddenly run into a problem where you can't hire anybody and you increase the base, pay to 15 bucks an hour, you better do that across the board. Otherwise the people that have worked there for years are going to get really upset. You got to balance it. If you're going to try and adjust, pay for the new incomers, but not everybody else, you gotta be really careful with that. What we've done is we've tried to put in a bonus for the existing employees that know what it's like to work for us. What we've done is we've tried to incentivize them that we're going to pay you a bonus. If you can bring us a qualified employee, you've got a friend or a neighbor that you know would fit and they hate their job at whatever. Talk him into it, man, like be a sales person, tell him that these guys are awesome. Plus if you come on board, I get a little bit of money. I'll split it with you, whatever. So right now we've put it out as $50 when we hire them a hundred more dollars after their 90 day probationary period. So if they make it through that time, the employee gets $150. If that doesn't get us what we need, then we're going to tack on another one, which is for the prospective employee for the applicant. As soon as we hire you, you'll get a little bit of a bonus on another one after 90 days. And so does the person that referred you, you're talking about spending on the high end $300 if we matched it between the employee and the applicant, but to get an employee that's gonna stick around. That knows what it is because someone already told them what is to work for us. That is totally worth 300 bucks posting a job on ZipRecruiter costs more than 300 bucks. You got to just get weird with it.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, absolutely guys, not surprisingly in a lot of markets, we've talked to a lot of you guys, a lot of our students in other markets from the East side of the United States or the West side to Canada. And there's a serious problem right now. Like it seems like people are having an issue hiring specifically cleaners. We've had a lot of our students just say, it's, they're just not showing up. They're not coming. I don't know where they are. They want more money or whatever the problems are. So we here in Albuquerque, New Mexico don't have quite a big, we have a lot of laborers and people that apply still where we're not having an issue with that per se, but we are having other issues in our company we're growing so big, so fast that we're actually needing to build more culture into our teams and make sure that that comradery is there. And so we're thinking of just doing other things to help build that, which is like taking the employees out for lunches more and just doing things to build that culture and bring people together more, which is really hard.

Brandon Condrey:
The pandemic really hampered us because he didn't want to be hanging out in close groups and everyone was wearing masks. So it just didn't make sense. But now that we're kind of on the tail end of this, I think we're looking at getting a coffee truck that'll come in every Friday for the month of July or something. And every employee can get whatever they want from the coffee truck. And we're going to hang out in the parking lot. We'll put some music on everybody, hang out. You can make some internal adjustments to keep the people that you have, but also to make it more attractive to prospective employees as well. That's another option.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And then just going back to getting these people to show up and even just knowing if they're going to continue showing up, like we have a qualification kind of system process that we build in that when once we have that job posting and we post on sometimes ZipRecruiter for cleaners, but a lot of times it's just Craigslist and like Facebook, there's a couple of Facebook, just look for Facebook groups that are specific to your local area. That literally say like here in Albuquerque it's Trabahos in Albuquerque. A lot of times people looking for these jobs are Hispanic, Spanish speakers in Albuquerque, but it might not be like that in your area. But look for a job posting forum type area, a group. And on Facebook, those are free Craigslist. Craigslist is a little bit more money, but it's a lot less than some of these other recruiting sites. And then once you get those people to show up, you kind of qualify them. And what we do is if they look really good and sound really good in the interview, and you might be doing that over zoom too. We'll talk about that here in a sec, but get them to come back. If it's a cleaner, especially you want to know that they can manage their schedule. They can make changes on the fly and they can arrange stuff for their kids when their schedules and they can be at work and they can be reliable. And that's a big issue. People have with cleaners in this industry is getting them to show up in the first place, which is why we have a bonus system. We incentivize them with money because money talks, but also qualify. Make sure that before they even get hired, that they can show up a couple of times and they're reliable and they can move their schedule around. And they prove to you that they can.

Brandon Condrey:
That's great when you're not in a hiring crunch, you want to make sure that everyone's going to play nice by the rules. But if you are just fiending for a person, any person to get in there, do the interview. If your gut says, this is totally going to work, and they've got the experience that you want, hire them on the spot, just lock them up. Because if you say like, okay, I'll let you know, we've lost some good ones doing that. Well, you know, they walk out the door and then you call them up to do the qualification to come back at two o'clock to fill out the paperwork, like, nevermind. I already got hired at whatever. And right now with everybody looking to get people at the same time, people are going to be flying off the shelf. Right? The good ones are going to be gone fast. Yeah. The other thing we're doing is we have called back some former employees that quit for XYZ reason that we liked and trying to see what their current situation is. We have went out on medical leave. We're gonna check in and make sure that she's feeling better. And can you come back? We had one that quit to deal with some homeschooling because the pandemic had shut down their child's school. And now that school's came back and Albuquerque literally 10 days ago. So we're calling her back to see like, Hey, could you come back in? We really, we really could use you. You've got people that may have gone through the system. You don't want to bring back the ones that you fired. You don't want to introduce a bad element of the company, but if you've been around long enough, you may have a list of people that you can bring back. So that's a good option. Another one that we toyed around with kind of in a joking way, but maybe not. If it gets desperate is to, okay. We'd like Merry maids is big in town. They have, or Molly maids. I think they have 26, 33 teams. Whatever, if you trust the numbering on the cars, they have one single location. Why don't we just go down there in the day when all the employees are out and just put in a flyer under people's windshield wipers, it says in Spanish, Hey, we're hiring. We do things differently than the one that you work at. Call us up that might get you two or three, depending on if they have a job. And they're worried about getting another job, they're not going to quit. So that means they're probably not actively looking, but a lot of those people, especially the way it works in our city is they're making minimum wage. And after five years they got a dollar more than minimum wage. We pay way more than that. And so if they, maybe they just don't know. But if we're able to tell them like, Hey, it starts at 12 bucks an hour, that could be a 25% pay raise just by leaving, go to where the people are, let them know that you exist. Yeah. Maybe don't do it. If it's a private parking lot and there's security involved or something, maybe it's a street parking, but there are options for that as well.

Brandon Schoen:
And you guys would be surprised. That's a great point. Brandon is a lot of these people that we've hired, even our very first employees were telling us and they still tell us when we hire them, like how poorly they were treated at these other companies and how they would do what, just work them like crazy and work overtime. And they underpay him and just talk to them and horribly and just treat them poorly. It's just surprising. But this is the thing that you can counteract with just treating people, right?

Brandon Condrey:
And they want that in the job. I tell them that, Hey, we have paid time off or we have sick pay. We strive for bankers hours. Like that's what we try to tell people when we hire them is we want you to work Monday through Friday eight to five, so that you have time to go live with your family right now because of our hiring. And it's the busy season that we've unfortunately got teams that have been out in the field until six or seven o'clock at night, which is not ideal. We're not shooting to have them there that late. The benefit for them when that happens is that you are getting time and a half for overtime. We're in a hiring crunch and also at a busy season. So the teams that are here are going to be working. And it's just the reality that goes back to the culture thing where you got to communicate with your team that I'm sorry that this is like this right now. This is not what we're going for. Speaking of which we're going to pay you money. If you can bring us employees to help alleviate the situation for everybody, it's not a one prong approach to solving the problem. You got to get creative on multiple fronts. That's what we've told you in here. Hopefully you find that helpful for hiring. And if you have an idea that we didn't think of that is working well in your market, let us know in the comments, hit us up on email at hello@ProfitCleaners.com. We'd love to hear about it.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, Absolutely. Guys. So as Brandon said, this should have helped you guys. Hopefully it'll help you guys a lot more. If you listen to the podcast, you've got other content out there, hiring templates and things like that. And leave a comment, ask us the questions, click like subscribe, all that good stuff. And same on the podcast. Leave a review guys. We'd really appreciate it. It helps us so much. These are free. We're not charging you guys for this amazing education. So please reciprocate the value.

Brandon Condrey:
And find us on Facebook. You can interact with us there. Tell us what you do about hiring that we don't know. We're happy to spread the wealth. In the meantime keep it clean.

Brandon Schoen:
Keep it clean.

Brandon Schoen:
All right guys, so that is the episode. Hopefully you've got some good insights and good strategies in there. Again, guys, if you have not yet checked out the show notes, we do show notes for every one of these episodes on the podcast. So if you're ever wondering, you know, additional links or resources, go to Profitcleaners.com, check out the show notes for every episode, we've got show notes, but specifically for today's show notes, as promised, if you go to ProfitCleaners.com/36, episode 36, that's where you're going to find the show notes for this episode. And you can specifically find job posting templates, a video walkthrough, how we hire contractors, all sorts of cool stuff there guys. So check out those resources in the show notes. If you're still having issues with the hiring or needing to up your game in that area, check out those resources as always on in the show notes. And until next time, keep clean.

Announcer:
Thanks for joining us today. To get more info, including show notes, updates, trainings, and super cool free stuff. Head over to Profitcleaners.com and remember keep it clean.