Your pool maintenance service is booming, and you need to grow your employee base. Without proper planning, you can experience some growing pains when expanding your business. Bringing on new members of the team requires careful planning for recruiting, interviewing, and training. Once you bring new team members on board, they need support as you integrate them into your pool maintenance team.
One of the biggest mistakes a company can make is the careless hiring of new staff. Hiring the right employees, rather than simply filling every open position as soon as possible, costs you time by having to constantly hire and train new employees. And it can cost you, clients, for your pool maintenance service if you hire the wrong employees.
What Should You Be Looking For When Hiring New Employees for Your Pool Maintenance Business?
The first step of this employee hiring process focuses on thorough screening skills so you can narrow down the field to the best potential candidates. You may be overwhelmed with applications, so when someone’s resume lands on your desk, look at their skills and their previous experience that can be an asset to your pool cleaning business.
Have they worked in other similar businesses? Have they previously worked at a spa or resort where pool maintenance was one of their duties? These are pretty obvious things that must employers initially look at when narrowing down the application pool to who to interview.
But there are other factors to consider. You can learn a lot about a potential employee by their cover letter. Are they enthusiastic? Does their personality come through? Is their cover letter riddled with bad grammar and typos?
Hire Someone Who Will Stay Awhile
Does an applicant have a steady work history? You don’t want to go through all the work of interviewing, hiring, orienting, and training someone only to have them leave for another job a few months later.
Ask about any gaps in employment. Why did they take time off? Did they go on a sabbatical or were they simply unemployed for a period of time? Because of the pandemic, there may be a lot more applicants with some sort of gap in their work history, but don’t write them off without asking for the reason and getting an explanation firsthand.
What Kind of Person Are They?
Initial impressions during an interview can tell you a lot about a person or give you a feeling of how friendly they are and if they’ll be polite to your customers. By checking references, you can also check how honest they are. Everyone wants to make a good impression in an interview and there are always two sides to every story.
However, if a potential employee of your pool cleaning service has told you outright lies about their background, you should eliminate them from your prospects immediately. Likewise, if a candidate has had a rough work or personal history, telling you upfront can go a long way to justifying giving them another chance with your business.
How Much Will They Need to Travel for Pool Maintenance Appointments?
If you’re hiring someone for a scheduling job, they’ll most likely spend most of their time in an office or at a desk. However, if you’re hiring someone to do the actual pool maintenance, those people will spend a lot of hours on the road. You want someone with a clean driving record and good habits behind the wheel to prevent any liability should they become involved in an accident.
Anyone who works for your pool maintenance service can open you to liability if they drive recklessly and cause an accident during working hours or in a company vehicle. You also don’t want to foot the bill for insuring someone with a long history of questionable driving habits or accidents.
Hire People You Trust, But Monitor Their Pool Maintenance Jobs
We all value those employees we can trust to do a good job, keep customers happy, and consistently show up for work. But there are always bad apples in any bunch, so you need to supervise their work habits. An app like ServiceWorks makes that an easy reality — easy for you because you can monitor their activities from anywhere using a simple phone app. Easy for them because the intuitive features on the app make it easy to learn.
It also has communication tools, assistance with scheduling and invoicing, and it’s easy for new employees in your pool maintenance business to learn. It even comes with a free trial so you can test it out before you make any kind of commitment.
Bigger Pool Maintenance Service, Bigger Employee Pool
More employees shouldn’t mean more problems. Expanding your business shows you’re on the right track to success, but it can be a difficult time as new people join your team. The long process of reading resumes, interviewing people, and selecting a candidate is only the beginning.
When expanding your pool maintenance service you also want to make sure each new employee has sufficient — and efficient — orientation and training for their new role. You want to make sure they can handle any situation they might encounter in the field. Or, if they’re taking an office position, you want to make sure the training is thorough and they get along with their new coworkers to form a cohesive team. That will keep your maintenance business functioning as it should and continue your upward trend as your business grows.
With the right team, you can keep growing your pool maintenance service by keeping your employees and customers happy.
