Recruiting handymen for your business

You need to be talented or have talented handymen for your handyman business to succeed. Therefore you need to be very careful when hiring.

Search and find reliable and good people, and then supply them with enough work with a decent package so that they can make as much or more money for you. You must have incentives to bring the best out them. But most important you must get people who thee same vision as you or else you won’t last long in business.

How to recruit
You must advertise the position. This can be done with newspaper advertising.

Secondly you can get the word out to people in the trade through advertising, contact with lumberyards for recommendations, talking to contractors who know other small contractors, etc.

Once you have found potential candidates, every key person in your company, from manager to office coordinator to training director must interview applicants in depth.

Specific questions should be asked about range of skills each one possess such as carpentry, electrical, plumbing, plastering, etc.

You must also find out about jobs held in the past, and the type and quality of work done for other companies, jobs that required supervising or dealing with other people, administrative or selling skills, their strengths and weaknesses in running the business; how many hours they worked; if possible how much money they were taking home, etc. Most importantly ask for contactable trade references and verify everything.

Use testing services that test for empathy, ability to take and give orders and ability to work with people. These tests can tell you who not to hire. They screen out most of the poor candidates, and do give an indication of whether the person is suited to the handyman business.

Use an application form to get information about background, education, family and previous work experience in detail.

Make sure you discuss in detail the subject of markup and margin in the handyman business during interviews. Candidates must be willing to buy into your pricing strategy or else it would be difficult for them to make profit for you.

If an applicant is not willing to accept your pricing strategy after discussion, don’t hire him even if they meet all criteria.

The problem is that unconvinced handymen will constantly be complaining that the prices are too high and he cannot sell at that level.

To make it worse, some even tell customers that they are aware that your prices are high and tell them you make charge like that. These are people you don’t need to work for you. You don’t need someone who will disassociate himself with the company beliefs.

The company must advertise, develop products, train, pay an administrative staff, etc. All this costs money, unless this can be explained and accepted by applicants, they should not be hired.