This year, with our growth, we had to hire a lot of people. Unfortunately where we live, there is a not a big labor pool to pull from for physical labor jobs.
So what did we do? We scrapped- hired crappy people, whoever we could get, whom many of were not hard workers and or did poor quality work.
First we tried Craigslist- this brought in some applicants, many of whom had criminal records or were no shows.
We tried putting out flyers at the university by us- no calls.
We tried a Facebook ad- I think we got one or two calls but was not a great resource.
We tried the local university job posting board- we got one good guy from this.
We went to the Department of Labor and conducted interviews- we picked up two guys who initially seemed great, but one ended up claiming a workers comp injury which we are still fighting and the other got fired because he was too slow and dishonest. One guy we picked up is a little “off” but desperately wanted to get back to work and has proven an asset to us.
We tried Indeed.com- this was our most valuable resource. We picked up several applicants from here.
This fall, we recognize that finding people was an issue. The next route we are going to try and have hope for is a temp agency. We have used them before- and pulled in mostly bad employees but used one or two good ones too. We figure this happens with the guys we hire anyway- but this way we know we can call and there is always someone on hand. Since the agency keeps them busy all the time, they have more people and a bigger pool to pick from. We are able to buy them outright if we want to keep them for a few thousand dollars- or we can hire them through the agency as long as we’d like for $15 an hour. $15 is more than we pay our other guys, but if he is immediately productive its better than hiring a shitty guy for $10 an hour plus $2 in payroll taxes and having him lose us money.
So the temp agency is our next approach we are excited for- I will keep you posted how it works out for us.
