How to Open Up Your Business for New Hires

RCS Influencers, Seth and Ashley Pietsch say contractors shouldn’t be afraid to hire someone with no experience. 

Editor’s note: The following consists of a conversation between RCS Podcast Producer, Megan Ellsworth, and business owners, Ashley and Seth Pietsch about how to increase recruitment and retention in a roofing business. You can read the transcript below or listen to the podcast.

Megan Ellsworth: Hello everyone, welcome back to RoofersCoffeeShop® my name is Megan Ellsworth, here with an influencer response topic for the month of October and I'm with Ashley Pietsch from Integrity Insurance. Hey! 

Ashley Pietsch: Hey, how are you? 

Megan Ellsworth: Doing good, excited to hear what you have to say out this month's topic, which is, what programs do you have for finding new hires?  

Ashley Pietsch: Yeah, so actually, as we've started in our business, we actually had quite a few old contacts that we had worked with at our prior agency that we worked for. And so that was really good for us because of a lot of them were looking for more of a smaller, independent agency and ones that we had already worked with and so that was pretty easy. But moving forward, we do a lot of ads on social media. We do a lot of word of mouth. We ask our employees if they know people. We do some on Indeed, which we've had actually some success there, we've hired some pretty great new commercial account managers that have helped us along the way. 

And then the other thing that we like to do is for new people that maybe don't have insurance background yet, we usually start them off as a receptionist, see how they do in the front office. If they like it, if they want to move up and then if they do, then we put them through the schooling that's needed in order to get an insurance license and start training them from ground up, which is then great because we kind of train them the way that we want our employees, all the procedures and it's actually worked out really good for us.  

Megan Ellsworth: Yeah that's brilliant. And it's really cool that you guys do that for your employees, helping them get licensed and everything. That's great. 

Ashley Pietsch: And then I know as far as, I'll let Seth kind of answer on how we go about hiring new producers within our office. 

Seth Pietsch: Yeah. Hi Megan. Sorry I didn't say that I was on the call with you. 

Megan Ellsworth: No worries. Hey Seth! 

Seth Pietsch: How's it going? So the new producer side of things, I've been kind of underneath the approach right now where it's kind of difficult to teach an old dog new tricks sometimes. So I found that bringing in a new person, a new producer that doesn't have any sort of insurance experience and really showing them the ways that I do business and how I was taught as a younger producer has worked really, really good because then you can tell right away if somebody does have the want to stay in insurance and keep moving forward with that. And then, if they find out that this isn't for them there's no hard feelings because it's a tough industry to get established in, nothing like that. 

So hiring people that don't have any sort of experience in insurance has actually worked good. And now we do hire people that have insurance experience on the producer's side as well, but it is harder for seasoned agents to leave, to go start over, because then they have to start up their clientele again. So it's easier just from a business perspective to find somebody that's not established, that doesn't have a current account base, and then convince them to try to start over in a new agency. So that's never easy for a seasoned producer to do, so hiring from no experience has been our most successful so far. 

Megan Ellsworth: Wow. That's really fascinating and really cool that you guys have figured this out and it sounds like you have a really set system for all of this. 

Ashley Pietsch: Yeah. It's working out nice. And then a lot of our companies, once we do bring people on board, they also provide schooling, which is great. We just enroll them in the company's schooling and they teach them all the ins and outs on insurance. So I that's really helpful for us. 

Megan Ellsworth: That's awesome. 

Ashley Pietsch: Yeah. 

Megan Ellsworth: That's great. Well, you guys are knocking it out of the ballpark here. No one else has really brought up this fact, or this idea, of bringing in people that have no experience in this specific field. So I think it's really cool for our contractors to hear that perspective. 

Seth Pietsch: Absolutely. I think it's a great way just because any new hire, if they've been in the industry for a long time, they're going to have good and bad habits, that's just kind of the way it works. So if you bring in somebody with no experience, you can teach them exactly how you want them to work for you and the tips and tricks, you get to teach them from the starting point versus trying to change somebody. And a lot of times the bad habits, it's very difficult for people to break or can't break. So teaching them from the beginning is a very good way to approach. It just takes a little longer to get that person up and running which you're going to have to be patient with. But I think that's a very good approach right now with the lack of the labor in the labor force right now, the shortage. So any way you can get creative is a good way to go. 

Megan Ellsworth: Absolutely. Oh yes, absolutely. That's great you guys. Well, thank you so much for sharing these ideas. Any last thoughts or anything you think roofing contractors could implement in this area? 

Seth Pietsch: Just be open minded, keep coming up with creative ways of trying to attract potential employees and clientele to your business, and just really treat them like family the best you can because everybody wants to be part of something that they enjoy being part of. And if they feel that and they are appreciated, that's going to keep a lot of people on board and bring new people your direction. 

Megan Ellsworth: Precisely. Well said you guys. Well, thank you so much for chatting with me today and I look forward to our next influencer topic with you all. 

Ashley Pietsch: Thank you for having us. 

Seth Pietsch: That sounds great. Thank you, Megan. 

Megan Ellsworth: Great. See you later. 

Ashley Pietsch: Bye 

Seth Pietsch is the president and Ashley Pietsch is vice president of Integrity Insurance & Bonding Inc. See Seth’s full bio here and Ashley’s full bio here.