Kristin and Tony Case on how to minimize the new hire investment - PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of a live interview with Kristin and Tony Case from Hi-Peak Staffing. You can read the interview below or listen to the podcast.

Intro: Welcome to Roofing Road Trips, the podcast that takes you on a thrilling journey across the world of roofing. From fascinating interviews with roofing experts to on the road adventures, we'll uncover the stories, innovations and challenges that shape the rooftops over our heads. So fasten your seat belts and join us as we embark on this exciting roofing road trip.

Karen Edwards: Hello and welcome to another Roofing Road Trips from RoofersCoffeeShop. I'm your guest host, Karen Edwards. And today I'm really excited to talk about an important topic for our industry and that is related to hiring the processes, the risks involved and things that are typical that we see within the roofing industry, including mismatches between job requirements and candidate skills. And for today's conversation, we are bringing in the experts, Kristin and Tony Case of Hi-Peak Staffing. Welcome Kristin and Tony.

Kristin Case: Thank you very much. We're happy to be here.

Karen Edwards: Glad to have you today. So let's start with Tony. Why don't you introduce yourself and then tell us a little bit about your background.

Tony Case: Yeah, absolutely. Well, my name's Tony Case, again. I'm the co-owner of Hi-Peak with my wife and business partner. We are now entering into kind of our stride where Kristin has a diverse background in recruiting. She'd been with a couple of different agency recruiters. We decided almost four years ago now that we wanted to go out on our own. We wanted to try and do this by ourselves. And so I have a little bit of a mixed hat, mixed bag as far as my background goes, I was in education for almost a decade. I was a former athlete and then got into the professional world in the sales and marketing aspect of things.

And so we figured with our two heads combined, we could try and go after this. I spent quite a bit of time and efforts recruiting when I was in that realm of athletics, and so it's very relative. The transition was quite easy. If you've spoke on the phone with one recruit, you've spoke on the phone with a multiple candidates, those scales translate. And so we are now into the scaling process. We've grown. We've tried to increase our network, and that's what we're doing now and we're really excited about the future and see what the future holds and that's a little bit of money.

Karen Edwards: Awesome. Kristin, tell us about you.

Kristin Case: Okay. Hi, I am Kristin Case. Tony and I were married in September, so we're newlyweds and we own Hi-Peak Staffing together. So I come from an agency background of 15 years in recruiting. I started as an HR manufacturing IT recruiter and then about 10 years ago, just like everyone else, I fell into roofing, and I've been here ever since. So I opened up a roofing division at a previous employer, recruited, scaled that up and then we decided to kind of branch off on our own and try this out for ourselves and it's been really awesome. So yeah, we're nationwide roofing recruiters, and we specialize predominantly on the contractor side, but we also do work with some coatings manufacturing and distribution sides of it as well. But really the contractor side is our specialty right now.

Karen Edwards: Okay, interesting. Congratulations on your recent wedding.

Kristin Case: Thank you.

Karen Edwards: And Tony and Kristin are brand new parents to a nine-month-old puppy, so if you hear any puppy noises in the background, that's why.

Kristin Case: Yes, little Otis.

Karen Edwards: Yeah. Well that's cool. So we've been talking for a long time in roofing and construction in general about the challenge of finding labor and finding the right people on your team. So I would just like to know what you're seeing. What are contractors, I guess, not doing right? What are some risks that they're facing when they're hiring? Because when the pool is small to begin with, you really need to make the right matches, correct?

Tony Case: Correct. Yeah, and it's a great question, Karen. It's a hot topic. It has been for the, I'd say the last three years since COVID. We are dealing with an extremely saturated market. But I think that what we're seeing, the risks versus things that we're hearing from our contractors, what's being reported widely, that the struggle is real, that the talent pool is dwindling. So Kristin will address a few things of what we kind of do and introducing new talent to that pool. But we've seen a lot of different things where in an attempt to, I guess backfill or cover your bases when you don't have skilled workers or just basically the vacancies that you do have, we're seeing contractors have to increase bids. We're seeing other employees have to accept additional roles. We're seeing quite a bit of morale drop when that does happen.

We're seeing that people are missing out, our contractors are missing out on bids that they could potentially be winning because they're either stepping in and having to do some of that recruitment on their own, spending the time, investing their time in places where maybe it's not generating the revenue right now. And so that's a huge risk that we see a lot of our clients or even potential clients that are accepting right now as an agency recruiter, that is our responsibility and we accept that risk. We try to mitigate that risk for our clientele just so that they can do revenue generating activities all day, not have to spend ample time out of their week or out of their schedule trying to do this. We're professionals. This is what we do every day, day in and day out.

And so that's how we try to mitigate some of that risk. But those are the risks that we're seeing our clientele accept with the morale, the safety aspect of it, the time and the indefinite cost where there's a huge cost when you're looking at onboarding someone, training someone, the potential equipment and the background checks, things like that to where if that person is not the right fit and they're spending a short amount of time, we call it weeks or months, you have to start that process all over. And that's part of that risk that we mitigate. We do that for you. We do that for our clients. We make sure that we're vetting everyone on the proper scale and putting the highest quality talent in front of our clients.

Karen Edwards: Do you see contractors ... Because a contractor is running their business because they want to put roofs on, they want to do work, they don't want to worry about the time and effort that goes into finding the right fit. And are you seeing that sometimes people just get a little tired and say, "Well, yeah, I think that person's probably good enough?"

Tony Case: All the time every day. We are fully aware that we're one of few, but we're not the only commercial roofing recruiter out there. And so we understand that we probably have a lot of our clients working with other recruiting agencies, but then we also have our clientele trying to do this on their own. And if they don't have a developed or experienced HR department that is used to doing this on a daily basis in volume, it gets very, very tiresome for them. And they can do that. They can just kind of fold their cards and say, "I've interviewed six people, none of them are qualified, hired one of them."

And then again, you run that risk of training that person onboarding and going through the entire process and then figuring out that person's not the right fit. And that's what we pride ourselves in is making sure that we have the intricacies of what you need, what you're looking for, any backgrounds that are necessary, any certifications, higher education qualifications, anything like that. We take that off of your plate, do it for you so that the only thing you're really doing is speaking with this person one to one and figuring out if they're going to be the right one for you to bring in.

Karen Edwards: Wow. So what does the process look like if I'm a contractor and I decide I had enough, I'm not seeing the right people, I want to start working with you. How does that work?

Kristin Case: [inaudible 00:08:28]-

Tony Case: Oh, go ahead.

Kristin Case: Yeah, that's a great question. So usually what I like to always, when I'm talking to new potential clients that have been struggling to fill a job, it's been open for 30 days, 60 days, 90 days. And either we reach out with a potential candidate that could be a good fit, or they find us on RoofersCoffeeShop or on our website or whatever and we have that initial conversation, it's usually because they've either hired two or three bad seeds. Maybe they thought they could be a potential fit, but they weren't able to ramp up in time or that the role has just been open and they're just not getting the applicant pool that they used to maybe pre-COVID. So a process would be with us is that we take that an intake call. So we learn who they are, what their pain points are, we go through what their company culture is, what are the skills that the candidate has to have in order to be successful in this role and then really evaluate a full job description.

And then we tell them whether or not we feel we'd be able to assist them in filling those opportunities. And so typically in the roofing space, yes, anything from a laborer all the way up to a leadership position. And I think where the value really kicks in with utilizing a specialized agency is the time factor. So stats and studies will show that jobs will be posted for anywhere ... The average right now is a 45 day. A lot of companies don't have 45 days to wait to hire someone on a position that may be open for two months prior to that and they were interviewing and all of these things. And then they're spending their own money on the advertising of the job postings, the interview. It usually falls on, if they don't have an internal HR department or recruiting division, it usually falls on someone's hands and then gets passed down the line until they've run out of resources.

So what we bring in is the skillset of being specialized, talk to them about their needs and then if we agree to work together, then it's hopefully a quick turn time. We usually like to have, within 10 business days, we usually like to have five candidates presented and interviewing for that position. For some other roles, like more specialized, higher level, those can take longer because they're a little bit more strategic. But in that bread and butter wheelhouse of your project managers, your estimators, your sales reps, your field supervisors, operations service, those are all something that we're working every single day across the board. So it's really that we try to flip them on that time factor for them.

Karen Edwards: So I'm curious, what does your vetting process look like when within 10 days you want to have five candidates? What have you already done, whether that's background checks or how do you determine if that person might be a good fit?

Kristin Case: That's a great question. So we vet every one of our candidates, and what we mean by that is we talk to every single one of them. So on the backend, which I mean we'll get to this later, but our services come at no charge to you until the candidate actually starts. So all that behind the scenes work is at no charge. Like what Tony had mentioned is the objective is to get people in front of you so that you want to interview them and move to the next step. So the process is that we, like I said, take the job order, figure out what they're looking for and then what we'll do is post the job on job boards, but then we also have around 20,000 LinkedIn connections combined with about 88% of them being in roofing. So then we can also reach out to our network of people and work on getting referrals and word of mouth is a great way.

And then we also search down passive candidates. Candidates that don't have the resume online, don't have them posted, but then we do outreach trying to get them interested in these new exciting opportunities. So what we do is we do a phone screen with every candidate or a Teams video, go through their background, their experience, why they'd be a good fit for this particular position, their salary requirements. And then what I like to say is we wrap them up in a pretty bow and we ship them off to the client. So then when the client gets to work the next day, they open their email and they're like, wow, Tony and Kristin or Hi-Peak Staffing have sent us five, six candidates and they all align with what we're looking for. Now it's just about finding that right personality match. And that's really what we ... That's our process. And then we kind of facilitate, I'm the liaison between the candidate and the client of just kind of making sure the whole process runs really smoothly.

Karen Edwards: Wow. And it sounds amazing. One, because you-

Kristin Case: [inaudible 00:13:29] convenience.

Karen Edwards: ... you take the pain out of it. Right, it's convenient. And I mean, especially for a lot of roofing companies are small businesses and they may not have HR departments and they may not ask the right questions or put the right processes in place for finding those people. And then that's painful. Right? It's not so much, I mean, you mentioned the money, Tony, and the morale and the safety and training and so many things that go into it. And if there is a way to prevent that from happening, then I don't see why anybody wouldn't be calling you guys.

Kristin Case: Thank you.

Karen Edwards: Yeah. Yeah. I like your analogy too, from recruiting in athletics to recruiting in the industry. It's very, very similar because it's a team. It needs to be the right fit. Do you have any, without naming names or sharing too much detail, any success stories or anecdotes of you might be able to share?

Tony Case: We have success stories every day. We actually have on our vision boards where we track our metrics, that's kind of what we're looking for is those success stories. Just last week, we had a candidate that we placed in a service role, basically a lower tiered, but a very skilled worker. Last week we were notified that they're being promoted to project manager and then with aspirations of eventually a branch manager, and those things are, or leadership, executive level leadership, those are the things that we pride ourselves on of we're not only finding you the right person in the right fit in the right area, but we're hopefully finding someone that's willing to grow and wants to grow with your organization and eventually lead and be an impactful management type of level person. And so that's something that we pride ourselves on. We do that every day.

We keep track of those things. It's also because it's beneficial for us to do so. We want to make sure that if we place someone with an organization, with a client, with a company, we want to make sure that we have the capability of reaching out to you at any time, whether we're doing random check-ins or sending you a launch or sending your team [inaudible 00:15:53] it looks like, we want to make sure that we have the potential of contacting you when you are the one hiring, when you are doing this on your own and you need to build your team. And so those things, we track those and we love to talk about those every day.

Karen Edwards: Yeah. Yeah. That's fantastic. And when you mentioned before, Kristin, that all this pre-work and all this planning doesn't ... You're not paying for that, right? It's not until you get those candidates and then make that higher. I want to talk about people so often will say, wow, I don't want to spend the money on that. I can just do it myself and I can save however much money. And not to mention pricing, but I would like to just reiterate, what are some of the costs that are involved in making the wrong hire?

Kristin Case: Oh, man, the list goes on and on. What I hear, so we have ... There's obviously studies and stats out there that it can be 20% of someone's salary to when you hire the wrong person. So you've just hired this person, you're super excited about them, you put them through the training. So someone's doing the training, you put them on the payroll, you've got them now full benefits. And so there's a major investment involved for that person to turn around and just not be a good fit at the end of the day, end up leaving, the list just goes on and on. Whereas what we provide is a guarantee. So we have to back our work up. So if someone does decide to hire through us, they get a guarantee period so that in case that person doesn't work out, they don't feel like they just took this huge loss on an investment. So we will replace that candidate at no additional cost.

And so that's a big reason why I think a lot of our companies continuously use us because they know, okay, we've had a lot of success. But then also that in case anything happens, which things do happen, we're there to support them and make sure that we do right by them. I would say when I get the call, it's usually like they've said, the job's been open for X amount of time, they haven't got any qualified candidates. Somebody else has spent 10, 20 hours doing interviews and they can't find the right skillset or personality match or they don't have the right certifications, whatever it may be. It's normally the investment of time that is just being wasted is what we find and what we hear. What would you say to that, Tony?

Tony Case: Absolutely, and I couldn't agree more that there's upfront costs that we kind of discussed and what it looks like onboarding someone, what it looks like preparing them with either cell phones, company vehicles, equipment, whatever that looks like. There's always that upfront cost. But then we're talking about also the unseen cost where if you're spending 10 to 20 hours a week recruiting, that's clients you're not reaching out to, that's not prospective projects you're not bidding on. That's taking away from your ability to do and complete revenue generating activities.

And so those things could equate to hundreds of thousands of dollars of loss. And so when we talk to our clients and our best clients, our top clients are the ones that understand, we're willing to make this small initial investment to have the right people in place so we can continue to do what we need to do in order to make our company successful. And I think that's the largest thing that is unseen, but also kind of unknown with people that just like you said, Karen, I can't pay for that right now. I need to do it myself. Well, what are you sacrificing in doing that in the meantime?

Karen Edwards: Yeah. I'm curious too with when you do the kind of learn about the company, learn about the culture, see what's there, do you ever say, "Hmm, you guys need to do a little bit of work before we're going to be able to match something?"

Kristin Case: Oh, yeah.

Karen Edwards: What's that look like?

Kristin Case: So in my beginning years, no, I was way too nervous to say things like that, but what ends up happening is you end up finding out what you needed to find out three months too late. So instead, let's have these conversations, these tough conversations and let's try to find a middle ground. So yes, if I feel like a company is not successful with hires because they pay their people way under what they're valued at, then I'm going to have to have a friendly coaching session with them about, "Hey, if you guys are open to looking at people at this rate, let's see what kind of different talent pool we look at." So then they know, okay, we have a range now and now we can look at people what they want to pay and then at what they should be paying. And usually they end up upping their salary because that person who's qualified typically has really great job stability, can pass a drug in a background screen, doesn't have points on their license, is looking for a great place to call home.

And when we can provide that for a bump and a salary increase, they end up staying longer. So yes, tough conversations with the clients have to happen upfront. And at the end of the day, if it's not worth it for them, that's okay, no problem, no sweat. But usually what happens in that scenario is about six weeks later, they call us back and say, "Okay, we're ready," but then we're already prepared for that. So I'm already ready keeping them warm in the back of my head going, they're going to need someone at that location. And I'll start kind of poking around in the market so that I have someone for them so that they can say, "Yep, this is the right ... We should have done this in the beginning."

We don't really get ... Within a staffing agency, like Tony mentioned, there is an upfront cost. This a fee that you pay to work with us for our specialty services that you pay when a candidate starts, but at the end of the day, it's like they don't even argue or have an issue with that because now they're like, "Oh, we're so satisfied. Found this person. Now we can move on to that next position we had to hire for." Because it's usually anywhere between one and eight roles that they're looking to fill. With the job market, now with there being the baby boomer generation retiring and then the great resignation in COVID and then also, air quotes, roofing is not sexy. We have to start expanding out into different industries. I'm a part of the National Women in Roofing group. We are doing that right now. That is we're trying to figure out ways how to bring new women from outside industries that have amazing skill sets into the roofing industry.

Also, getting with schools that maybe a kid doesn't want to go to college and that's okay, that's cool. Maybe they like working with their hands, maybe they want to be outside. We have to do a better job of getting a whole new generation interested in this. And so this year that is something that we're really pushing onto new clients and existing clients is, "Hey, this person comes from a sales background that maybe in the mortgage industry or in an industry that is failing now, would you guys be open to looking? They have all the intangible skills and a great personality." And we're seeing that they're open to that now. So it's just bringing a whole new fresh face to the industry too, that we have to provide that coaching to our clients, that there's a lot of qualified people out there. Let's broaden our horizons.

Karen Edwards: Right. Right, yeah. We are going to have to steal and borrow from other industries because the skills are transferable. If you're good at sales, you're good at sales. If you have those talents, you can find the corelation.

Kristin Case: And typically the roofing company that we're talking to has an owner with 10 to 30 years of experience that they can teach them the roofing, you can't ... If you don't have the budget to teach someone a sales cycle, picking up the phone, cold calling, prospecting, canvassing, all of those things, knocking on doors, but you can teach them what a TPO roof system is. It's like the timing is cut in half. So we're really starting to introduce outside folks to the roofing industry, which is great. We need it.

Karen Edwards: Oh, absolutely, 100%. And I know just through as a roofing industry, National Roofing Contractors Association has gotten involved the last few years with SkillsUSA and this is the second-

Kristin Case: Yes, I saw that.

Karen Edwards:... year that they're going to have a roofing competition as part of that national thing that goes on.

Kristin Case: It's so awesome.

Karen Edwards: Very, very cool. But yeah, yeah, definitely, I think the future, the younger generation that is graduating high school or tech school and wants to get in the field and work with their hands, that we have to pay attention to them. Definitely.

Kristin Case: Yeah. And I have a couple of girlfriends that are teachers and they tell me, "Will you talk to my students?" Because they don't understand that in roofing, there can be a lifelong career of upward mobility. And because I don't know if it's a stigma or whatever it may be, but when you hear roofing, you're either thinking the person with the hammer and the nail on the roof or the guy knocking on your door asking if they can do an estimate. They don't understand that there is major six figure salaries in this, and it's a ... What are we at? 150 billion industry now or on our way in the next 10 years. So there is just so much opportunity. So when I talk to them and I say, yeah, you start out at an entry level pace, but within two years you're up to $60 to &70,000 base salary, full benefits, vehicle, 401k, vacation at 20, they're like, "Oh my gosh, this is amazing."

Karen Edwards: And no student loans.

Kristin Case: And no debt. That's a huge one. No student debt. And I wish back when I graduated 28 years ago, I knew about this because who knows, I could have gone into roofing sales or whatever. And so I just think that it's really cool and that we're really doing that push right now. We just got to keep doing it and get better.

Karen Edwards: Yeah. Yeah. That's great to hear. Wow. So if a contractor does, they're listening to this episode and they're like, "I should have done this a year ago. I need to reach out." Where can they find you?

Tony Case: Everywhere. So obviously a classified ad running with you with RoofersCoffeeShop, all of our information is included in that. We are easily accessible on our website. They can fill out a very brief, I think it takes about 14 seconds to fill out all of your information and press send directly on our website. We're also easily accessible on LinkedIn. Any social media aspects that you're looking at, Instagram, Facebook, X, anything that you need, we are available on that. You can reach out to us on anything. Our contact information is widely available as well. We're not scared to talk to anyone. We welcome every conversation and we would love to get in touch with everyone.

Karen Edwards: Excellent. And Hi-Peak does have a full directory on rooferscoffeeshop.com, so feel free to look them up there. And this has been really fantastic. I've learned a lot today, and I want to thank you both, Kristin and Tony for being here. And hopefully-

Kristin Case: Thank you very much.

Karen Edwards: Yeah. Hopefully we will make a difference for someone who's out there listening.

Kristin Case: Awesome.

Karen Edwards: For all of you, thank you for listening to this podcast. We always want you to listen to all of our podcasts to stay on top of the latest news and happenings in the industry. So be sure to visit RoofersCoffeeShop, check out our Read Listen Watch initiative. That's where all of our podcasts live. Or you can subscribe from your favorite podcast platform. You'll find us there. So we appreciate you being here, and we'll see you on a future road trip. Bye everyone. Thanks, Tony. Thanks, Kristin.

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