New Hiring Practices to Account for a Changed World

RCS Influencer Rae July says companies need to be realistic about their job offerings to receive more high-quality job responses.  

Editor’s note: Listen in as RCS Podcast Producer, Megan Ellsworth and Rae July discuss how Chinook Roofing reaches out to potential employees. You can read the transcript below or listen to the podcast.

Megan Ellsworth: Hi, welcome back to RoofersCoffeeShop.com. My name is Megan Ellsworth, and I'm here with Rae July talking about the October influencer topic, which is: What are some ways that you all find new hires for your company? Rae hit us off. 

Rae July: Hey, Megan, and thanks for having me. So, we have been doing a couple of things, everybody knows there's a labor shortage. So, we're trying to go about hiring people through different channels. We do the traditional job posting on Indeed and the other job boards, Super Recruiter, and stuff like that. But we also have been partnering with nonprofit organizations like Metropolitan Development Council, MDC Hope and just a couple others. We've tried to partner with like Job Corps to do job players on base, for the local army base. And from time to time, we'll also go over to the GAF Roofing Academy and just reach out to the graduates there and try to recruit them that way. But that's some of the different things that we've been doing. It's a hit or miss quite honestly. There isn't one method that has worked better than the others, just because people have to want to work, and roofing is not something that is easy. Nobody goes to school to be a roofer, so it's either you get people who are already experienced, which most of them would've worked for another roofing contractor.  

Bring new people in and you invest in training and we've actually started investing in the training aspect of it. So we've been building mockups, partnering with manufacturers to do comprehensive training that way and looking at possibly doing the NRCA ProCertification programs and stuff like that. 

Megan Ellsworth: Oh great. those have been so helpful for so many contractors trying to bring in new hires and everything. What are you seeing specifically in your area with people applying, not applying, and other companies around you? 

Rae July: In our area, again, it's the urge to work. We have to be honest with ourselves and realize that the last, roughly 18 months-two years, people have figured out other ways to earn an income. Some of them, their situation might have changed where they actually have to go back to a traditional work environment. Whereas, there are others who have realized that, "I don't really need to go back to a work environment." And so they decide... They look at their finances and say, "Okay, well I can get by on this much, or I need this much to get by on." And in reality, you have to look at your... What you can offer.  

Megan Ellsworth: That's great. 

Rae July: Helps sustain, to resist the great because a lot of the times you have people who want to work, but they have unrealistic expectations about what they should be earning. Especially if they might not have worked for the last two years, there's a gap in employment there. We account for the gap, obviously, because of the circumstances. But at the same time we have to be realistic and say, do we invest in someone, and pay them a high wage requirement and they might not be knowledgeable, and you have to then turn around and spend money to train that person. Or do we bring someone in who might not need a high range of wage requirement, but we can invest in their training and development of their skill sets so that that person can truly grow with your organization and become an asset as opposed to somebody who might be coming from somewhere else and might just be looking for a job not have that career mentality. 

Megan Ellsworth: Precisely. 

Rae July: So you invest all of that money into someone who might not necessarily want to be there. And so, those were things that as a company we are thinking about. And so again, it's always hit or miss. We were looking for office staff, we're looking for field staff and we'll get this influx of resumes and you reach out to them to try to interview them. Some of them don't respond. Some of them we make appointments for them to show up to the interview and some of them don't show up. So, those are all kinds of things you're dealing with. 

Megan Ellsworth: Oh, right. Just right, man. It is such a tough climate right now with all this going on at the exact same time. Thank you for sharing your thoughts. Any last words or more maybe words of encouragement for fellow contractors out there? 

Rae July: Quite honestly, I would say just stick with it. It's a work in progress. We're fortunate enough that we do have some resources where we can do that. But again, when you... And be realistic in your hiring practices. You can't put a job posting out there to hire someone to do admin work, paying them $18 an hour and request that they have a four-year college degree. That's unrealistic. You have to meet people where they are and realize that maybe we're looking at the bar being a little bit lower than we expected it to be and just tailoring our needs to fit what's out there. And, honestly, it's being realistic, having realistic expectations. 

Megan Ellsworth: Precisely. Well said. Rae, thank you so much for sharing with us today. 

Rae July: You are welcome. 

Megan Ellsworth: I look forward to hearing your thoughts in next month's topic and I'll see you next time. 

Rae July: Absolutely. Thank you, Megan. 

Rae July is an Estimator at Chinook Roofing & Gutters in Fife, Washington. See her full bio here.