(Good) help wanted

Talk of the nation’s dire employment situation is in the news daily.

The U.S. Department of Labor paints the picture: Unemployment has hovered above 9 percent since May 2009. Millions of Americans rely on extended unemployment benefits because they’ve been out of work for so long.

The good news for those job seekers is that more companies say they’re looking to hire during the second half of 2010 and the first half of 2011, according to BusinessWeek’s recent survey of economists.

For many lawn care and landscaping companies, this is old news. They’ve long been looking to add to their ranks and intend to continue to grow in the coming year.With so many out-of-work Americans, it would seem that there are even more workers to choose from, but owners are having just as much trouble as before. The labor pool is full, but not with the right folks.


Treading water
Some landscape companies are weathering the storm by maintaining the status quo.

Bruce Johnson, who operates Performance Landscaping in Winnipeg, Manitoba, reports that his revenue for 2010 will end up at about $450,000 – the same as last year.

Matt Marks runs Town and Country Land Works in Fishers, Ind. His business, which serves 35 percent commercial clients and 65 percent residential clients, will bring in about $150,000 this year, which marks 15 percent growth every year for the past three years.

While he wanted to hire more workers in 2010, Marks didn’t win as many bids as he’d hoped, so he nixed those plans. He employs two full-time and as many as five part-time workers, depending on the season.

But back east, Paul Rapoza had an unexpectedly busy year.

“We had more demand for work this spring than we anticipated for enhancement projects,” says the owner of the 100 percent residential Rapoza Landscape in East Falmouth, Mass. “We were conservatively projecting a year – and, specifically, a spring – like 2009. It was quite a bit busier. So we hired more filed people but we got a late start because we had underestimated demand.”

Rapoza had reason to budget conservatively following 2009 when his revenue was down, but this year he predicts it will be even or slightly above 2009 – about $1.5 million. His next hire will be a business development/sales person to increase maintenance sales, he says.

Casting the net
While the pool of eager lawn care and landscaping workers might already be small, companies or recruiters then have to look at those candidates and determine which ones will be quality employees. Some contractors have methods that have worked well, while others continue to explore ways to find recruits that will work out in the long run.

Johnson started hiring subcontractors to work for him in 2010, and he’s still working out how he’ll approach hiring in 2011. He is considering using a temp agency to fill any gaps.

Rapoza has found success taking his search online. In addition to referrals, he says his company has had a good experience using Craigslist and generally has a good response to its help wanted ads on the free classified website.

“The types of applicants have to be computer literate, which is usually a plus, and they can read and write in order to be able to respond to the ad with a resume or just e-mail reply,” Rapoza says.

He has found that the number of job seekers has increased over the last couple of years. When he began using Craigslist in 2007, he received about 10 replies over a two-week period. Now he usually gets as many as 50 within a week.

Marks agrees that the number of applicants seems to have increased within the past year, but there haven’t been as many skilled or experienced workers as he’d hoped.

“Most applicants were high-schoolers or college students looking for a summer job without experience or very little experience,” he says. Like Rapoza, he’s trying to find more qualified people through current employees’ friends and networking in the local area. He plans to compensate for the lack of skilled workers by cultivating leaner, more experienced crews.

“I’m focusing on the labor that I have now and training them and retaining them for years to come,” he says.

H-2B or not to be
“It’s hard to find reliable workers who will work these conditions,” Marks says, adding, “It’s tough to find better because our industry doesn’t pay enough to compensate for weather, on-off hours, etc.”

That’s why many companies turn to the H-2B guest worker program. Recruiters often claim that the guest workers are more eager to do the work and more willing to accept the green industry’s accepted rate of pay.

Employers complain that one of the downfalls is that the program cap limits the number of approved guest workers to 66,000 per year – or a 33,000 for each half of the year – and as a result they don’t get the number of employees they request.

None of the contractors who spoke to Lawn & Landscape use the program, but Rapoza says he uses a legal immigrant work force from an economically depressed area about 50 minutes from his headquarters.

A focus on retention
Many lawn and landscape business owners have a positive outlook for their companies in the near future, indicating they might be seeking to recruit more skilled workers a year from now. While Johnson expects to maintain his current revenue stream in 2011, Rapoza predicts an increase in business of 10 percent across the board – which would give him some room to hire.

Marks agrees that the industry is about to start rebounding, and when they’re ready, business owners will look to hire for the long-term. While unskilled laborers might accept the minimum-wage jobs, the companies that are willing to pay higher wages are especially looking to hire workers with experience in hardscaping or landscape installation, he says.

“Employers will seek skilled and experienced laborers and pay them more money to stay around for years to come,” Marks says. “Employers will be very careful on who they hire.”

The author is a freelance writer based in Lakewood, Ohio.