Recruiting Crew Leaders

I am the division manager for Burnett's Landscaping. We are a medium-sized design/build company located in southeastern Connecticut. This is a simple idea to recruit crew leaders in the off-season - something that we've tried to do a little bit differently, which has been a benefit to us.

You could use this concept for any type of employee, but we've found this successful for crew leaders. We can't work year-round, and we have just a peak season in which we can hope to accomplish all of the work we have to do for the year. Mostly, we can get started in the third week of March and, if we're lucky, the ground stays workable right until Christmastime.

In our area of the country, all of the landscape-related businesses rush to hire new employees at the same time - during the spring months. The recruiting is mostly done through the local newspaper, and sometimes through word of mouth. As a consequence, there is a lot of competition for good employees and we also seem to spend an awful lot of wasted time in the spring interviewing people whoa re not really interested in working for us.

So, in the fall of 2000, I decided I was going to try something a little bit different. At Burnett's Landscaping, we already knew that to meet our goals we would need an additional one or two crew leaders for the following spring. So, instead of waiting to advertise the positions in the spring as we had always done before, I decided it might be a good idea to try looking in the fall and really got a head start on the next year.

I purposely waited until the weather got cold, because I figured that the prospective new crew leaders for us would be getting miserable because of the cold weather, or they would be getting laid off for the winter. I ran a simple employment ad in our local newspaper, and it started on Dec. 8, 2000, which is not ever the time you'd see an employment ad for a landscape crew leader in our area. I requested that I run for four consecutive Sundays. It was simple and read as follows:

Landscape crew leader, full time for all aspects of landscape/construction. Experience preferred but will train as junior crew leader. Profit-sharing, 401K, paid vacation, sick and holiday pay, health insurance. Call Burnett's Landscaping, phone number, equal opportunity employer.

It turned out we had much less responses to this ad compared to any ad we had ever done in the spring time, but the people who responded to the ad were really worth talking to. For example, Seamus was interviewed on Dec. 12 that year. He'd been working in a retail garden center and had good plant knowledge and some landscape experience. He was really looking to move to a larger company where his job would be more stable, where benefits were offered, and where he might fin year-round employment. Seamus was hired immediately to fill the first of our crew leader positions, and he stared work Jan. 18 which, for us, is the absolute dead of the winter.

Gary came in the following day, on Dec 13. He had just been laid off from a smaller landscape contracting company in our area. He vowed not to return there because the work that the was expected to perform there was sloppy and disorganized and he really wasn't happy with the finished product. So, Gary was hired to fill our second landscape crew leader opening and he started work on Feb. 190, 2001. This was still the dead of winter for us in Connecticut.

So, is it a bad thing to have these two new people working for us when there's very little income generated? The only thing I could think of was to carry them until the spring when they could pay for themselves. The benefits seemed to be that we'd have extra tie to bring them up to speed and have more time to do any training, which we don't have tine to do in the spring.

In the case of Gary and Seamus, having them start first in the off-season actually worked out well for everyone involved. Seamus is a trained auto mechanic and he was able to immediately assume a position in our maintenance shop. We use the winter months to go through all our trucks and equipment, and that way he really fit in perfectly right from the start. He spent some time with the other crew members and he was very comfortable and ready to go when spring finally came.

Gary, as it turned out, has tremendous talent as an artist. He had some commission work to finish up and some exhibitions to do, so he was happy to start out a little later in the season. His first job, which started in February, was to help us construct our display for the Connecticut Flower Show. During that week, he got to work with all the other crew leaders in a setting that, I'm sure, was much less intense that if he started in March or April. Gary and Seamus are still working with us as crew leaders and have really progressed well.
 They say timing is everything. Recruiting is something we have certainly all done repeatedly but, for us, just changing the timing a little bit was really a great benefit.

This article was printed with permission from the American Nursery & Landscape Association, and is based on a presentation made at the ANLA Conventonin San Diego, Calif., in July 2002. You can reach Mary Richardson by calling 860/859-3100 or emailing burnettslandscaping@prodigy.net.