How a water restoration business hires people it can count on, explained

What to take away

Employment law differs by state and changes. This is a hiring method rather than legal advice, and background check and pay practice questions belong with a qualified adviser.

Say what the job is in the advertisement

The fastest way to reduce early turnover is to stop surprising people.

State the on-call expectation, the rotation frequency, whether standby is paid, the physical demands, that the work involves other people's homes at bad moments, and that contaminated conditions are part of the job. Say what you will train and what you expect on arrival.

You will get fewer applications and a much better conversion from offer to a person still working there at six months. That is the trade worth making.

Where the candidates are

The people who succeed in this trade rarely come from it.

Plumbing and HVAC apprentices who did not finish, facilities and maintenance technicians, movers, and people from any trade where an emergency call was normal all adapt well, because they have already discovered whether they mind being woken. Referrals from your own technicians are the best single source, and worth paying for after a retention period rather than at the start.

What matters less than owners expect is prior restoration experience. It shortens training and it brings habits, some of which will be worse than yours.

The interview that actually predicts something

Ask about behavior, not about attitude.

The last question is the most useful and the least asked. People answer it honestly, and the answer tells you whether your rotation will work for them.

Keep the questions the same for every candidate for a role, and keep them related to the job. Consistency is both better hiring practice and the position a small employer wants to be in; the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission: Small Business Resource Center sets out what a small employer needs to have in place.

The working session

Schedule a paid half-day with a crew. Give the candidate a meter, a form and a supervised task.

Watch four things. Do they read the instrument or guess. Do they write down what they found, including the awkward finding. Do they ask when they do not know. Do they treat the property carefully without being told.

Those four predict performance in this trade better than any answer in an interview room. They are also the four that a certificate cannot tell you about, which is why the working session earns its cost even when you decide against the candidate.

Checks, and keeping them proportionate

Decide in advance which checks apply to which role and why. A driving record check is obviously relevant where the role involves a company vehicle. Others may or may not be, depending on the role and on your state's rules, which vary considerably.

Apply the policy consistently, document the reason for each check, and get advice before adopting anything you have not thought through. The U.S. Department of Labor: New and Small Businesses material covers the wage, hour and recordkeeping obligations that begin with the first employee, and they begin whether or not anyone has looked at them.

Making the offer competitive without overpaying

Find out what the roles pay locally rather than nationally. The area estimates in the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics Tables are a starting point, and the real comparison is the plumbing, HVAC and facilities employers you are competing with for the same person.

Then compete on the things that cost less than wage inflation: a published rotation, paid standby, a real training path with funded certification, decent kit on the truck so nobody fights the equipment, and a crew lead who is competent. Those are what people talk about when they recommend an employer.

The first crew lead

Promoting the longest-serving technician is the default and often the wrong call. The crew lead has to be able to write a drying plan, read a reading trend, adjust a setup for a stated reason and tell a customer bad news. Those are different skills from being good with equipment.

Assess against the written role description, and if nobody internally meets it yet, either hire externally or fund the training and say plainly that the role opens when the assessment is passed. The structure for that ladder is in the water restoration hiring guide, and the technical ground the assessment covers is in the equipment sizing and placement guide.

First thirty days

Give a new hire a named trainer, a written list of what they will be able to do by day thirty, and one supervised job per competency. Assess at thirty days with both people signing.

The most common failure is leaving a new technician to learn by riding along indefinitely. They pick up habits nobody chose, and the first anyone hears about it is a callback. If you are still building the business itself, the order to do this in is in the restoration business launch sequence.

Common questions

Should we hire an experienced restoration technician or train someone new?

Both, deliberately. An experienced hire gives you capacity now and imports habits; a trained hire takes longer and fits the way you work. A company with only one kind has a problem either way.

Is a working interview worth the cost?

Yes, and pay for it. An unpaid trial is a bad look and in some states a legal problem, and the information you get is worth several times the half-day wage.

How do we compete with larger firms on pay?

Usually by not trying to. Predictable rotation, paid standby and a funded training path retain people that a marginally higher wage elsewhere does not.

What early sign means a hire is not working?

Readings that do not match what a second person finds, and findings that never include anything inconvenient. Both mean the person is recording expectations rather than measurements, and that habit does not improve on its own.