CHANDLER, Ariz. — In recent years, it’s become more and more difficult to fill technician jobs in laundries.
How can a laundry operation step up its employee recruitment game to identify talent to fill positions and create a winning team?
Jennifer Poage, a consultant from Lexington, Ky., offered insight on these topics during a session called Shrinking Labor Force at the Association for Linen Management (ALM) annual conference here earlier this year.
“I’m convinced that nothing we do is more important than hiring the right people,” says Poage. “You can have a great product, great service, great business strategy, but if you don’t have enough of the right people, you’re not going to be successful.”
She says that, after looking at recruiting numbers early in the year, employers will have a challenge filling positions through the rest of 2016. That includes the laundry industry.
“It’s interesting in the laundry industry when you look at the unemployment rate,” says Poage. “In October, it was 2.7% and here in January it’s already at 5.1%. It just kind of shows you how things are moving pretty quickly.”
Unemployment in the laundry industry is low, but that doesn’t mean that finding the right people for open jobs is impossible. It will, however, take some effort.
‘KILLER’ JOB POSTINGS
Poage says that laundries really have to have “killer” job postings in the current employment market.
“What do I mean by killer job postings? The first thing you’ve got to do is to be sure your job postings have search engine optimization (SEO),” she says.
Why? Because, according to Poage, 89% of candidates that are actively looking for a job go to a search engine to find them. They don’t go straight to CareerBuilder, Snagajob or Indeed. They go to Google, and Google searches on 35 characters.
“If I search for a job in laundry, if the post starts out about the company, I won’t find it,” she says. “Right out of the gate, you have that job posting’s title, or whatever that job is. You want to put in that first paragraph what the job is and why would they want to work for you.”
Poage says job postings that typically garner the most applicants talk about the company at the bottom. At the top, a laundry needs to share how great it is to work at the company, what the job is, what are some of the requirements and then go through what experience is needed, and so on.
A difficulty for the laundry industry is that most job seekers don’t know that the industry is even an option.
“If you know your job isn’t one that somebody is actually going to say, ‘I want to do this job and this job is out there,’ then you put something in there that targets particular demographics,” Poage says. “You also need to make sure you’re marketing, consistently, your company and the jobs that you have available. You have to increase brand awareness.”
Communicating a strong employment branding message is also critical, she says. People want to know what the company’s values are.
“When you communicate employment branding, you get to the people who don’t know that your operator job exists. Or that it might be something they could be successful in and want to do,” says Poage.
She says that employment branding includes language such as the company is always looking for great people, or employee testimonials. Rather than being about the job or the number of job openings, consistent advertising could say a company has openings because it has a great career path, according to Poage.
Developing a strong community presence is another way laundries can create an employee pipeline, she says.
“It is a more labor-intensive job for you and your managers, but it is very critical that you are working through your community to be able to find good talent. Especially when it comes to entry-level positions,” Poage says. “You should be sure you are meeting with whatever tech schools you have in the area. If people can work at 16, 17, 18 years old in your area, go to the high schools. Not everybody is going to college right now, and almost every high school has career fairs.”
She says that while companies are often looking for a quick fix, if they develop those long-term relationships, over time it certainly is going to benefit the laundry.
“This is also where your ideal candidate profile is really going to help you,” she says. “For example, if you know your employees like to work out, then you would work with the YMCA and some local gyms and publicize there that I have these jobs.”
Finally, it is important that a company spends time engaging its employees.
“A really successful company gets 40% of their applicants from referrals,” Poage says.
She recommends testing a program before implementing it fully. Many companies’ first thought with lower-compensated employees is to offer cash to entice them to get people to work at the laundry. Not so, says Poage.
“I have found working with different companies (looking) for those types of individuals that cash is not a motivator,” she says. “There are a couple reasons. Often when they get that money, it goes to pay bills, or they have a spouse and it comes in the mail or straight into checking and they never see it.”
Contests are what Poage sees as working well. For example, every three months, if an employee refers someone, and that person gets hired, the employee’s name is placed into a drawing for a big-screen TV or some other gift.
“If you have more than one location, do it at each one,” Poage says. “Make it a big deal. Take their picture.”
Laundries are facing a shortage of good employees. Targeting job marketing at the right people, in the right manner, will help increase successful hiring—and help the laundry to be successful in its business.
Miss Part 1 on sourcing and screening? Click here to read it.
Have a question or comment? E-mail our editor Matt Poe at [email protected].