how to hire lawn care employees

How to Hire Lawn Care Employees to Fuel Your Business Growth 

GigSmart | Apr 12, 2021

Why Your Business Needs Temporary Lawn Care Employees

When you own a landscaping, lawn care service, or any related business focused on commercial or residential outdoor projects, anticipating the number of workers you may need during any given week can present a real challenge. You never want to turn away business, but when a last-minute project comes up, and you don’t have the extra staff to accommodate it, you often have no choice but to decline.

There is a better way. If you’re not leveraging temporary labor to help supplement your staff as demand for your landscape business or lawn care service fluctuates, you should be. Let’s dive into why you should utilize temporary lawn care employees to help you ensure you can accept every outdoor project request that comes your way, bringing even more revenue to your landscaping, lawn care service, or outdoor property maintenance business.

Scale Crews Based on Project Needs

Hire workers based on the demands of each project. Rather than having too many full-time employees on standby, hire temporary workers to help with large or last minute projects. 

Since you likely experience increased customer requests based on a variety of factors like the weather, the time of year, and your location, you can utilize temporary Workers to quickly scale your team as those variables change. By supplementing your crew with flexible labor, you can easily offer more ‘hands on deck’ to get projects done to completion on time (or even ahead of schedule). Temporary labor makes it easy to scale your workforce, without the unfortunate downside of having to dismiss or let go full-time employees once projects are complete.

By using an agile crew, you can save money, meet deadlines, and satisfy your clients. Temporary lawn care workers can help you complete more projects, generating more revenue for your business.

Access Workers with Specialized Skills

Since every project is different, you may run into instances where you need a specialized expertise for the job. Using temporary labor gives you a way to leverage specialized workers, like irrigation technicians, trained arborists and equipment operators, for short-term work. In addition, you may gain other potential advantages by sourcing temporary workers with specialized training or certain equipment. Instead of sourcing the expertise or tools required to complete the job, save yourself some overhead by requiring what’s needed as a prerequisite for your next temporary hire.

Try-Before-You-Buy

Have you ever hired someone who was not a good fit? Temporary labor reduces risk by allowing you to have a “trial run” with potential hires before offering them full-time positions. This allows you to evaluate worker performance, skill, and fit before hiring them as a permanent member of your team. 

Temporary labor gives you a means to hire full-time workers with 100% confidence. In Q4 2021, we found the number of hourly shift workers converted to full-time employees increased 167%, confirming the desire for companies to retain top talent once identified.

Where to Find Temporary Landscaping Employees

Many landscaping companies continue to struggle with retaining employees due to of fluctuations in scheduling, job complexity, and job type. After experiencing challenges with hiring, retaining and scheduling, Colorado based Cosyleon Landscape Concepts turned the GigSmart Get Workers to quickly scale their staff as seasonality, demand, or job complexity requires it.

Whether you’re a business that offers landscaping services or an individual looking for a summer lawn maintenance company you can rely on, you can find and hire skilled help for any outdoor project with Get Workers.

If your needs are immediate, we can help you find qualified, temporary labor in less than an hour. If you have a scheduled project coming up, you can hire up to 30 days in advance. Through GigSmart’s Get Workers app, workers are rated and reviewed, allowing you to select the best workers for the job. The best part is all eligible workers hired through the GigSmart platform are insured, which means potential accidents that might happen on-site won’t affect your business’ insurance policy or raise your premiums. 

Hire Lawn Care Employees with GigSmart

Whether you need to match landscapers to one-time projects or build a large team for your landscape business, GigSmart can help! GigSmart gives you instant access to professional landscapers that use their expertise to produce quality work. Landscapers on the Get Workers platform are experts in landscape design, lawn care, and landscape architecture.

Draft a Gig Post

The key to finding a great landscaper is to post a detailed job description  – the more detail, the better. We recommend outlining specific tasks, key requirements, duties and arrival instructions in your job posting. For example:

  • What type of work the worker will be doing?
  • Where the work will be taking place – is it inside or outside?
  • Does the worker need to bring their own tools or equipment?

In addition you can add photos to your post to help workers better understand what they’ll be doing. This is a great place to include photos of the job site, plants needed or materials being used.

Ask the Right Questions

It is important to ask the right questions as you interview your candidates. Consider adding an application questionnaire to help ensure that they’d be right for the job. Questions could include:

  1. What qualities do you have that make you a good landscaper?
  2. What type of landscaping experience do you have?
  3. Do you have knowledge of plants?
  4. How do you handle an unsatisfied client?

Review

Once the applicants have poured in, you’ll be able to see any responses they have provided in the optional application questionnaire, as well as review other details in their profile, like their references, education, or work history to help you make an inform decision on who to hire. Browse reviews and rating, then book a trusted landscaping pro.

How to Prepare Temporary Lawn Care Workers for a Project

Preparing temporary workers for outdoor projects can seem like a daunting task. If you’ve only been using full-time employees, it can be a challenge to know how to train temporary workers. It’s important to make sure your temporary workers understand the guidelines they must follow when working. Whether it’s what equipment or tools to bring, what equipment or tools they’re expected to know how to use, their dress, or customer service specifics, you need to make them aware of your expectations so they feel prepared for the job and your clients receive the best experience.

For the same reasons, it’s important to make your temporary outdoor workers aware of your expectations, and it’s crucial to advise them of what the consequences will be if they fail to meet expectations. Make sure you are transparent with them and aligned on what to do and what not to do to prevent confusion on the worksite. Good communication is critical, since everything from plant selection to installation needs to be discussed and agreed upon. With everything clearly laid out, who knows, you might just find a temporary worker you want to hire over and over again.

Get Started with GigSmart

Create your free hiring account and post your first Gig to be connected to temporary lawn care employees who can help fuel your business. Sign up for your GigSmart Get Workers hiring account today. To create a free Shift Gig, elect the orange “Create” button to get started. Add worker skills, hourly rate, and gig details such as description, address, date and time. Soon after you get started with us, you’ll find that GigSmart is the easiest, most affordable way to find and hire top notch landscapers.

 

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