Hiring has been a prominent topic as we ride the roller coaster of business volume that has been the past few months in the home inspection industry. Hiring inspectors is a complicated, exciting, and sometimes terrifying endeavor. The hiring process is possibly the most important strategic cycle in the service industry. Plenty of organizations survive with a reactive approach to staffing. High performing organizations proactively plan, efficiently balance staffing with demand to maximize return on investment.
We all know hiring is an investment. It costs a lot to train an employee. Until robot home inspectors arrive, people are the cards we are dealt. With people comes incredible talent, but also problems and risks that machines do not have. We can navigate these problems! It is a necessary investment to grow a business and your bottom line.
Capacity drives hiring decisions. We want to align our strategic planning with talent acquisition and achieve an ideal balance of demand and staffing, and nail the timing. This balance can be hard to achieve because of the lead time it takes to recruit, hire, and train an inspector. Nobody wants to turn away business or risk the morale issues of underutilized inspectors. So how do we find that sweet spot? Generally, a balance of best possible forecasting and good old business intuition.
Our hope is that by now all clients are in a good rhythm of working on forecasting with the RTC team and really digging beyond the basic P&L and balance sheet. We leverage that discussion to relate to hiring decisions by taking a deep dive into the relevant factors:
Demand forecast
Year over year
Growth through marketing, geographic expansion, acquisition
Capacity (Inspections per day)
Known/predicted attrition
Training costs
Recruitment
Admin onboarding
Training wages
Equipment
Trainer’s time
Risk of failed hire
Productivity learning curve
Timing/ability to incur upfront training costs against seasonal revenue pattern
Think about these factors and let us help fine-tune your organization’s strategic planning to make staffing decisions that maximize profits.
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