Plant the seeds

Recruiting is like shaving. “If you don’t do it every day, you’re going to look ugly,” says Scott Chatham, president of Chatham Landscape Services in Marietta, Georgia. Recruiting is an ongoing conversation at the company.

In fact, three years ago, the business hired a full-time recruiter to focus on bringing in high-quality employees who can not only fulfill duties in the field but represent the company well with its high-end residential clientele who demand a clean-cut, professional worker who can communicate effectively.

“We saw the labor market was tightening up here a few years ago when the recession was still in full swing,” Chatham says. “We had people coming off the street wanting work because there was nothing.”

But Chatham Landscape Services doesn’t just hire off the streets. “We brought on a recruiter to responsibly, ethically find employees,” Chatham says. (That means, no stealing good workers from other companies.)

The recruiter reaches out to churches and other community groups. “He’s out there drumming it hard,” Chatham says.

The company also increased the reward for existing employees’ referrals. “If they bring in a supervisor-level person, we give a $500 reward,” he says, adding there are restrictions concerning how long the new employee must stay on board.

And in the meantime, the company works a couple of different career fairs to build its brand and plant seeds for future employees. One of those “planting seeds” gigs is the Workforce Developmental Student Career Expo sponsored by the Georgia Urban Agricultural Council.

Chatham Landscape can’t promote its brand there and openly recruit employees. “It’s about promoting our industry more than anything,” Chatham says. “Our name is on the booth so you know who we are, but the point is to get students interested in landscaping.”

Chatham brings a display of equipment that students can climb on, and some colleagues dressed in the company uniform are there to answer questions. Students at the fair range from freshman to seniors in high school. So, Chatham knows that they won’t be in the workforce for up to five years. “This is a long-term investment,” he says.

The National Collegiate Landscape Competition, hosted by the National Association of Landscape Professionals, on the other hand, has resulted in immediate hires for Chatham Landscape Services. The company has a booth that includes a backdrop of pictures along with the logo. But what’s more important is not what happens at the booth, but what happens on the show floor.

“If we meet a kid coming through that seems attractive, we’ll try to get his or her name, and the next day we’ll watch them while they compete in their events,” he says. They talk to students standing by. “We are almost interviewing the other kids there, ‘So, how good is this person?’” Chatham says. “We let the student know we are interested and that we are following them around.”

This assertive approach beats standing at a booth and waiting for students to call you back after the show. At its home base, Chatham Landscape Services takes the same active approach to hiring, hosting its own career fairs every quarter. “This is met with limited success,” Chatham says.

But he’s not going to just wait for good people to walk in the door.

The company advertises its own event by posting signs in neighborhoods, apartment complexes and other spots close by. Managers are at the event and tables are set up so drop-ins can fill out applications and participate in a short get-to-know-you interview. The purpose of these events is to hire hourly personnel, Chatham says.

“We have been trying this for almost four years,” Chatham says. The best attendance was 15 people. The worst was zero. “As the economy improved, the number coming to our career fairs has dwindled.”