How is the blue-collar labor market?

I'm curious with many blue collar type industries, especially in the B2C arena, are customers loyal to the brand or more loyal to the servicer? Does it matter?

I'm the owner of a 50-person residential service plumbing company, so hit the bullseye of your blue collar hiring question. It is true that hiring is difficult. It is also true that making the phone ring with leads, creating and adhering to standardized processes, and implementing technology are difficult. I don't see hiring as any different than other business challenges, other than there is a lot more empathy from friends for grousing that "nobody in this generation wants to work and those that do aren't willing to pay their dues to advance" than "The API between my marketing automation system and CRM is crap!" Like most problems, there are great resources and best practices from which to learn. Based on the size of the majority of searcher acquisitions, new CEOs will only need to hire a small number of people to grow significantly. That is very achievable.

I don't have all the answers and have made some hiring blunders. I am, however, thankful to have lost only one team member in the last 12 months (managed out for performance) and have added ~10 people with a high percentage of them proving to be strong hires. A few tools which have helped:

1 - Shore up retention first. Culture is the most important. After that, ensure pay and benefits are well above the median point for small businesses in your area (not just your industry) and at least at the median point against major corporations. Outside of those holding licenses, hourly workers are often industry agnostic and therefore your competitive set is any business paying an hourly wage. Our shop's lowest wage is $5/hr above minimum wage. New employees get 3 weeks of PTO (earned over the course of the year, not upfront), 100% medical premium for themselves, and a generous 401(k) match with no vesting period. We also promise 40 hours of work. Many blue collar jobs don't offer significant PTO and the work hours per week may be inconsistent. We have to fight for candidates sometimes who are asking for $X/hr by demonstrating to them the equivalent $/hr value of PTO or how $Y/hr x 40 is more than $X/hr at whatever number of hours they've been working. In most of our job postings we show a $/yr figure prominently with $/hr as a supporting figure because the big number is more eye-catching.

2 - Invest in recruiting advertising and employer branding. Most small businesses post generic job ads on Indeed or ZipRecruiter and hope for the best. In the blue collar world LinkedIn is irrelevant outside of perhaps sales and HR roles. It's not hard to stand out by approaching hiring as a marketing exercise. And there are premium features of the hiring websites which can be used. I pay $150/month to Indeed for the privilege of accessing resumes of users. Every morning my search filters generate an email list of users who meet my criteria and have updated their resume or searched for a job on the site in the last 24 hours. I can then send them a DM. Response rate is ~30%. Follow-up happens by the hiring manager. Just this week we hired a guy for our sewer line excavation crew with great experience. It doesn't get any more blue collar than that. He has said several times through the process "how did you know I was looking for a job and find me?" I had sent him a DM within 24 hours of him updating his profile on Indeed and before he had applied for any roles.

3 - Build a candidate screening process that increases the odds of a strong hire. Too many small businesses waste time and money churning through bad hires. There's plenty of material about doing this. Two techniques that work for us are

- Run every candidate through a behavioral and cognitive assessment, comparing results to our carefully crafted targets for the role (We use Predictive Index as our vendor). We do this as a screening technique to determine who to invite for interviews.
- Bring every candidate in after successful interviews and before an offer for a job shadow half-day or full-day (we pay them). It gives the candidates a real view into our company to self-assess fit and it lets us see them in an environment where they let their guard down.

Final point. I echo ^Searchfunder member‌ comment that CEO involvement in recruiting is key for these size businesses. When a person joins a company of only a few dozen team members they are tying their financial prospects and workplace satisfaction, in large part, to the quality and capabilities of the owner. We have strong enough managers that I do not conduct interviews for the majority of roles. I do, however, make it a point to wander through the building at just the right time and strike up a conversation, starting with "You must be NAME, I'm excited that you are here" and drop a few points about their background to demonstrate that I really do know about them." General conversation follows, which is largely me asking easy questions about them as a person and soft-selling the company by highlighting elements of our business and culture that the behavioral assessment indicated would be most important to them. Halfway through I find a way to reveal that I'm the owner.

I could write a much longer response of all the things I've done wrong in this area, so don't put too much credibility into the approach. In the last year, we've been ghosted by candidates at every stage of the process, had people accept offers and then never show up, and fail the pre-employment drug screen after being told 3 times during the process that we test for marijuana. Hiring is a struggle. Summary... you can crack the code of hiring if you are intentional and differentiate from competition. It took our company about a year to get to this point and I suspect it will take another year to achieve the next level of improvements in hiring we envision.