Finding painters for your team is not difficult.  However, hiring the right painters for your team can be a challenge.  If you are serious about growing your business, then you need painters that are reliable, do great work, and support the goals you have for your organization.  It’s important to balance the total cost of labor (compensation, taxes, paid time off) with the necessary skill to perform quality work.

Have you ever stopped to examine exactly how you are hiring the members of your team?  There are literally dozens of ways to find new painters for your company. But if you are interested in finding quality painters that can be long-term employees to help your business grow, you can’t simply hire anyone that walks through the door with a paint brush. Here are some suggestions for building out a great team of professional painters.

Building a great paint team doesn’t have to be hard.
Image courtesy of Cooley Painting.

As a small paint company (1-10 painters):  The most efficient way to hire new painters for your team is through referrals made by current employees. If a painter has been with you for some time, then you should feel comfortable asking them if they know of any other painters that might want to join your team. Most importantly, make sure that the referring painter does good work. This strategy is effective for a number of reasons. Existing employees already understand the compensation level you offer and the quality of work you expect. They understand the values important to your business and will likely be loathe to suggest or recommend a friend or acquaintance that won’t be a good fit for the business. While there are obviously exceptions, sourcing new paint team members through your current team is often faster and less complicated for you, the business owner.

Employee Referrals are perhaps the best source of new talent.
Image courtesy of Jobvite.com

As a midsize paint company (11-50 painters):  As your company grows from being a small organization to one with many teams and many different jobs taking place at any given time, finding good employees gets a little more complicated.   Using current employees to help source new painters for your team is still a good source of personnel, but if you are growing quickly, that well may dry up sooner rather than later. At this level, your goal should be to source quality painters in a minimal amount of time.  At the same time, if you begin hiring painters out of necessity that don’t meet your standards, you are opening the door for poor performers in the future.

While it may be tempting to simply find independent contractors and ask them to wear your company shirt while working, I would caution against this strategy in most cases. While this can be a reasonable solution in a pinch, independent contractors work for themselves for a reason – not for you. While they may indeed accept a job from your company if you are overextended and do not have the staff, it is unlikely that this will work as a long-term solution. Your goal should be to find long-term team members, not short term quick fixes.

A larger paint team.
Image courtesy of Vivax Painting.

As a large paint company (50+ painters): By the time your organization grows to need 50 or more painters on staff, then you no doubt have other departments working for you as well. Marketing, human resources…there are more people involved with your success then just your team of painters. Just as importantly, you should have at least one layer of management in place to help oversee the paint teams. Surely you aren’t trying to manage the quality and timeliness of dozens of jobs at a time, are you?

Finding managers, team leaders, and supervisors is most easily accomplished by tapping in-house employees that have shown leadership in the past. Promoting a painter who has been with you a while to a oversee a group of painters is a great way to maintain continuity in the quality of work you expect.

But what about adding more painters?  With an organization this large you can’t be counted on to source and interview every candidate when you are busy managing other facets of the business.  And passing that task off to your paint team supervisors requires a level of trust you might not be comfortable with. What if they hire the wrong people?  My suggestion is to find one person on your team – be it someone in human resources or a painter who has been with you for a long time – and have their sole job be making sure your team is full of quality painters. This is comparable to having a recruiter on staff, only this person is focused on your paint staff, not on other departments. This strategy blends the best of both worlds: you have a single person managing the sourcing, hiring, and training process. As the business owner, you have one person to manage and direct with regard to hiring painters.  Having the right person in this role can pay huge dividends as your team will continue to meet your high standards without it being your responsibility to build it in the first place.

Whether you are just starting out as a one-person paint enterprise or have grown your organization to a full-scale corporation, the core of your business is and will always be great paint work. Add the right people to your paint team and you can expect to soar to amazing heights. Add the wrong people and you may find that your team experiences the kind of turnover that makes you pine for the days when it was just you and a brush. Click here to learn more from BYK about building and running a paint business!