Trouble finding good managers? You're not alone. Hiring is tough across virtually every industry right now. Once you do find the right fit, it's even a struggle to keep them when there are so many competing offers out there.
Listen in as Kraig and Sue Haviland discuss their hiring practices, including both how to find and how to retain great managers and other employees.
Question: "How do you find new self storage managers?"
Check out the video clip below to hear their answers:
In this Gabfocus Session: Best of the Best, we spoke with Sue Haviland of Haviland Storage Services and Kraig Haviland from San Diego Self Storage. They gave us their thoughts on how to find and hang onto the best of the best when it comes to self storage managers and other employees.
Check out the full Session to dive deeper!
Don't want to watch the clip? Here's what Kraig and Sue had to say:
We are strictly using Indeed for finding new candidates.
We have a budget, we'll say $20 to $30 a day for ads. We've found just enough people through Indeed that we haven't had to go elsewhere for that.
The other thing that we do is we do have referral bonuses for our employees who refer new employees to us, people that they know. And we also have a retention bonus for people that we pay $500 at 60 days right now. So that's helped entice some people to come our way.
We obviously are dealing with the same tight, tight employment market that everybody else is. And we also have restrictions on who we can hire. They have to pass a drug test, including a marijuana test, so that weeds a lot of people out unfortunately, when they find out, they have to go do the drug screen."
—Kraig Haviland
"I've got eleven different owners, and just one of my properties alone has eleven partners, so sometimes that can throw a monkey wrench. We're using Indeed a lot, and we started having a lot of trouble with them, like even if we had a budget, trying to keep us getting higher budgets to boost it or pausing our ads. So we've also started using ZipRecruiter a little bit. We're still using Craigslist, and I'm finding that sometimes we actually get a different pool of resumes instead of all the same ones, which helps. I'm using my social media accounts to post stuff.
The referrals, like Kraig said. Again, it's a different site, so I've got different referral bonuses based on the size of the sites and owners input. But we bumped that up at some of the sites quite a bit where it used to kind of be a 150, 200 bucks, and put it in and stretch out the time. If they give us a great referral and that person stays for six months, my current employee gets $500 for that referral instead of, like, 150, because I'm sure a lot of you lately have had-- we hired this girl about a month or so ago, and we thought, oh, we got lucky. She interviewed well, she's going to be great.
She was getting it, and we trained her for three weeks, and her very first day to work at her assigned site she quit. And it took probably a good three to four weeks to zero in on her as our final candidate, too, because we're not hiring quickly anymore.
We used to make jokes about 'don't get the warm body right now.' I'm kind of sometimes thinking, I just need a warm body."
—Sue Haviland
