Employee retention: Always be recruiting

Jedd Narsavage

It sounds exhausting, but as Jedd Narsavage says, companies should always be in recruitment mode.

“For recruitment, we treat it as a 24/7, 365 kind of thing, even during times when we might not have an actual open position to fill,” says the vice president of design and development for GreenSweep, a company based in Silver Spring, Md., that has 80 employees and does 80 percent commercial and 20 percent residential work “Just like in sales, you should ‘always be closing,’ we also should ‘always be recruiting.’”

For management positions, the company relies heavily on social media. “We post openings on LinkedIn and Facebook and keep an eye out for folks in our area who work for larger competitors and might be interested in moving to a smaller company,” he says.

GreenSweep is conscious of its soft recruiting, as well. This means the team is always aware of how it presents itself both online and in any professional interaction, never knowing who could be a potential future employee, Narsavage says.

GreenSweep is also expanding its participation in local university and community college career fairs. It encourages some students with no background in the industry to join the company.

“We can teach plant identification, how to operate a skid-steer or how to estimate a hardscape project,” Narsavage says. “We can’t teach an extroverted attitude, good sense of humor, flexible personality and self-confidence.”

“We want to make sure that anyone who might come across GreenSweep thinks to themselves, ‘That looks like a fun and confident group of employees who care about one another — I want to be a part of it.'” – Jedd Narsavage, vice president of design and developments