Here’s How to Improve Your Chances of Hiring Quality Attendants – And Starting Them Off of the Right Foot
[This is the first of a three-part series on hiring and training laundry attendants.]
To me, employee training actually starts with the hiring process. And that process begins by clearly understanding the skills required for the position you’re looking to fill, and then creating an accurate job description to match your needs.
After all, different people have different expectations of what a laundromat attendant’s duties include. For example, if they’ve worked in other laundries, they likely may have been just cleaning the store and maybe greeting customers. However, if you’re handling commercial accounts and wash-dry-fold laundry, you’ll be demanding a lot more than that of your employees – so you need to let them know.
When we’re hiring, we’ll post an ad that clearly defines we are a laundromat looking for an employee who is able to be on his or her feet for long periods and can work at a highly productive rate for six to eight hours per shift.
Also in our help wanted ad, we specifically note that we’re looking for someone preferably with experience working in a retail clothing environment. This experience ensures that the job candidate most likely knows how to fold garments so that they look like new – and can do so on a consistent basis.
We also include in our job posting that we’re looking for someone with customer service experience – someone who has not only worked in retail, but has also worked the sales counter.
This type of experience provides a solid base for someone looking to work in our wash-dry-fold and commercial laundry business, because that candidate presumably will have some customer interaction ability, as well as cash-handling skills.
Obviously, if you can find someone with experience in what you’re going to ask them to do, it’s always better than getting someone with no experience.
The next step we take – even before the face-to-face interview – is asking job candidates to visit a few other laundromats in the area, which offer the same type of services we do. We want these candidates to ask questions about the attendants’ jobs and what they do, and then come back to us with impressions of those businesses.
Typically, we’ll send them to a business we think does a good job, as well as to a facility we feel may not be doing such a great job. We want to see if a potential candidate can recognize the difference between the two – and, if this individual can make that distinction, we know we’ve got a strong candidate who could potentially develop into an asset for us.
During the actual interview, beyond inquiring about the stores the candidates visited, a key question we always ask them is to give us their impressions of what they think the job is all about. Before we describe the position, we want to get their initial impressions.
Our interviews also include a couple of sales-related questions to determine a candidate’s personality and whether or not he or she has the ability to sell. That’s one of the key factors we look at – the individual’s personality.
We also ask a few questions to try to determine if candidates have the ability to be outgoing and to think on their feet. One of my favorite questions is the well-known tactic of handing a job candidate a paperclip or some other common office item and then asking that person to “sell it”to us.
The next step – after we’ve made a decision on a candidate but before that person has even shown up for the first day of work – is to ask the new attendant to visit our company website and Facebook page. Then, on their first day on the job, we have the new hires explain what they’ve learned online about the business and the industry.
In addition, as part of our training program, we have compiled a book of PlanetLaundry articles and other materials – some of which I’ve written, as well as a great number of the popular “Wash with Wally”columns. We’ll have our new attendants to read through this material, and then we’ll ask them to tell us what thought was interesting – and, from this feedback, we can determine what they may have learned and what we can elaborate upon.
One of the keys to our success has been having a rigorous homework program for employees, in addition to our in-store, on-the-job training.
Another key is starting off our new attendants – on their very first day of work – by timing their production work on some simple tasks, such as folding towels. From Day One, we want to start the process of documenting their training progress.
I’ll go into more detail about tracking that progress next month.
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