What if there was a way for HVAC contractors to foresee how successful an employee will be — before they were ever even hired? It’d allow them to save time in the hiring process by only interviewing candidates that data shows would be a great fit for whatever position they were interviewing for. In addition, they’d save money and experience lower turnover rates by not investing in resources for an employee who, according to what the data could show, won’t even last a year with the company.

Sounds almost too good to be true, right? Well, it isn’t. Think of the technology and software that already exists to make contractors’ jobs easier. Now, does a predictive analysis that provides a test to applicants and uses research, a form of personality profiling, and updated data from those already working in the trades, that results in the knowledge of which candidates will be successful and actually stay with the company — before they are ever even hired — seem that far off?

These recruitment or hiring platforms already exist for HVAC contractors; they just have to commit to utilizing their data during their hiring process.

Pre-Hire Me

Four years ago, Jonathan Porter-Whistman, author of “The Sales Boss” and CEO of WhoHire, a trade-specific digital recruiting platform that utilizes smart artificial intelligence to predict performance and flight risk pre-hire, became the business coach of Tommy Mello, CEO and founder of A1 Garage Door Service.

As a result of this relationship, Porter-Whistman became curious about if there was a way to build a prediction model for Mello’s garage door technicians just to see how well they’d do. And there was, and Porter-Whistman did just that.

“We're able to predict what's the average ticket size for the garage for technician pre-hire, what their quality score’s going to be, which is kind of like Google rankings … and also what we call flight risk — so, how long are they likely to stay versus churn out of the organization?” Porter-Whistman explained.

That got Porter-Whistman thinking about how this could be done for the rest of HVAC, plumbing, and electrical trades of any size. After all, not all companies are as big as A1 Garage Doors and thus, might not have enough data for a platform like this to be successful. Most don’t. This led to a partnership with Nexstar Network, and Porter-Whistman speaking at this year’s Super Meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, at the beginning of November, on these predictive measures can be used to hire the right people.

“And a lot of their members gave us access to their people and their data, living in systems,” Porter-Whistman said. So far, they’ve assessed over 4,000 people in the trades. “And then we've taken actual performance data and we're building performance fingerprints for all the key roles inside the HVAC, plumbing, electrical — your technician, your installer, your CSR, your dispatcher.”

The whole point of something like this is to look at something more than whether someone is extroverted or introverted, which is what a lot of predictive tests usually do. Likely, as long as the employee has a good attitude, contractors probably care more about the chances they will stay at a company versus whether they are shy or outgoing (to put it in layman’s terms).

“If you're hiring the way that you hired even two years ago, you're just going to get further and further behind,” Porter-Whistman said.

Benefits

While personality profiling has been all the rage for 30 years, Porter-Whistman said there’s a whole Wild West out there featuring new research that no one is really tapping into. And the position contractors should take is to want to look at all of the things that science says can be measured. A recruitment platform is just one more tool to utilize to do that.

“And you should see which of those things actually correlate to people that stay in your organization,” Porter-Whistman said.

HVAC contractors that really would specifically benefit are those with high turnover rates or in high growth mode.

“The industry average for an HVAC technician is that they have a 55% churn out every two years … [which means that] somewhere around 25% of the people they hire last less than a year,” Porter-Whistman said.

Porter-Whistman said that means if an HVAC contractor has 40 technicians, they have to basically hire 10 a year just to stay even, and in today’s economic climate, hiring 10 technicians who will stay and work hard isn’t all that easy to do. So it’s much better hire people right off the bat that will stay in the company.

Porter-Whistman said the data is able to show that “this person that you're going to invest your time, money, and energy in is the sort of person who naturally tends to blossom inside of that environment that you're asking them to grow,” he explained. “And because of that, you see much lower turnover.”

Not to mention all the resources saved from not investing in the wrong people. Think of that drain experienced by a company after interviewing a candidate, hiring them, getting their benefits squared away, training them, getting them a truck, just for them to leave the organization.

Porter-Whistman said another benefit is the average performance metric goes up when a hiring platform is utilized.

“Here's an example: On Tommy's team, he has some garage door technicians that are selling $600,000 and he has some that are selling $1.2 million, and [a recruitment platform] enables him to hire more consistently people that come in and can reach that high million-dollar-plus mark,” Porter-Whistman said.

Mello has also reduced his training time in half per utilizing a hiring platform. What used to take him 60 days to bring a garage door technician in from nothing, get them trained and out in the field, now takes 30.

These results are due to getting the right psychographic profile matched with the environment and things that potential employee would be asked to do.

“If they're naturally slanted to be gifted at that and to enjoy it, they're going to spend more time doing it,” Porter-Whistman said.

Or maybe, after assessing the employee, the data shows they’d actually be a better fit for a different role that they applied for.

Commit to Data

For a recruitment platform to be really successful for a contractor, they first have to ask themselves if the way they are selecting people for jobs is actually paying off over time. If the answer is no, they then have to commit to utilizing the data and then folding it over into their hiring process. In other words: listening to it.

“And what you'll find that almost every company does … is they pat themselves on the back for the person that stays and does well, and they use an excuse for the person that turns out — it's never like ‘We selected them wrong,’” Porter-Whistman said.

And that’s a big challenge facing contractors when adapting to a recruitment platform.

“If your gut and intuition are different than what the data tells you, gut and intuition win every time,” Porter-Whistman said. “It shouldn't, but that's what happens.”

That’s the hardest part, Porter-Whistman said — basically for a contractor not to say, “Well the data is telling me that this person was a bad hire, but I really liked them and I’m going to hire them anyway.”

But contractors have to realize that hiring platforms aren’t about perfection. They’re about placing bets more accurately and consistently. Through the truckload of data on an individual, coupled with actual performance date from those in the trades, a unique model is created that will tell contractors whether that bet they placed is going to make them lose or win.