Recruiting new talent into the HVAC industry is always an issue. Most contractors will report their biggest concern is finding enough quality workers to keep up with the amount of work they can secure.
Dan Bueschel of Modigent spends a lot of time on this issue and appeared as a guest on our NEWSmakers podcast series to talk about it.
Here are some of the highlights:
ACHR NEWS: How do you bring people into the HVAC industry, specifically the younger generation?
BUESCHEL: It's a great question. And it's obviously an industry challenge. We outreach to both community colleges that have technical training programs, and we try to reach kids in high school. We have our HR and recruiting teams go to schools to talk to kids. And we also have a pretty robust nationally accredited apprenticeship program inside of our organization itself. So we train our own.
You can always go and buy talent from the other contractors in town, but at the end of the day, it doesn't really change the net capacity of any organization or the marketplace itself. We believe in building our own.
ACHR NEWS: When you are recruiting these younger people, it sounds like it is more face-to-face than anything else. Do you also do items like social media marketing?
BUESCHEL: We do it all. We pride ourselves on our ability to use every means available. We do recruit from a social media perspective. We are active on all the platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and all the rest. We spent a good amount of time on website development and social media management. We hired some folks to really help us work through our social media presence. We've heard from a lot of young recruits, when they come into the organization, who have let us know that they saw our posts on Facebook. They then go to the website. They told us they liked the energy and excitement that we expressed about our company. Our recruiters are reporting back to us that the social media platforms have been very helpful.
ACHR NEWS: When you go into the high schools, what is the reaction you get from the students, counselors, and administration?
BUESCHEL: I think it's been an evolving environment over the past couple of years, only because there's been so much conversation in the national media around the trades. The trades are about to embark upon a resurgence of popularity. So, there's a little bit more acceptance to the value proposition now than maybe a couple years ago.
What we encountered was that when we started to speak about an HVAC job, most of the people felt that it was somewhere between minimum wage and $20 an hour. And the end, a lot of our mechanics make a six-figure income. The concept from the students is I am going to make $30K or $40K a year. The first thing we have had to do is dispel that myth when we meet the students.
And the counselors have been very receptive to the idea that not every kid goes to college. It is not about intellect. If you are a chiller mechanic or a high-end controls mechanic, you have a pretty intellectual job. And when you troubleshoot, that requires logic and process thinking. You have an increasing awareness to that component as it relates to the counselors.
ACHR NEWS: Anywhere else you are finding people?
BUESCHEL: Actually, we are approved by the Department of Defense for direct veteran hiring. So, we are certified to hire directly from the military. And that's a big plus for us. We love to hire veterans. We like to give everybody an opportunity to take their years of service they provided the country and help our organization. Hopefully we, in turn, help them achieve the goals they have for their lives.
As it relates to just a pure business perspective, we have, over the past five years, seen more demand for our services than we can deliver. Capacity planning and capacity management is the number one constraint to growth in our industry, for our organization, but I would assume the same for many of my many of my peers.
