Read that order again, because it is the part owners skip. Most companies treat this as a hiring problem and spend every year replacing the people they lost for reasons that had nothing to do with recruiting. You cannot hire your way out of a company people leave. You can only make the leaving stop.
Why does the answer start with keeping rather than hiring?
Because the cost is in the churn, not in the search. A technician who quits in month two costs you the recruiting, the onboarding, the truck sitting idle, the senior technician pulled off billable work to train them, and the customers who met them once and will meet somebody else next time.
It also compounds. Every good technician who leaves takes a little of your reputation in the local trade with them, and technicians talk to each other far more than owners think. A company that loses people gets a name for losing people, and then the search really does get harder.
So the honest sequence is: fix what makes people leave, then go and find more. Doing it the other way round is just a more expensive version of the same year.
What are the six steps that change who stays?
These are Kerry Webb's six, in his order.
How specific should the job offer be?
Specific enough that a candidate can picture the work. Publish the pay range, the benefits, the on-call expectations, the training you provide and the advancement path.
Vague postings attract people shopping on price, because price is the only thing you gave them to compare. Specific postings attract people choosing a company. If your posting could be pasted onto any competitor's website without changing a word, it is not a posting, it is a notice.
Where should my candidates actually come from?
From several places at once. One source is not a pipeline, it is luck.
Employee referrals, trade schools, apprenticeship programs and your relationships with suppliers, all running at the same time and all the time. Stay in contact with promising candidates before you urgently need one. The day you need a technician is the worst possible day to start looking, because that is the day you hire whoever is available rather than whoever is right. The Small Business Administration's guidance on hiring and managing employees covers the paperwork side that trips up owners doing this properly for the first time.
How do I check whether a technician can really do the work?
With a practical skills assessment and real customer scenarios, and with the same one every time. Consistency is the point. An assessment you vary by candidate is an opinion with a clipboard.
Evaluate four things: troubleshooting, workmanship, communication and reliability. Two of those are technical and two are not, and the two that are not are the ones that generate your callbacks and your complaints. Check the credentials the work actually requires as well, including anything covered by the EPA's Section 608 requirements where refrigerant handling is involved.
What does a structured start actually look like?
A named mentor, written expectations, and protected training time.
Assign one experienced person to the new hire and make it part of that person's job rather than a favor. Put the checkpoints in writing and say plainly what good looks like at each one. Then protect the training time, because it is always the first thing sacrificed to a busy week and it is the one thing that cannot be caught up later.
A good technician who quits early almost never quits over money. They quit because nobody told them what good looked like and nobody had time for them.
Which daily frustrations are costing me people?
This is the step owners skip and it is the one that keeps people.
Reliable equipment. Stocked trucks. Realistic schedules. Clear dispatch information. Fair on-call rotations. None of that is a benefits package and all of it is the difference between a job somebody can do for ten years and a job that grinds them down by August.
Ask your technicians which of those five wastes the most of their day. They will not have to think about it, which should tell you something on its own.
How should a technician earn their way up?
By demonstrated skill, and you have to show them the ladder. Write down exactly what a technician must be able to do to earn more, and reward quality and customer care alongside productivity.
If the only route to more money at your company is selling more, you will end up with technicians who sell. If the route runs through skill, workmanship and how customers are treated, you end up with technicians other technicians want to work with, and those are the ones who bring you your next hire.
What should I pay a technician?
Structure first: an hourly rate with weekly performance pay based on revenue goals. The hourly rate gives a technician a floor they can live on. The weekly performance pay gives them a reason to care about this week rather than this quarter, and weekly is the part that matters, because a bonus four months away does not change what happens on Tuesday afternoon.
The number itself is not something anyone can hand you, and you should not trust a figure lifted from another company's payroll. What you can pay depends on your gross margin by department, your fully burdened labor cost, your billable capacity, and what your own local market pays for the same skill. Work it out from your own books: take your department gross margin, work back through burden to what an hour of that technician's time has to earn, and set the rate where the margin still stands up at your real utilization rather than your hoped-for utilization. What the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes about the heating and air conditioning trade is a reasonable national reference point to read beside your own local figures, and it is a starting point rather than an answer.
What goes wrong when an owner only fixes recruiting?
Three things, in sequence.
The job gets filled and the reason for the vacancy does not get fixed, so the same vacancy comes back in nine months wearing a different name.
The new hire is dropped into the work with no mentor and no standard, so they learn your company from whoever happens to be in the van that week, and your service quality becomes a coin toss.
And the numbers move before anyone admits there is a problem. Turnover shows up in the numbers long before it shows up in how you feel about it: your callback rate climbs, your labor hours estimated against actual drift apart, and gross margin sags in whichever department you keep starting people over in.
What should I ask a coach, a recruiter or a trainer before I pay one?
Five questions. Any one of them will tell you quickly whether you are buying help or activity.
What will you change about why people leave, not just about how we hire? What does my onboarding look like when you are finished with it? Who inside my company owns each step after you go? Which of my numbers should move, and by when will I see it? And what will you need from my managers, because a retention problem is usually a management problem in a technician's uniform.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do good technicians leave?
Rarely over pay alone. They leave over unreliable equipment, unstocked trucks, unrealistic schedules, unclear dispatch and unfair on-call rotations, and over managers who never coached them. Fix the daily frustrations and the pay conversation gets much easier, because money is not what they were actually complaining about.
What should I put in a technician job posting?
The pay range, the benefits, the on-call expectations, the training you provide and the advancement path. Specific enough that a candidate can picture the work before they apply. If your posting could be pasted onto a competitor's site unchanged, it will attract people shopping on price rather than choosing a company.
How should I pay technicians?
An hourly rate with weekly performance pay based on revenue goals. The hourly rate gives a floor to live on and the weekly element gives a reason to care about this week. What the number should be depends on your own gross margin, labor burden, capacity and local market, so work it out from your own books.
How do I check a technician's ability before I hire them?
Use a practical skills assessment and real customer scenarios, and use the same one for every candidate. Evaluate troubleshooting, workmanship, communication and reliability. The last two are not technical and they are the ones that generate your callbacks, so do not let a strong technical showing carry a weak one.
Should I hire experienced technicians or train my own?
Both, and for different reasons. Experienced hires fill capacity now and bring habits you did not choose. Trained apprentices take longer and learn your standard from the start. Companies that only do the first spend forever undoing habits, and companies that only do the second run short in a busy summer.
Want Help Doing It?
The retention problem usually lives one level above the technicians. Leadership training works on the managers who run these people, and the Elite HVAC Service Manager System is for the point where the problem is no longer a script but a manager. The CHOICE Service Call Playbook gives a new technician a standard to run to from their first week.
The 90-Day Plan is the engagement that goes at all of it together, and coaching for results is the one to one work with you and your leadership team. The rest of the resources for home-service owners are there when you want them.
Book the $100K Conversation and bring your turnover numbers. Live every Thursday, 11 AM to noon Central.
Take the Business Assessment if you would rather see the whole picture first.
Call BGS Strategies on 940-441-3231, email support@bgsstrategies.com, or send BGS Strategies a message. BGS Strategies works with home-service owners across the United States and Canada, and calls before 10 AM usually reach voicemail because Kerry is coaching.
