Live From NHPC’23: Prioritizing Employee Value

“What’s your name?” Patch says to the AV guy at the Hyatt Regency Room 702, as she gets set up for her 90-minute mini workshop focused on job posting and recruiting. He responds, “Chris.”

Patch insists on putting name tags on everyone in the room so that she can address them as she helps them during her workshop. Patch is personable—you can tell how much she genuinely cares within minutes of meeting her.

Chris looks at her hesitantly, unsure if he wants a name tag. “What do you want your title to be?” she asks.

“I’m just the IT guy,” Chris responds.

It’s that word just that Patch doesn’t agree with. “You know that I can’t do my job without you, right? You are important. That’s important,” she says.

Chris smiles and nods.

It’s a small interaction but it’s telling. As BPA has said time and time again, the future of our industry depends on our people. And as Patch said today, we need to create a culture of appreciation in order to attract and retain our workforce. Being appreciated is the number one thing employees value in a workplace, according to Patch. That comes in above compensation and employee camaraderie.

This week we’re at our National Home Performance Conference & Trade Show taking place in Seattle, Washington. This event has shaped up to be our biggest yet with more than 2,600 attendees here from across the continent. For this particular session I was in, Patch limited the group to 20 attendees so that she could focus on them individually to help them post actual jobs they need filled on Indeed.

The goal of this session is to help attendees overcome their job recruiting challenges and give them the confidence they need to write job descriptions and post jobs. (Another lesson: job postings should be different than, and separate from, job descriptions. A job posting is an ad for the job, a job description is what the person will do.)

At the end of her session, Patch promises that these attendees will get better people to fill their job positions. But it’s not just employers she’s focused on. “Good jobs change lives,” she says.

That’s why recruiting is important to her. A good job can give someone a sense of pride, a path, and a better life overall. And we’ve got just the industry to help them do that—one with an onslaught of funding coming our way and one that’s got the ability for people to grow and learn.

All of the attendees in the room have been dealing with the challenges of hiring for the past year or more. They’ve had candidates go through the job hiring process, get to the end, get an offer, and then completely disappear. They’ve had new employees just stop showing up one day. They’ve had a number of employees who just aren’t motivated. They’ve been struggling to fill important positions in their organizations…there’s simply not enough people in the pipeline. But Patch says there’s solutions to these problems.

She uses Indeed to post her jobs and recommends it to those in the room. She shows them how to pay per day for a limited amount of time and to use Indeed Assessments to ensure that they notice when the best candidates apply. She gives tips like being detailed in posts (how much will your job candidate have to lift?), removing all gender specifics (use they/them as a default), and to include the company culture in the job posting (tell people what the company is like so they can determine if they fit).

Doing all of this upfront work can help get better employees who are going to stick around.

You can learn more about Patch’s session from today here. You can also view the full conference agenda here.