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It is a fact of life. College graduates will work for a couple of years for one company and then move on to another and possibly another before they find a home. Some of them may simply be looking for more money and better benefits, whereas others may be seeking more responsibility or a company culture that is more suited to their personality. No matter what the reasons are, the challenge for landscape contractors is to minimize this trend, says Donna Vignocchi, CLP, ILT Vignocchi, Inc., in Wauconda, Illinois. Her company employs a multifaceted approach to do just that. It begins with hiring the right people for the job and then continues by ensuring there is a career path in place to keep new employees interested for years to come.

“Before any of this happens, though, I believe companies have to provide good benefits and have a consistent culture if they expect to have any chance of keeping new employees,” says Vignocchi, who admits to being passionate about retaining employees. “Without these two fundamentals in place, virtually anything else a company does to keep employee interest high will ultimately fail. Then, it is a matter of building a bond with your employees. This begins with the hiring process and continues through training and development.

“Before we hire anyone, we ask candidates to take a personality profile test. The exercise was originally implemented to help us hire salespeople, but we have since found it very useful in making sure we simply hire the right person for the right position, no matter what that position is. The test measures such things as an applicant’s organizational skills, resiliency, aggressiveness, ego, and other personality traits. Although we do not rely completely on the results, they become a useful tool to help us determine (1) if a person will be comfortable with our culture and (2) if he or she is the right match for the job.”

New graduates are very impressionable and trainable, she adds. “If the profile does nothing else, it shows where a candidate’s weaknesses are and gives us an opportunity to help strengthen them. For example, we want our design/build mangers to be artistic and have some natural selling ability. Beyond that, we can give them the training and experience to become good managers.”

There are two other critical components to ILT Vignocchi’s employee retention strategy — an internship program and training. “An internship program is valuable for a couple of different reasons,” Vignocchi explains. “First, interns are naturally exposed to a company’s brand, culture, and vision. If they like what they see, they will share their experience with other students who have similar values. This will help expand our network of potential employees. Then, we make a concerted effort to hire our interns. An internship gives both the employer and employee an opportunity to see if there is a good match. A student who has a good experience as an intern will likely have a good experience as a full-time employee.”

The final component of the company’s retention strategy is a leadership development program. “I think one mistake that companies often make is to hire college graduates to be managers right out of school,” says Vignocchi. “Unfortunately, recent graduates lack the knowledge and experience to manage either people or a book of accounts. If they are put in a management position prematurely, they will become frustrated and leave. The irony is that the experience they gained with your company will probably bode well for them in a different company, where they may become fixtures.”

She continues, “One way we forestall this frustration is with a leadership development program that lasts two to three years for maintenance managers and three to four years for design/build managers. The program is not rigid, meaning we can customize it to fit various employee career paths. What it does, though, is ensure that they get the training and experience they need to become successful managers before we put them into a managerial position.”

The company’s approach to retention is not foolproof, Vignocchi notes. New employees will come and go. The trick is to make a company less of a stepping-stone and more of a comfortable environment for career-minded employees.

By Rod Dickens, ALCA Contributing Writer