Stop 7 of 8 · Later
Techs: hiring and the toolbox talk
A job post that filters, a ride-along checklist that decides, and a five minute Monday safety talk that Sam has not had to write since March.
Hiring once a year, badly
Sam hires a service plumber about once a year, and every time it starts the same way: a job post copied off the last one, which was copied off an ad from 2019, which is why the applicants are wrong. Then two weeks of resumes, one ride-along, and a decision made in the truck on the way back.
The post is the filter, and it is the cheapest thing to fix.
The job post
A good service plumber post does three things: says what the work actually is on a Tuesday, names what will disqualify someone before they apply, and sounds like a four-truck shop rather than a national chain.
Write a job post for a service plumber at a four-truck residential plumbing company in the San Fernando Valley. Describe a real Tuesday: residential service and repair, water heaters, drain work, repipes, three to six calls a day, talking to homeowners in their houses. Say clearly what disqualifies someone: no clean driving record, no experience in occupied homes, not comfortable pricing work in front of a customer. Under 350 words, plain language, no corporate tone. Leave the pay range, the benefits and any testing requirements as square brackets for me to fill in.
The ride-along
The ride-along is where the hire is actually decided, and it goes badly when Sam is judging on feel. A checklist turns it into six things anyone can score.
Build me a one page ride-along checklist for a candidate service plumber, as a document I can print. Six things to watch, each with what good looks like and what a problem looks like: how he talks to the homeowner at the door, whether he explains the work before he starts, how he handles a price question, how he leaves the work area, what he does when he is missing a part, and whether he writes anything down. Add a scoring line and a place for two sentences of notes.
Five minutes on Monday
The toolbox talk is the thing every shop knows it should do and does for three weeks. It gets done when writing it takes two minutes.
Write a five minute toolbox talk on [this week's topic] for four residential service plumbers. Base it on the manufacturer instructions and the relevant OSHA page, and cite both so I can open them before I read it out. Structure: what goes wrong, why it goes wrong on our kind of jobs, three things we do differently starting today. Finish with three questions I ask the crew out loud, and one thing to check on the next call. Under 400 words, written to be read aloud.
A year of topics keeps it from turning into the same talk twice.
Give me twelve toolbox talk topics for a residential service plumbing crew, one per month, ordered so the seasonal ones land in the right month for Southern California. One line each on why it matters for our work. Keep them specific enough that each one is a different talk.