More than your manicured grounds and updated facilities, your employees are what drive the success of your funeral home. Embalmers, managers, and funeral directors are the keystones of your business, and they ultimately dictate its day-to-day operations, particularly as they relate to families.
It goes without saying that you’d want the most skilled, personable, and accommodating staff. Here’s how to successfully recruit for these positions.
Prepare a Compensation Package
Before you begin the recruiting process, you’ll want to develop a detailed compensation package for the roles you wish to fill. While you likely won’t discuss compensation during the initial recruitment phases, you’ll want to be able to provide a ballpark range for salaries. This way, candidates will know immediately if your opportunity is worth their time.
Additionally, you might consider planning out the other components of your compensation package. These might include healthcare, paid time off, and incentive compensation structures. By offering benefits beyond a salary range, you can further entice people to consider joining your team.
Create a Job Description
In writing your job description, you’ll want to think about exactly what you’re looking for in candidates and articulate this clearly. This way, prospects will get a clear picture of what the job entails, which skills are required, and what their life will look like as part of your team.
In a job description, you’ll want to include:
- Job responsibilities
- Desired experience
- Required skills or certifications
- Characteristics of the ideal candidate
- A salary range
Additionally, you’ll also want to include some information about your work culture. This is where you can mention benefits, the size of your team, and your company vision. All of this serves to entice qualified candidates to apply.
Use Numerous Recruiting Methods
Rather than posting a job on your website or through Facebook, you’ll want to use more targeted means of recruiting. For starters, you should post your job listing on death care industry sources like the NFDA and job boards of local mortuary schools. Additionally, you can consider more general employment websites such as LinkedIn, Monster, Indeed, and ZipRecruiter.
Your goal should be to broaden your pool of candidates, giving you plenty of options to choose from.
Additionally, if you have the space to do so, you might also consider reaching out to your local network of death care professionals. Particularly when looking for young talent, mortuary programs, and business schools can be a great place to find passionate individuals looking for new opportunities.
Involve Your Employees
A big mistake many funeral homes (and businesses) make during hiring is leaving employees out of the process. While you naturally can’t involve your team in every step, you might consider seeking their input.
For example, during the initial phases of recruitment, you might ask your team what they’d look for in a leader or what skills and abilities they feel are missing in the current operational procedure. Additionally, when you’ve narrowed down your candidates to two or three options, you might invite these people to meet with your employees. During this time, your employees can ask any questions on their minds and get a better feel for potential candidates.
Involving your current employees allows them to get a better sense of how a person might fit within your work culture. It will also inform candidates of how effectively they might work with your team.
Be Open to Change
Just because a person fits with your work culture doesn’t mean they won’t have ideas of their own. Some of these ideas might drastically change the ways in which your team operates. Embrace this!
Assuming you’ve done your due diligence and found an exceptional candidate with both passion and expertise for death care, you should trust in your new hire to make changes as they see fit. Particularly if you’re hiring a new funeral director, you’ll want this person to be able to put their stamp on the business. This will ultimately ensure their (and your) success.
Don’t Settle
When looking for someone to run your funeral home, the last thing you want is to settle for a candidate who you’re not confident in. Handing the keys to someone lacking in experience, skill, or drive can quickly work to tarnish the business you’ve worked so hard to build, and recovering from such a blow is no easy feat. Because of this, it’s often best to turn to the experts in funeral profession hiring.
The team at Johnson Consulting Group has one of the largest national networks of death care professionals. In addition to their consulting services––which will provide insight into the type of leader you need––their recruiting services can help connect you with qualified candidates that exceed the expectations of your job description.
In many cases, recruiting can become a full-time job, one that distracts from the immediate business of running your funeral home. At JCG, we can take the load off your shoulders and begin matching you with the best candidates in the business.