Stop testing New Painters on the job…Do this instead!

So, the painting industry has a bad reputation and it’s deserved. Like, why do pitbulls have reputations for biting people? Because they bite them. And so, painters are not very professional.

Often, we have issues with addiction and a lot of other things and criminal records, you name it. And then just people that have bad business practices. They’re good people with bad business practices. So, it creates bad outcomes for their clients even though their heart’s in the right place.

And so when you’re going to hire someone, what most painters do is you talk to them, maybe you get a reference or a referral, and you talk to them on the tailgate of your truck, and then you say, “You seem like a pretty good guy. Let’s put you in a customer’s house, even though I don’t have any idea if you can paint, if you can read instructions, if you can fill out paperwork, if you can make clients happy, if you can be clean. Look, let’s just test you out in a home somewhere. Let’s um aggravate and occupy the time of the crew and the other painters so that they can later tell us that I can’t believe boss, you ever sent this guy out. He can’t paint. He’s unprofessional. He can’t follow instructions.

All of this can be discovered with what we call a technical skills test. A technical skills test is something you administer with a setup on the wall. You can do it on the back of your truck. You can do it in a warehouse. You can even make it portable where you draw some shapes and then you give someone a scope of work. If someone’s going to work for you as a crew leader or even a painter that’s going to have to occasionally fill in, they need to be able to read a scope of work to know where does the paint go, what color is it, what sheen is it, can they follow instructions.

If they can cut in a circle, they can cut in. It allows you to evaluate. Can they read instructions? Can they paint a straight line? Can they put the right colors in the right places? And then can they follow the cleanup instructions?

And there’s a test where they basically have to fill out some very basic paperwork. It has instructions on how to fill out the paperwork. You hand this to the painter and say, “Listen, here’s your work order. Here’s your workspace. You’re not allowed to ask me questions. Uh you’ve got an hour to complete this. If you complete it earlier, that’s great. Let’s get to work. I’ll be over here. Call me when you’re finished. And after you conduct these, and we have members that have conducted hundreds of them, and we have a specific toolkit uh that teaches you how to do this with all the paperwork, the diagrams, etc.

When you’ve tested a handful of painters, you will know what the standard is. And we have it set up to where you can rank them on all of these things. How quick are they? How clean are they? How good are they at following instructions and reading comprehension?

And can they fill out paperwork? Because that’s really what you’re hiring a crew leader to do. And honestly, it doesn’t matter who you’re hiring in your painting business, whether it’s a sales associate, operations manager, assistant, you name it. You need to have a technical skills assessment because the time to discover they don’t know how to do what you’ve hired them to do is not while they’re on a job and it’s not while they’re in your office. It needs to be screened and covered in advance.

And instead of having to do it over two days or two weeks, you can do it in 45 minutes or less. And as you continually constantly grade people with the exact same process and mechanism, you’re taking your prejudice for personality out of it. And you’re only focusing on performance. And you’ll get a gauge of what good, better, best, and awful is.

So it’s not so subjective. Everyone goes through the same test the same way. So you can evaluate people in a way that makes sense. So stop these tailgate interviews. Stop these sticking them with Bob to paint for three days only to fire them and only to have wasted a bunch of money when instead you can get it done in 45 minutes or less.

If you would like to get access to this tool, if you need uh help for screening for technical and non-technical skills with your painters, and everyone does, email me brandonpainersacademy.com or you can call me 423-800-0520 or visit our paintersacademy.com website for more tools, training, and tricks.