Attracting and Retaining Employees

Member Profile

A Midwest farm of just under 9,000 acres that employs 5 full-time people in addition to family members that work on the farm.

The Challenge

Like many operations, hiring employees was not one of this farm’s strengths. They did not have a hiring process or know how to properly solicit applications, interview or select employees. Hence they would typically hire people that they knew even if they didn’t have the needed skill set because that was the easier approach.

This caused problems later and in some cases damaged relationships. Turnover of employees is very costly both financially, operationally, and emotionally. Consequently, they were scared to grow the operation because they couldn’t physically work any more hours themselves and couldn’t hire the right employees to help them run the farm.

The Results

UnCommon Farms’ Human Resource experts assisted the farm owners in many ways including:

• How to write employment ads and where to post them
• Tapping the bank of job descriptions UnCommon Farms has already written, tweaking them to fit the specific needs of each farm
• Developed a structured hiring process which fit the owners style and culture
• Implement a performance review process which gives current employees feedback in a non-confrontational format and actually helps the work environment because employees better understand what is expected
• Help the owners put an employee benefit plan into place that has increased employee loyalty

One of the farm owners put it this way: “Because of UnCommon Farms, we have hired 3 great employees that we never would have found on our own. We now have so much more confidence in hiring, and our farm runs better because of better employees and better management of those employees.”