ForConstructionPros.com

Aardvark Sweeping Services President Carl Barton says one innovation that has helped Aardvark Sweeping's bottom line is creating an entry level position, which it calls "porter," that enables the company to evaluate prospects before spending too much time and money training them.

"We spent a lot of money going through people before," he says. "We were bleeding on our training process, so having an entry level position has really saved us money while screening some of the unacceptable people out."

He says the original hiring and training process involved two weeks of riding with a driver, training on all the aspects of the job and working through a training sheet that lists all the elements of the job.

"After the two weeks, once the driver is adept at each element on the training sheet, we would send him out on a route and he just learns through repetition," Barton says. "There is some on-the-job training that's required because you just can't learn it all by watching, so we might start him out expecting only 200 or 250 minutes a shift. But it's still productive so he could work through all the jobs on his route and learn himself. But it ended up being about 30 days before we would make a final decision on that employee."

Barton decided that Aardvark was taking too long and investing too much money in people who ultimately did not work out, so they came up with an approach to short-cut the training and decision-making process and save a little money at the same time.