Hiring and Training Staff for Your Dog Training Business

Hiring and training staff is one of the hardest parts of running a business, be it a restaurant or a successful dog training business. Your employees are truly the face of your business (unless you're a one-person operation). They're the ones out there interacting with clients and building your reputation.

Not only do you need to find people who are passionate about dogs, but you also need to ensure that they have the right skills, knowledge, and experience to work with a variety of breeds and temperaments. The right staff can help you provide quality services to your clients, build a positive reputation, and increase customer loyalty. The question is, how does a dog training business owner go about finding the right people? Well, you're in luck.

In this blog post, we'll explore some of the key considerations when hiring and training staff for your dog training business.

Finding the Right Staff

When searching for the right staff, it's essential to identify what skills and qualities are important for your business. What do you want from your employees? What do you need them to do? Below we'll go in depth regarding some of the most important factors that you should take into consideration when you're looking to start making your first hires.

Experience

Consider whether you want to hire someone with previous experience working with dogs, or if you're open to training someone new. Sometimes it's a good idea to hire employees without any prior experience, so that you can train them in your ways. Other times, you're going to want to hire skilled employees that don't need a lot of hand holding at the start. That'll be up to you to decide. You might want to use a skills assessment when you're making your hires so that you can see which skills they already have and which skills they are lacking.

Knowledge

Make sure that your staff have a good understanding of canine behavior and are able to identify potential problems and find solutions. Are you going to require them to have training certifications or are you going to help them get their certifications? Helping employees level up their skills is a great way to boost company loyalty.

Personality

Look for staff members who are friendly, approachable, and good at building relationships with clients and their dogs. Having friendly staff that are able to communicate with your clients is essential. You don't want a grouchy staff member that upsets your clients. Find the right mix of personalities is also important to workplace dynamics. Having the right blend is essential to making sure your team works well together.

Availability

Consider the hours you need your staff to work and make sure that you find people who are available during those times. Make sure that your staff is able to be free when you need them to be free. There's no use hiring staff if they are going to have availability issues.

Training Your Staff

Once you've hired your staff, it's important to provide them with the right training to help them perform their jobs effectively. This may involve a combination of on-the-job training and classroom-style training, depending on your needs. As we said previously, offering employee training is a great way to boost loyalty. If you're willing to help your staff learn a new skill, they're most likely going to stick by your side more than someone else.

If you're hiring inexperienced staff, you're going to have to do the training yourself from zero. This might be a good thing, since you're able to mold them into the perfect employee. However, you're also going to need to spend a lot of time training them when your time might be better spent working with clients.

On the other hand, if you hire an experienced dog trainer, you're going to be able to get the instantly into the work rotation and they'll start generating income for your business. They're going to have their own style and this might not be the style that you want them to have, but that's how it goes when you hire an employee with lots of experience.

All in all, making your first hires and then training those hires is a complex beast to tame, much like the dogs that you train at your business. However, if you take your time, find good employees and then train them well, they'll be great employees for years to come.

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