Labor Finders Earns Best of Staffing 10 Year Diamond Award
This year, ClearlyRated has the honor of recognizing our first ever cohort of 10 Year Diamond Award winning firms! This award is the crowning achievement for Best of Staffing firms, earned only by a handful of elite organizations that have won the Best of Staffing designation for 10 consecutive years. Among them is Labor Finders, a temporary staffing and employment agency serving blue collar day labor and industrial staffing needs from nearly 200 office locations across the United States.
Labor Finders has earned the Best of Staffing designation for Client Satisfaction 13 years in a row. We had the opportunity to sit down with Dan Shube, CSP and CMO at Labor Finders, to hear his thoughts on the Best of Staffing program and what the 10 Year Diamond Award means to the Labor Finders team.
While winning is wonderful, the goal is and always has been to get better.
—Dan Shube, CMO of Labor Finders
What does winning the Best of Staffing 10 Year Diamond Award for Client Satisfaction meant to you and the Labor Finders team?
Dan: It means a lot! Obviously being the “best” of the work that we do is great, but having a third party validate that is more important than declaring it ourselves. But what truly matters is what this win means to the organization, to all the people who work hard every day to gain an accolade like this. Everyone who works at Labor Finders takes their service responsibilities very seriously. Providing excellent customer service on a daily basis is important but when you look back on this over a decade of earning Best of Staffing, it’s the consistency that’s truly exceptional. Every day is a new adventure, especially in our industry. Finding good workers to take care of our clients is a very difficult job. I lead the marketing function at our corporate office, so I strive to share in what happens at the street level and on the field, but earning this award gives my team something to celebrate. It’s truly made possible by the efforts of the field team, so the opportunity to share in the prize and the good news that we’ve won this award for so many years means so much. Just having the opportunity to share it with the folks on the front line, that’s what’s really important to me.
Earning the Best of Staffing 10 Year Diamond Award means that Labor Finders has earned exceptional client satisfaction ratings for 10 consecutive years. What does it take to maintain such a high level of excellence for such a long time?
Dan: Honestly it’s all about the people… it’s people who have a deep caring for other people. While taking care of our clients and being rated on their satisfaction is truly important, fundamentally we are also trying to help people who need work find opportunity and some continuity. Supporting both of these groups, clients and workers, takes immense effort, and earning their trust and satisfaction happens one day at a time. You just have to do the right thing every day—it’s simple, but not easy. When you can do the right thing day in and day out, not only do you win awards but you put smiles on people’s faces. You feel good being able to fill a business need while also providing people a paycheck that helps them pay the rent and feed their family. It’s the little things that all add up to doing something really well.
What’s an important lesson that you’ve learned from participating in Best of Staffing for so many years?
Dan: Looking back at our first year participating in Best of Staffing, just deciding to go forward with this program was a little bit nerve wracking. To have the gumption to ask your customers how you’re doing is a little bit scary. The good and bad news is that they’ll tell you the truth! Sometimes what they say is positive and refreshing. Sometimes it’s not so easy to listen to. The important thing is to ask. If you don’t ask you don’t know, and what you don’t know you can’t fix. It’s scary and difficult at times, but really that’s the important lesson. You need to ask how you’re doing, and then you need to take action once you hear it.
Have you encountered any surprises along the way in the past 10 years? Did anything happen with the Best of Staffing program that you didn’t expect?
Dan: Honestly, I didn’t expect that we would earn Best of Staffing the first year that we entered the competition! Not because I didn’t believe in our team or their efforts, but because, in our kind of work, it’s very difficult to have satisfaction from our clientele. These days it’s really difficult to find good workers, but that has been true every single year that we have participated in Best of Staffing. It has felt like a constant battle to deliver on client expectations and keep satisfaction high. And given that, I’ve been surprised and thrilled every successive year that we’ve won the award! I really didn’t imagine that we could be so competitive, especially alongside so many staffing businesses that compete in our field of expertise but also in more white collar industries. So the big surprise is that we won and that we continue to win. It’s not easy, and we certainly can’t take these consecutive wins for granted. Every year is different, we don’t ever want to let down our guard. We always want to be working to satisfy our clients, it’s a never ending task and one that we pursue with pride.
What advice would you give to someone about to participate in Best of Staffing for the first time?
Dan: I would say keep your head up, don’t get down. Listen, keep your eyes wide open and your ears open as well. No matter who you are surveying, whether it’s clients, talent, or your employees, be sure to reach out to them ahead of time and also after the survey is over. Make it clear that their opinions matter. And always strive to keep getting better. While winning is wonderful, the goal is and always has been to get better. Even if someone tries Best of Staffing and doesn’t earn the award, at least they’ve established a benchmark. And from there they can learn, improve, and try again. As long as you’re getting better you’re not losing.
Is there anything we haven’t covered that you’d like to share or talk about?
Dan: I would say that the Best of Staffing program, and our consecutive 13 years of winning Best of Staffing for client satisfaction, has provided my team with an unprecedented opportunity to lead with good news. As a marketing and PR professional, we’re constantly seeking good news to share amidst an onslaught of bad news. Best of Staffing is an opportunity for Labor Finders to strive for some good news to share. We are fortunate to have an amazing creative team that has built the Best of Staffing program into our annual marketing, communications, and PR circuit. We’ve obviously dedicated an entire marketing plan to our win – press releases, social media announcements, and various other communication campaigns to communicate the win with our community. To have a story to tell that we worked really hard to take care of our clients and ensure they had a good experience, while at the same time we’re making sure that people can earn a paycheck and put food on the table for their families—it’s truly a wonderful story, and it takes a lot of work. This is certainly good news, it’s always my pleasure to share year in and year out. I’m going to do everything I can to make sure we keep winning so that we have good news to keep sharing.
