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A resource from RocketLevel for restoration company owners, ops leaders, and anyone who hires, backed by decades of experience in the trade. About a 5 minute read.
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Make your own copy: this is a spreadsheet you can copy and use. Open the copyable spreadsheet It opens a fresh copy in your own Google Drive, and you fill it in yourself.
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A bad hire in restoration is expensive in a way the profit and loss statement (P&L) never quite shows: the wasted wages, the jobs they slowed down, the customers they rubbed wrong, the time you spent managing them, and the rehire you now have to run. In our experience, most of those misses trace back to the same root cause: hiring against a vague job description and a good first impression instead of a clear definition of what the role has to accomplish. A hiring scorecard fixes that.
The scorecard idea, hiring against written outcomes instead of a job description, comes from Who by Geoff Smart and Randy Street. This page applies it to restoration hiring.
A job description lists duties: respond to calls, operate equipment, document jobs. A scorecard lists outcomes, the results that mean this person is succeeding: jobs documented to insurer standard with no rework requests, drive time logged and accurate, moisture maps complete on every loss. Outcomes are measurable; duties are not. Write three to six outcomes for the role and you have defined what good looks like before you meet a single candidate.
With outcomes written, every interview asks the same question: is there evidence this person has delivered this outcome before? You score each candidate the same way, on the same scale, against the same outcomes. This does two things. It makes the comparison fair instead of "who did I like most," and it forces you to weigh what a candidate actually did over how well they tell the story.
One condition makes the consistency-as-fairness argument hold up: every outcome you score has to be job-related, and not a stand-in for a protected trait like age, sex, race, national origin, religion, or disability. Scoring everyone the same way is only fair if the things you are scoring are the things the job actually requires. "Documents a job to insurer standard" is job-related. A criterion that quietly screens for who is younger, who fits in, or who reminds you of your best tech is a proxy, and scoring it consistently just makes a biased standard look rigorous. Keep every line tied to a real result the role has to produce.
It is also the standard a selection procedure gets measured against: the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures at 29 CFR Part 1607 treat any procedure that screens out a protected group at a materially different rate as discriminatory unless the employer can show it is job-related. It is free to read and worth a look before you finalize the list.
Restoration hiring has two failure modes: people who can do the work but will not show up reliably or treat a customer right, and people who are great with people but cannot run the equipment or read a scope. Score the trade skills and the work habits as separate lines. An Institute of Inspection, Cleaning and Restoration Certification (IICRC) card and a skills check tell you about the first; references and past behavior tell you about the second. Both have to clear the bar before you make an offer.
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Do this: Before your next hire, write the three to six outcomes the role must deliver and the bar for each. Score every candidate against that exact list, looking for proof they have done the work before and weighting that over how well they interview. Keep the scorecard and compare it to their first ninety days.
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This guide is general guidance, not legal or HR advice. Employment and hiring laws vary by state and locality and change over time. Keep your selection criteria job-related and consistent, and consult a qualified employment attorney or HR professional on your specific situation.
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Tools for this play. Keep going: run the scorecard inside the structure in The Interview That Predicts a Good Hire: Questions, Structure, and the Working Ride-Along, then pair this with Onboarding a New Restoration Technician: The First 30 Days to set the new hire up to hit those outcomes, and Growing Your People into Managers: Building Your Bench to build from within.
Start here: The Commercial Growth Playbook, the whole commercial motion in one read, or skim The 3 Stages of Commercial Growth for the quick map: knowing your market, becoming the go-to provider, and building the conversion engine.
Do it yourself or have it done. The scorecard spreadsheet above is built for you to fill in yourself, and hiring decisions stay with you. The same outcomes-first discipline applies when the seat is a commercial rep, and the hardest outcome for a lot of shops to produce is a full calendar of first meetings. RocketLevel's inside sales team books those meetings, so the rep you hire against this scorecard spends their time across the table instead of on the phone.
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Part of the free GEM Resource Hub by RocketLevel Commercial. Playbooks and tools for running the whole restoration business, A to Z, while specializing in building commercial revenue you own. RocketLevel is a bolt-on inside sales team that strengthens your commercial pipeline. Explore more in the GEM Resource Hub. New here? About RocketLevel and what the system has produced. When you're ready, see what your market is worth or book a Commercial Growth Call.
How we source figures: every number in this library names its source or is labeled as RocketLevel's own working figure. Read the sourcing standard.
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