“It’s all about de-risking the company. We’d been through a couple of years when we were subjected to the lottery for H-2B. Two weeks prior to having 50-60 employees turn up, we didn’t know whether we were gonna get them or not. By going down the Temp to PERM process, that gave us gave us more stability and de-risk the company’s process of making sure we had good quality employees to do all of our landscaping needs.”
“As we were growing, we were doing more and more returning workers within the H-2B process, and we started to have a real good core set of H-2B employees that would come back every year. We wanted to reward that good work ethic from those guys and from our point of view, being able to sponsor them legally to a green card was a really good thing.”
“Of our H-2B pull, it was about 70% of those workers that went onto the PERM program, and at the time the other 30% of the workers had reservations. Now what’s starting to happen is the rest of that 30% are asking us ‘when can I go on that on that plan’. It was our goal to double every three years; so, as we grew, what started to happen was there was less seasonality in our business. So, before, it was it put a big shot through the business when our H-2B workers went home typically September, October time frame and as we got busier and busier and bigger and bigger, that posed more and more of a disruption to the business. So, by moving them onto a permanent work footing, that we believe is going to benefit us.”
“Our partnership with Unlimited Labor has really guided us through the Temp to PERM process. We’re about two years into it now, it’s been pretty smooth with Unlimited Labor working with our HR teams and the workers are definitely grateful for that. And it’s been pretty smooth.”
“I think one of the things that we’ve seen, especially when the market’s been really tight, is that getting good quality workers is an issue. We believe that the retention through the PERM process when we’ve invested in our employees, we believe that it’s going to have a better retention than some of our other workforce.”