A bad hire on a farm costs more than a bad hire in an office. You're handing someone machinery, livestock, chemicals and a lot of trust, often with no one else around to catch a mistake. Get it wrong and you're not out a bit of admin time, you're out a season.
The good part is that most hiring mistakes are made before the job is ever advertised. Sort out the front end and the rest gets a lot easier.
Get clear on the job before you advertise
Before you write an ad or ring a single person, get honest about what the role is. Not the title, the day-to-day. What does this person do at 6am in June, what gear do they run, who do they answer to, and what does a good day on the job look like next to a bad one.
Write it down. If you can't describe the role clearly to yourself, you can't describe it to a candidate, and you can't tell whether the person in front of you fits it. This is where a proper position description earns its keep.
Hire for the job you have, not the one you wish you had
Farms tend to write job ads for a mythical all-rounder who can weld, muster, do the books, fix the pump and never take a day off. That person is not coming. When you load a role with every skill you'd like, you either scare off good candidates or you settle and resent it later.
Split it into must-haves and nice-to-haves. Must-haves are the things the role genuinely can't run without on day one. Everything else is training or time. Be strict about which list things go on.
Skills can be trained. Attitude can't.
This is the one that catches people out. You can teach someone to back a trailer, read a chemical label or run a new bit of software. You can't teach someone to turn up, own a mistake, or give a stuff about the animals and the people around them. Capacity and attitude are either there or they're not.
So when you're weighing up candidates, put attitude first. Look for someone who asks questions instead of guessing, who's honest about what they don't know, and who you'd trust on the place when you're not there. A keen learner with the right temperament will outrun a skilled operator with a chip on their shoulder every season.
Rule of thumb: if you're torn between the more skilled candidate and the one with the better attitude, take the attitude. You'll be training either way. Only one of them makes the whole team easier to be around.
Reference check like you mean it
Reference checks are the step everyone knows they should do and half of them skip because they're busy or the person seemed alright. Don't skip it. A ten-minute call to a former employer will tell you more than an hour of interview polish.
Ask real questions. Would you employ them again. How did they handle it when something went wrong. Were they reliable through a busy season. Listen for the pause as much as the answer. And verify the practical stuff yourself: licences, tickets, chemical accreditation, anything the role legally needs. People round up their own qualifications more often than you'd think.
When it's worth getting help
Here's the honest bit. Finding the right person takes time you don't have during harvest or calving, and it takes a network most farms don't have sitting in their back pocket. Advertising into the void and hoping the right person applies is not a plan.
That's where a specialist recruiter earns their fee. We point farms to Drover Ag, our recruitment partner. They're an agricultural recruitment firm run by people from the land, with a national network of candidates across livestock, cropping, irrigation and dairy, and they handle everything from advertising and screening to shortlisting and placement. Whether you need a junior hand for the season or a regional manager, they'll do the legwork so you can get on with running the place.
Sort out the role, know what you need, hold the line on attitude, and vet properly. Then, if finding the person is the hard part, hand that bit to someone who does it for a living.