Hiring for the season ahead

Tips to help you write the sort of ad that brings the workers you want

Ihave heard from lots of farmers about how busy and challenging it’s been in the past few years, especially as many farms continue to operate shortstaffed and struggle to find employees to fill those gaps.

That’s why DairyNZ continues its mission to find committed Kiwis to work on your dairy farms. Our nationwide GoDairy campaign will begin again during March. GoDairy will help recruit committed young Kiwis, by connecting job seekers to the latest farm assistant vacancies across New Zealand.

Through the GoDairy campaign, we will be sending active job seekers to Farm Source to apply for roles, so we need farmers to list their current job vacancies on Farm Source. This will help jobseekers find great work and highlight the size of our sector’s workforce shortage.

When writing up your advert, here are a few top tips for getting your job noticed:

• Tell them about you and your farm Think about how you can stand out from the crowd. Consider what makes your farm unique and a great place to work. This is partly made up of your farm information including location, cow numbers, shed and farm system.

However, this is also about the culture of your organisation. It’s important to get across the values and vision you have for your business, and the culture you have.

Get current team members involved in this with a 10-minute meeting. Ask them “What would you tell your friends about why it’s good working here?” Incorporate their feedback into your job advert.

• Tell them why they should choose your job

To attract candidates, your business needs to be in shape and have the basics right. Some key things to consider are the current roster, hours of work, hourly rate of pay and the state and availability of accommodation.

Job seekers will be attracted to a different combination of benefits including location and remuneration, the type of work and the opportunities to align with their work and career

with DairyNZ

aspirations. Promoting the things that make you different and appealing in these areas will help job seekers determine if your job opportunity is a good fit for them.

Once you have written your advertisement, list it online at nzfarmsource.co.nz/jobs.

Longer term, developing a great workplace for your staff will mean that you will have lower turnover while finding it easier to attract committed staff members when vacancies do arise. n

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DairyNZ has a range of tools and advice for recruitment, onboarding and creating a great workplace at dairynz.co.nz/people.

By Samantha Tennent

After chasing the Mount Maunganui dream, a Bay of Plenty farmer is pursuing his new dream of dairying.

The sun, sandy beaches and surf of Mount Maunganui provided a dream lifestyle for a Bay of Plenty farmer – until covid hit.

The pandemic changed everything for Sam Taylor-Hill and left him feeling frustrated and deflated when he was made redundant from his brewery sales role. He had spent 12 years in hospitality, built a sound reputation and achieved some great things, but was back to square one unsure where to go next.

A friend snaffled him up to give him a hand getting his electrician business going. Taylor-Hill worked with him for 18 months as an apprentice but struggled to find his spark.

Arriving home one evening, he found his partner, Dayna Rowe, who was managing her family’s farm, stressing about finding staff.

“It was like the penny dropped, here I was not happy with what I was doing and she needed someone to help out on the farm,” Taylor-Hill says.

“So I dropped tools and took up a fulltime role as a farm assistant and I am absolutely loving it.”

He is a farm assistant on the Rowe’s family farm, milking 920 cows.

A defining moment was when he and Dayna were calving a cow together in the middle of the night. Being a beach kid from Whanganui, he had never experienced anything like it and “had no idea where my butter came from”.

Before then Taylor-Hill had been involved with night checks during calving and helped on weekends, so he had some foundational skills and knowledge, but he has been blown away by the support across the industry.

“The support is unreal, it’s incredible how willing everyone is to help each other.

“In the bar industry everyone stuck to themselves, but in farming, if you have a problem there’s always someone who can share their experience and give you advice.”

Entering farming was a huge eyeopener for him, having had an image of farmers as pretty gruff.

“I didn’t realise how much was involved in looking after the herd and producing milk. There’s so much going on with grazing management, weather and the general day-to-day and flowing with the punches.

“If something breaks you need to fix it, you’ve got to shoot from the hip sometimes.

“It’s the biggest sector in New Zealand but I reckon 95% of people have no idea what a farmer does and what they’re doing for the country.”

He thinks it has been a massive perk working and living with Dayna.

“Not many people get to spend that much time with their manager and it has been helpful because I can pick her brains and ask lots of questions so I’ve been learning things quickly.”

The BOP farm owned by Dayna’s parents. Grant and Ngarie Rowe, is 15 minutes south of Papamoa in an area called Pongakawa. It is 270ha and the 920 cows are milked through a 60-bail rotary with automatic cup removers. The farm also has Halter, which Taylor-Hill calls a game-changer.

“I’ve spoken to enough farmers to know how spoiled I am on this farm,” he laughs.

“The Halter system is amazing, we’re not in the paddocks chasing cows and setting up tape, it’s such an efficient way to manage the farm.”

The milking routine starts as 11 milkings in seven days and after Christmas that changes to 10 milkings across seven days.