TreeBossPro Blog — Running a Tree Business

Hiring Climbers for Your Tree Business: What to Look For

A good climber is the most valuable person on most tree crews, and the hardest to find. They make the difference between a removal that takes half a day and one that takes two, between a clean prune and a butchered tree, and between a safe job site and a scary one. Here is what tree company owners should look for when hiring climbers, and how to set them up to succeed.

Why Climbers Are the Bottleneck In Running Two Crews in a Tree Business Without Losing the Thread, the crew leader is the key to a second crew. On many crews, that leader is a climber. You can find groundies, rent equipment, and buy another truck. A skilled climber who can read a tree, plan the rigging, and work safely is much harder to replace.

That means hiring climbers is not something to do in a rush when you are already overloaded. It is something to work on all year.

Keep a running list of good climbers you meet: people from equipment dealers, training events, and other companies. When you are ready to hire, you will have names instead of a blank page and a job ad.

Look Beyond Years of Experience Years in the trade tell you something, but not everything. Ask what kind of work a candidate has done. Removals over structures? Rigging with a crane? Pruning to standards? Bucket work? Some climbers have years of experience doing only one kind of job.

Ask them to walk you through how they would approach a specific tree. Good climbers talk about what they see: the lean, the defects, the targets underneath, where the rigging point goes, how the groundies need to set up. That conversation tells you more than a resume.

Watch Them Work The best interview for a climber is time in a tree. Many owners set up a paid working interview on a real job with an experienced crew leader watching. Look at how they gear up, how they communicate with the ground, how they move, and how they handle surprises.

Safety and certification requirements vary by location and type of work. Check what applies in your area and to your company, and talk to your insurance provider about what they require before anyone climbs for you.

Hire for Attitude and Communication, Too Skill gets the work done. Attitude decides whether the crew wants to work with that person. A talented climber who yells at groundies and ignores customers will cost you employees and reviews. Ask references how the candidate treats people on the ground, how they handle customers, and whether they show up on time.

Communication matters even more as your business grows. A climber who can read property notes in the app, update them, take useful photos, and explain a change to a customer can become a crew leader. One who cannot will always need you there.

Pay attention to how a candidate talks about past employers. Someone who blames every former boss for every problem will probably say the same about you in a year.

Make Your Company a Place Climbers Want to Work Good climbers have options. Pay matters, but so do the things that make a day easier: decent equipment, organized jobs, and a schedule that is not chaos. A climber who shows up to find the job details, gate code, drop zone, and tree notes already on their phone has a better day than one who spends the first hour figuring things out.

Employee time tracking in TreeBossPro records hours, which makes pay simpler to check and helps settle questions before they become arguments.

Set New Climbers Up for the First Month Do not throw a new climber onto your hardest removal on day one. Pair them with an experienced crew for the first few weeks. Start them on work that matches what they have proven, and add complexity as they show they can handle it. Review their jobs, photos, and time on site.

Give them their own login to the crew app with the right role-based access, so they see their jobs and notes from the start. TreeBossPro is never billed per user, so there is no reason to share logins. The tree service business software page shows how the crew app keeps new hires connected to the plan. A good climber is worth the effort it takes to find and keep them.