Hey guys and gals. I'm four years in business and I'm looking to hire a few employees. Thankfully I've gotten to a point where I need to be bidding work and sending out estimates. 2 part question...
1.) best way to hire quality employees?
2.) what AI would you recommend or have you used for sending estimates and invoices/bid proposals
thanks to you all. Have a great weekend.
Hey, congrats on hitting that 4-year mark and needing to hire — that’s a great spot to be in.
1. Best way to hire quality employees:
For me in Indiana, the best hires have come from referrals. I ask my current customers, subs, and people in local trade Facebook groups if they know anyone solid. I also post on Indeed and Facebook Jobs with a very clear job description. The key is doing a working interview or short paid trial day. Skills are important, but I look more for reliability and attitude. Good people are hard to find, so I move fast when I find them.
2. For estimates, invoices, and bid proposals:
I’ve been using ChatGPT (and lately Claude) a ton for this. I give it the job details and it writes professional proposals and bid letters way faster than I ever could. For actual sending and tracking, I like PandaDoc — it has good templates and AI features that help fill in proposals. If you’re in the Jobber ecosystem, their built-in estimating and invoicing is pretty smooth too.
For hiring, I’ve had the best luck focusing on reliability, communication, and willingness to learn. Skills can be taught, but attitude and work ethic are much harder to train. Partnering with local career centers and schools has also been a great way to find people looking for experience and growth opportunities.
For AI, I’ve been using Claude quite a bit, but I’ve customized it around my workflow. I feed it job details and use it to generate scopes of work, proposals, bid letters, and customer communications. I still review everything before it goes out, but it saves a lot of time on the administrative side.
One thing I’ve noticed is that AI has been more helpful for creating professional proposals and customer-facing documents than it has been for the actual pricing. Most contractors already know how to price the work—the time savings comes from turning job details into something polished and getting it in front of the customer quickly.
