AFE Launches Career Center To Help Florists Find Employees
The American Floral Endowment (AFE) has launched a new online Career Center that connects floral industry employers with students and other professionals in the floriculture and horticulture fields looking for new career opportunities.
This addresses one of the biggest problems facing retail florists – the ability to find qualified employees.
The mobile friendly platform gives employers a place to post job openings, screen and manage applications, and access a resume database of targeted candidates. The site offers several different packages that can range from a simple online posting on the Career Center, to add-ons like emailing your job description to targeted candidates and posting it to another 1,000 job boards.
Once you’ve created an account, you have access to your saved job postings, potential candidates, the site’s Resume Bank, and much more.
There is a fee for employers to use the Career Center but all proceeds benefit the American Floral Endowment to increase funding for industry research, scholarships, internships, educational grants and programs to promote and advance the floral industry.
Job seekers can access the site free of charge. Once there, they can post their resume and search for jobs that match their skills, interests and location. The site will save their searches and notify them when a new match is found.
Visit The New AFE Career Center
Find employees for your flower shop at the new AFE online career center.
VisitAnd an added bonus for job seekers is the free career development tools also included on the site.
Florists have long had a problem finding solid, well rounded employees that can quickly become a productive member of a retail flower shop. Most education is focussed on design, but that is only one of the skills florists need in their employees.
"Finding qualified, dedicated employees is one of the greatest challenges facing the floriculture industry. The Endowment maintains close connections with students, young professionals, floral businesses, and horticulture professionals, so it seemed a natural fit to provide a career-focused online community."
For over a decade FloristWare has tried to address this by offering floral POS technology free of charge to schools and colleges with floral design and florist training programs. The goal is to help future graduates - and their future employers - by ensuring they are starting their careers with a full range of the skills needed in a retail flower shop.
“I knew from my own experience in the floral industry how powerful having a POS is for a floral shop, and that there was a gap in our curriculum if we could not give our students access to one. Having that hands-on experience when they begin an internship or apply for a job will give them a huge advantage. I also liked that FloristWare was an independent system that gives them the full range of a POS without being tied to a specific wire service” explains Tiffany Hammond, AIFD, CFD of Hennepin Technical College in Minnesota.
“We feel very fortunate to have FloristWare for our students to use. Having this hands-on POS experience gives our graduates an advantage when looking for employment because florists know it will reduce their training time once hired,” explains Roy J. Dria of Cumberland-Perry AVTS, in Pennsylvania.