Hiring solar installation crews — what 100 wrong hires taught us

The resume tells you very little

Roughly half the crew CVs I see are misleading. Either the experience is overstated, the certifications are issued by training centres of variable quality, or the prior employer was paying so badly that the candidate stayed only out of necessity. The CV is at best a signal that the person has been in the category before. It is not a hire/no-hire input.

What the first call needs to test for

On the first 20-minute call I ask only four things. (1) Walk me through the last installation you finished — give me the address, the system size, what went wrong and how you fixed it. (2) What did you earn last year, all-in, and how was it structured? (3) Who do you live with, and where are you willing to be posted? (4) Show me a photo of a system you installed.

Question 1 tests for honesty — anyone who has actually installed solar has at least one war story; people who can't produce one were probably not on the roof. Question 2 sets the compensation conversation early. Question 3 is the single biggest retention variable — a crew lead 600 km from family will quit within ten months no matter how well-paid. Question 4 takes care of certification fraud.

The trial week, not the trial day

Trial days are theatre. Anyone can perform for a day. We do a full paid trial week — the candidate joins an existing crew, works five real installations, and we get feedback from the crew lead, the customer survey and the QC inspector. Decisions made after a trial day are wrong about 40% of the time; decisions after a trial week are wrong about 8% of the time. The math is unambiguous.

Compensation design — pay for installations, not hours

Hourly pay produces hourly behaviour. Per-installation pay with a quality bonus produces quality behaviour. We pay a base, an installation-completion incremental, and a quarterly bonus tied to that crew's customer NPS and warranty-claim rate. The total compensation for a top crew lead is meaningfully above the regional industry standard. The total compensation for the bottom 20% is below — and they self-select out within a quarter.

Training is a curriculum, not an orientation

Most installer training in India is two days of OEM product orientation. Ours is six weeks. Week 1 — safety, harnesses, fall protection, electrical isolation. Week 2 — mounting structures and roof types. Week 3 — DC side wiring, MC4 termination, string sizing. Week 4 — inverter commissioning, app pairing, monitoring. Week 5 — net metering protocol and DISCOM inspection prep. Week 6 — customer interface, post-install walkthrough.

It is expensive. It is also why our crews can install double-stacked optimisers correctly on a 7-degree roof and our competitors' can't. Training is the moat that capital can't shortcut.

What to optimise for in the first 18 months

Retention. Period. The cost of replacing a trained crew lead is roughly 6× their monthly compensation when you account for productivity loss, training reinvestment and the customer-facing risk of an under-trained replacement. Anything you do to retain — proximity to family, predictable schedule, transparent pay structure, clear career progression — pays back many-fold in the second year.