Applause at Pestworld 2025: Top tips for reducing technician turnover

PestWorld 2025 brought more than 4,000 pest control professionals together in Orlando, Florida to discuss ways to expand their ventures, share perspectives on emerging trends, celebrate industry leaders, and more. 

Applause co-founder and VP of Sales Chris Anderson was one of many presenters to share insights on how pest control company owners can grow their businesses sustainably. His session, “How to Reduce Technician Turnover by 20%”, outlined data-backed methods for improving technician retention. 

At a high level, Chris walked through how to find and keep top technicians through a strategic approach to hiring, training, recognition, and management. Identifying reliable workers who are in it for the long haul is just the beginning. Supporting and retaining your top performers is what really drives business growth. 

Of course, there were dozens of sessions throughout the four-day event; it was impossible to attend everything. So if you missed ours, we’re highlighting the top 5 key takeaways from Chris’s session below. 

1. The true cost of technician turnover is higher than you think 

The first point Chris hammered home is that losing a great technician is more costly than you might think. It’s less an HR problem and more a profit problem. 

When a technician leaves, you lose team morale, productivity, and divert resources away from revenue-generating activities and toward recruitment and hiring. Both your customers and your remaining technicians have to pick up the slack. 

All told, the cost of replacing a single technician can reach the equivalent of their entire annual salary, once you factor in recruiting expenses, onboarding, training, and the dip in output that comes with learning curves and coverage gaps.

For a business with 20 technicians and a 17.5% turnover rate, that’s roughly $200,000 walking out the door every year. 

But the true impact runs deeper. Each departure disrupts customer relationships, erodes team morale, and increases burnout among the techs who stay behind. When that cycle repeats, it becomes harder to grow, because you’re always backfilling instead of building.

That’s why the first step toward solving turnover is to measure it the same way you measure revenue or customer satisfaction. 

The formula is simple:

(Employees who left ÷ Average number of employees) × 100 = Turnover Rate

Use this calculation quarterly, and compare your results to industry benchmarks:

• Pest Control: 26–33%
• HVAC / Electrical: 27–32%
• Plumbing: 22–35%

If your number sits above those ranges, it tells you where to focus. Once you can see the cost of turnover in real dollars, it becomes impossible to ignore. And that visibility is what turns retention from an abstract goal into a business priority.

2. In hiring, precision > speed

When turnover becomes a pattern, the root cause often starts long before a technician ever leaves. It starts in the hiring process. 

In the rush to fill open routes, many service companies focus on getting someone in the truck instead of finding the right person. But fast hiring almost always turns into slow growth.

The data backs it up: more than half of candidates (56%) admit to exaggerating or misrepresenting something on their résumé. That’s why the best-performing companies treat hiring like a quality control process: structured, consistent, and tied to clear outcomes.

Start by defining what success looks like in the role. Use a role-specific scorecard to document the outcomes, skills, and behaviors that define top performance. This ensures every hiring manager evaluates candidates through the same lens, rather than relying on gut feel or first impressions.

Then, systematize the process:

• Standardize interview questions around those competencies. Each interviewer should ask from the same playbook, so your evaluations are consistent and fair.
• Check references, always. It’s the easiest way to confirm truth and character — and it tells candidates you take hiring seriously.
• Screen for values alignment. You can train on process, but not on integrity or accountability.
• Leverage employee referrals. Referred hires stay twice as long on average, and they start with built-in cultural fit.

Finally, don’t skip the exit interviews. The people leaving your business often hold the clearest view of what’s missing. That feedback loop helps you adjust who you hire, and how you support them, over time.

The goal isn’t to make hiring slower; it’s to make it smarter. Every technician you bring on is an investment in your customers, your reputation, and your growth potential. When you hire precisely, you don’t just fill seats; you build stability.

3. Better training = higher technician satisfaction

Training is one of the most reliable predictors of retention, and yet, it’s often the first thing to get cut when the schedule gets busy. Meanwhile, 70% of employees say job-related training directly improves their satisfaction and companies with robust training programs see 218% higher revenue per employee than those that don’t.

The takeaway? Training isn’t a cost center. It’s a retention strategy.

Strong onboarding and ongoing learning signal to technicians that your company is invested in their growth. It helps them do their jobs better, builds confidence faster, and reduces frustration when challenges come up in the field. But effective training doesn’t happen by accident. It’s intentional, structured, and continuously refined.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• Ask your tenured technicians what they wish they’d learned earlier. Their firsthand experience is the most valuable roadmap you have for improving your training program.
• Design a structured onboarding process. Every new hire should have a consistent, documented path from day one through their first few months in the field.
• Make education continuous. Schedule short, regular training sessions that reinforce key concepts instead of cramming them into an annual meeting.
• Train the trainers. Equip managers with leadership and coaching skills so they can develop their teams effectively, not just oversee them.

When done right, training builds more than technical skill. It builds confidence, consistency, and connection. And those three things — more than pay or perks — are what keep technicians engaged for the long haul.

It’s easy to think of training as something you do for your employees. But in reality, it’s something you do with them to make sure every technician who joins your team has the tools and support they need to succeed.

4. Done right, employee recognition improves performance

Recognition is one of the simplest and most powerful ways to keep technicians engaged. But timing is everything.

Too many companies still rely on old systems: monthly shoutouts at meetings, bonuses buried in payroll, or a quick “atta boy” in the warehouse. Those gestures might feel good in the moment, but they don’t build lasting motivation because they’re out of sync with when the work actually happens.

Across tens of thousands of technicians surveyed, only 21% said they feel recognized every day, while nearly half say they rarely receive recognition at all. And when recognition is delayed, its impact fades fast. Research shows that immediate rewards increase intrinsic motivation, strengthening the link between effort and outcome.

When incentives are real-time and transparent, performance improves fast. In fact, Applause data shows a 28% lift in 5-star reviews during peak months when recognition is instant and tied directly to performance metrics.

Here’s what works:

• Make it instant: connect the reward to the behavior as quickly as possible. The closer they’re linked, the more the lesson sticks.
• Keep it specific: recognize measurable actions—like perfect completion rates, high NPS scores, or five-star reviews, so the “why” is always clear.
• Go public: peer recognition magnifies impact. When the team sees great work being rewarded, it reinforces the standard for everyone.
• Track and store it: recognition should live in a visible history, not disappear in a group chat, so employees can see their growth over time.
• Reward what drives business outcomes. Align incentives to your KPIs: customer satisfaction, retention, and productivity.

The right incentive doesn’t just say “good job.” It tells your technicians exactly what behaviors the business values most, and it reinforces those behaviors automatically.

Recognition isn’t just about feeling appreciated. It’s a management tool that builds consistency, strengthens accountability, and turns day-to-day work into a game worth winning.

5. Show employees a path for growth

If recognition keeps people engaged today, growth is what keeps them around tomorrow.

In every field service business, there comes a point where technicians stop asking, “How am I doing?” and start asking, “What’s next?” The answer to that question often determines whether they stay or go. According to LinkedIn’s Workplace Learning Report, employees who see clear advancement opportunities are 20% more likely to stay, and companies that define career paths experience 50% lower turnover than those that don’t.

Growth doesn’t have to mean a promotion into management, though that should be an option. It can also mean skill diversification, certifications, or lateral moves that keep technicians challenged and engaged. What matters most is clarity. When people know what’s possible, they can see themselves in your company’s future.

Here’s how to make that clarity concrete:

• Define the path. Outline what it takes to move from apprentice to lead tech to field supervisor. Include both performance metrics and soft-skill milestones.
• Discuss goals regularly. Use one-on-ones to connect personal goals with company objectives, and check progress over time.
• Create mentorship opportunities. Pair new hires with experienced techs to build confidence and connection on both sides.
• Encourage lateral growth. Not everyone wants to manage; offer ways to deepen technical expertise or move across service lines.

A clear growth path transforms your organization’s story from “a place to work” into “a place to build a career.” It signals to technicians that you’re invested in their future, not just their output.

And when your team feels that investment, they’ll pay it back—with loyalty, better service, and the kind of consistency that drives long-term growth.

Turning insight into action

Reducing technician turnover is about building systems that make great work easier to sustain. The companies winning today are the ones with clear data, consistent processes, and a culture that rewards performance in real time.

Each takeaway from our PestWorld session — hiring smarter, training with intention, recognizing effort instantly, and mapping clear paths for growth — points to the same truth: retention isn’t luck. It’s design.

That’s exactly why we built Applause Scorecards.

Scorecards give home and field service teams a way to make performance measurable, visible, and actionable. They align technicians and managers around shared goals, automate incentives, and show every team member how their performance impacts the company’s success. When expectations and rewards live in one place, accountability becomes effortless, and retention follows naturally.

If you’re ready to turn these strategies into real, trackable results, take a closer look at how Applause Scorecards can help your business build stronger teams and reduce turnover by up to 20%.

To learn more about how scorecards can improve technician performance, chat with our team today. 

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