How to make your technicians the best in the photography industry

It’s that special time of year again: 36Pix analysed for their customers the performances of CloudKO users for the 2018-2019 school year.

Here are a few tips from the hiring and training we do in-house.

To make sure our candidates’ green screen extraction skills are on point, we run small tests during our hiring process.

We provide our candidates with one image per tool we want to evaluate them on. For example, do they know how to use the Wand tool? Do they know what the difference is between black and white on a layer mask? Of course, the interface of CloudKO’s green screen software is a bit different from Photoshop. It’s fine if they don’t get it right away, as long as they can explain what their method is.

The advantage of such a hiring process lies in letting the applicant know what the job really is. The goal we want them to reach is fixing 120 masks per hour. It is a routine job that is not suited for everyone: it is better for them to opt out now than after we spent a week training them.

Once you have selected your new employees, the most efficient way to train them is in small groups of 3 or 4 people. We find it’s a better use of the supervisor and the trainees’ time. We then task them with editing jobs of varying levels of difficulty.

Watch out for high edit ratios: it means the technician is editing images that do not need to be and is wasting time. They should focus primarily on understanding the job and the quality required before worrying about the quantity of masks fixed.

Then, focus on the speed.

Efficiency comes naturally with time. During our in-house trainings, we noticed that the learning curve was quick: the ratio of masks fixed per hour increased from 50 to 90 between week two and three. Just look for small improvements: as long as their rates get better everyday, everything should be fine.

Keeping at it

Once the training is over, you can easily keep track of your employees’ efficiency with the users reports that can be found in CloudKO’s app.

What we keep an eye on is the Masks fixed/hour and the Edit ratio. We expect each technician to edit about 18% of the images they go through at a rate of 120 masks fixed/hr, which would be 960 masks and over 5,000 images per day.

36Pix is always there to help you analyze these reports and to give you a hand with your training.

Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions before school photography season begins!