Searching for Top Talent in Construction

We’ve all seen mountains of resumes that detail accomplishments that mere mortals could never fathom. Software skills of a Bill Gates, building skills of a da Vinci and GPAs measured in double digits to the left of the decimal point. With so many talented candidates to hire, why do companies still lament the “labor deficit” and bemoan the overall lack of finding great people?

Resumes do an amazing job of summarizing skills well, which is essential to aligning with positions that are in an organization. However, where there is often misalignment is within the realm of competencies and culture. A wise man once said, “All these resumes are supposedly telling us these managers and superintendents can cure the world’s diseases, but show me one with person who has the fire.” If only there were a button on your website that had the candidates self-identify, “Do you have fire in your heart? Check YES or NO.” (Well, there is also a hope that someone wouldn’t reflect on this and say, “You know, I do have a lot of quit in me.”)

The reality is this: Too many organizations are presented with a personnel deficit that is married to a weak talent acquisition strategy. This is a recipe for disaster. Firms are already running projects with a depleted bench, and then when a new project is acquired — maybe a complicated project with a great client — they scramble to find a suitable project leader. It might be an understatement, but the screening process may include questions like the following:

• “So, I see you have a pulse.”
• “You’ve seen a computer, right? Can you turn it on?”
• “Built much? Anything? Good, good.”
• “After you fog that mirror, can you start?”

A hire who doesn’t fit culturally also has the capability to do irreparable harm. A similar wise man once said: “Let’s slow the hiring down but amp up the firing machine.” Often, the complete opposite occurs — a cultural cancer is bought in on a whim and allowed to fester, deteriorating a firm’s unity, teamwork, collaborative spirit and culture.

The best organizations commit to a hiring playbook that balancing an organization’s talent strategy with proactive tactics for competency and skill identification.

Strategic Timing

As always, there is both an art and science to not only finding quality team members but also timing backlog, project starts and hiring like you’re orchestrating a human capital Rube Goldberg machine. It is possible a contrarian view of a firm’s talent strategy is in order. Consider a championship contending football team. Each position most likely has a backup player providing some insurance in the form of one or two additional players on the bench.

Now consider your team. If you either get another project or if you lose a star manager to a competitor, what happens with your team? What if both happened simultaneously? Is your team effectively running an offensive team with zero or negative bench strength?

Once again, there has to be a balance in a firm’s talent acquisition strategy. One of the first misunderstandings is that a firm has to keep everyone busy all the time. Realistically speaking, this does not mean managers or supers are sitting on a bench, literally waiting for their number to be called. However, when leaders look at their total overhead expenditures, they naturally think that optimization means everyone running a multitude of projects with no downtime.

On the other hand, a strategic leader understands a balanced approach, where associates are operating a manageable workload that also includes time for personal/professional development. Put another way, an engine running at 10,000 revolutions per minute all the time may be running hard and fast — but it also runs the risk of blowing up in a fiery wreck.

Tactical Cultural Analysis

On to the fun part. Hiring with an immediate need in mind can often lead to bad decisions. However, sticking to the talent playbook and asking the right questions does not mean you have to risk losing a top candidate. For instance, consider the following process:

1. Resume Screening

Aligning skills in this phase will help eliminate redundant questions later. If the desire is to have a field superintendent with five to 10 years of experience who is familiar with <INSERT FINANCIAL SYSTEM HERE> and <INSERT PROJECT MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE HERE>, a screener could quickly cull through candidates. This is the easy part.
 

2. Interview Panels

One easy way to avoid a bad hire is to have a candidate interviewed by a minimum number of team members. This ensures several objectives are met:

• “Love at first sight” — One person can easily become enamored with a candidate. Two or three people can provide alternate perspectives on a candidate and potentially break a tie.
• Cultural fit — A CEO or president has one perspective about life in the firm. Two or three people who will become collaborative partners of this individual will provide different observations.

3. Competency Screening

An organization first has to know what it is looking for in a candidate. Every firm should have five to seven competencies that would make up the ideal manager for the firm.

It is natural to look at the textbook list of competencies — takes initiative, conflict resolution, client intimacy, collaborative, etc. — and think, “I want all of them in my people.” Good luck with that! Welcome to the world of unicorn hunting!

Ideally, those competencies are absolutely required to live in your firm’s ecosystem and make up the foundation. In order to screen, there are a number of ways to implement a checks/balance:

Interview questions

Leveraged with the panels, each interviewer focuses their line of questions on a specific competency. For instance, consider the following question and “ideal answer”:

• Takes initiative (fire in their heart) — “On aspects of the project that can be draining, how do you refocus or trudge on through to the finish line?” Or “What gets you up in the morning? Why did you choose <INSERT YOUR VERSION OF CONTRACTING>?”
• Ideal answer — We want to see passion in their answer, potentially something about how they channel passion for the industry in every aspect of their work — and not just the fun stuff!
• Deals with conflict — “Talk to me about a recent project where things went badly. Two questions: How did you manage the client to a win/win scenario, and how did you manage the trade partners to a win/win?”
• Ideal answer — We know that there are bad players on both sides, but we don’t want to hear about them complaining about a bad customer or bad sub, as if the fault lies with everyone else.

Case studies/scenarios

Whether done in concert with the interviews, an excellent evaluation tool could be a simple case study or role-playing exercise. For instance, provide the candidate with a small project summary (usually loaded with curveballs and sticky wickets) and ask them to spend 15-20 minutes to formulate a project reconciliation plan.

Furthermore, this same case study can be used over and over, allowing the team benchmark the various responses over time.

Why Talent Vetting Matters

With the risk of heading down a nerdy pathway, competency alignment can also be called the “Kobayashi Maru.” No, not the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest champion, but rather the unwinnable test that “Star Trek’s” Captain Kirk solved. His solution was actually cheating, so this might not be a great analogy, but it demonstrated the prowess and mettle that a starship captain in Starfleet should have even under great duress.

Now imagine a series of true talent vetting that will provide a more discernible lens by which talent could be graded. We also can hope that the Kobayashi Maru determined if Captain Kirk really had that fire.