Hiring the right people for your construction company is a high priority for any construction executive. A strong team can contribute to a positive company culture, create unique ideas and, most importantly, help your company grow. In a perfect world, construction executives would get company hires right 100% of the time. Alas, executives are humans, and mistakes are inevitable regardless of the sophistication of your hiring process. Sometimes the new hires you thought looked good on paper or seemed to fit with your company culture do not work out.
The best leaders always reflect on the variables that impacted their decision making to help inform a better hire the next time. Here are a few reasons why construction companies make bad hires and how you can avoid making the same mistakes.
Developing tunnel vision over a resume
You see a potential candidate with experience working at a larger company, an amazing skill set or a specific degree. The resume sparkles and you get excited, thinking maybe you have found the perfect person. You share your enthusiasm with others on the hiring team and you become biased toward this candidate before you meet him or her.
The fact that a candidate has worked at a larger company, even if it was for a long time, is not an indication of their skill set and quality of work. The reality is that some big companies prefer to let bad talent stick around instead of firing them. When you focus too much on the resume, you may miss red flags related to character, drive or people skills. Hiring a toxic employee can be just as detrimental to your company as hiring an employee with an underperforming skill set.
The best way for construction executives to avoid this trap is to not get too excited about any particular candidate prior to the interview. Use the resume as a starting point and then hedge your bet on this candidate by setting up an interview panel. Use a combination of individual and group interviews to assess the way the candidate reacts to different personalities in individual and group settings. Use these interviews to compare notes with your team. What do they see in a candidate that you might be missing?
Company culture isn’t everything
As a construction executive, you may also find yourself at the opposite end of the spectrum where you love the way a candidate fits in with your team and company culture. Once in, you find that they lack the skills to do the job. It can be a boon to your company to hire people who get along well with everyone, but the euphoria quickly fades when you find that they have difficulty managing deadlines or problem-solving crises.
Avoid this issue by asking these questions: What are the critical elements you need for this role? What qualities are crucial and which ones are nice to have? Make sure you frame interview questions to highlight the critical aspects you are assessing. Have someone on your team who possesses knowledge of the critical skills interview the candidate. Make sure your team member uses the necessary jargon to test the candidate on their knowledge of that jargon. Look at their resume and see what the candidate says they know, then do a task assessment of those skills. Taking these steps can ensure that the candidate can do the job and that you aren’t hiring because you like them.
If you find yourself really liking a candidate, your first thought should be, “I need to interview this person more,” instead of “This is the one!” It is hard to delay hiring someone when your personalities click; however, stepping back and ensuring your candidate has the skill set will pay off in the long run. Take extra time and get extra eyes on a candidate you love. Rely on the people you trust to add perspective; doing so will protect your company.
Avoid hiring out of desperation
Sometimes an unexpected exit or a new commercial contract means that you need to hire right away. That urgency is understandable, but if you hire out of desperation, make sure you have an effective firing process. Haphazardly hiring someone can lead to worse consequences than not filling the position. You may increase your legal risk from an employment lawsuit. From a worker morale and cohesion perspective, hiring the wrong people will have a ripple effect across your entire company. The conflict and dissention results in increased turnover and production delays. This effect multiplies as the level of the position increases. You may face consequences by waiting to fill the position, but it is worth weighing these potential outcomes against the consequences of a bad hire.
When you need to hire someone quickly, consider the importance of the role and the degree to which you need to get the hire right on the first try. You might be able to risk getting your entry-level jobs wrong, but it is much harder to quickly replace and retrain your most senior positions.
One of the ways you can ameliorate desperation in senior hiring scenarios is to create an emergency succession plan for your top positions. This backup plan ensures that you have capable people who can serve in the role until you hire someone for the position. The cross-training and succession planning can also be helpful in filling the knowledge gaps as you bring a new hire up to speed.
To create the emergency succession plan, assess your current employees to see what other positions they may be qualified for if you have unexpected openings. Those who love learning may relish the chance for cross-training. The opportunity may increase their loyalty and motivation, creating a win-win for both them and your company.
Hiring is an important part of any construction executive’s job. Finding the right people will help your company grow. Remember that mistakes will always happen. Try not to be too hard on yourself when they do. Simply step back, reassess where things went wrong, learn accordingly and move forward.
