If you want the best people, you have to sell – the company, the role, and the location – and move fast when you get a good one!
I regularly stay in touch with a young fellow who works for one of our competitors whom I met about four years ago when he was working for a different company.
I have been impressed with the guy since I first spoke with him. He’s a very talented and capable individual who is also very introspective. And he is also a great writer who is unusually capable at expressing himself through his writing. Exactly the kind of person we like to hire on our consulting/advisory team – especially when you combine that with significant work experience in a firm that is part of the market we serve. And he has been very successful in his new job over the past year and brought in a bunch of new clients.
The point is this: We could have hired him ourselves had we moved faster. And there have been other situations like this that I have experienced over my long career, both in businesses I am involved with and even those I ran. A big part of leadership and creating a successful company comes down to building the right team. Recruiting and hiring processes have to be designed in recognition of that fact and work to create a favorable impression on the best people in the industry – those looking for new roles and those who aren’t. That takes SELLING. And effective selling means you take the friction out of the process and strike when the iron is hot.
I have long felt that too many AEC firms have a hiring process designed to keep bad people out moreso than to get good people in. I can – at least in part – blame the involvement of HR people who often have a negative bias (probably because they have to deal with all the problem people). In any case, I have always felt marketing people need to be more involved in recruiting than they typically are. It’s just too important of a function to ignore their input entirely as is typically the case.
In my role at The Walton College, where I teach entrepreneurship and have done so for more than 20 years, I am part of a new, growing department. We are constantly recruiting new professors. I’m honored that they have allowed me to be the person who gets to show these prospects around town. I know this area and can sell it. I think I have been helpful to our hiring efforts. Too much is at risk to let job candidates see whatever they see when here without someone who really knows the housing market and schools.
The bottom line is this: If we want the best people we have to act like a sports team. We need to sell – the company, the role, and the location – and move fast when we get a good one!
Mark Zweig is Zweig Group’s chairman and founder. Contact him at mzweig@zweiggroup.com.
