Turn your team into talent scouts and build your own recruiting ecosystem from the inside out.
There is nothing stopping every single person in your organization from being a part of your recruiting efforts. The reason they don’t is because they are not being empowered to do so.
In most AEC companies, people view recruiting as either:
- HR's job
- Something their boss does
- A recruiter's job.
All of these are unfortunately missing the mark because they ignore the best potential recruiting resource that you could leverage: your people. They have the best understanding of who would fit your culture and as a result are usually great at recommending potential hires to your organization.
Do people understand that most recruiters take a $30,000ish fee on every person they place? I’m actually a fan of a recruiter in certain situations, and have genuinely seen good recruiters place high level managers successfully.
But if your strategy is to solely use recruiters to get new people then you are guaranteeing that you will spend an extra tens of thousands of dollars per year on bringing on new people (who may or may not work out!).
Wouldn’t you rather your people have that money instead? If so, then you would do a lot better to offer an internal referral program to your employees where you give them a $5,000 check six months after someone they referred has stayed and proved themselves to be a great part of the company.
Teaching your people to recruit is really not challenging. It ultimately comes down to helping them realize that all they have to do is go to their job site meetings, networking events, and heck, even the normal places they go in their personal lives thinking about whether or not the people they meet would potentially be a good fit for your company. If they go into every interaction thinking about making friends and then evaluating them across whether or not they would be a good fit on your team, they will start to notice opportunities from places they never expected to.
One of our customers hired a very successful estimator when the general manager went to buy a new car and thought that the salesperson he was working with was just amazing. He casually dropped the idea of the person coming to work for him and all of a sudden he had this new great fit on the team that brought a lot of really good energy to their estimating team.
Finally, it's worth noting that there is negative unemployment in our industry, which means that there are more job openings available than there are people to fill them. At the very least this should motivate you to start building a recruiting ecosystem within your business.
You will find that the people coming to you from most recruiters are typically people that other companies do not want and that's why they are on the open market. You're much more likely to get a great potential recruit by building relationships with people and catching them on a bad day where they finally say that they are fed up with their company.
In summary, I would make recruiting everyone’s responsibility. I would empower my team to see themselves as talent scouts, create a meaningful referral program that rewards employees for bringing in great people, and train them to build genuine relationships while consistently asking, “Would this person be a strong fit here?” In a market with negative unemployment, the firms that win won’t be the ones waiting on recruiters – they’ll be the ones building their own recruiting ecosystem from the inside out.
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Matt Verderamo, MS is a consultant at Well Built Construction Consulting. Connect with him on LinkedIn. |