Recruiting is the AEC industry’s biggest challenge, yet most firms still operate without a real recruiting plan.
February of this year, I presented at Zweig Group’s Principal's Academy in New Orleans on the topic of recruitment and retention. The Principals Academy is Zweig Group’s flagship training program for existing and emerging AEC firm leaders, and there were 45 people in attendance.
In my introduction, I cited data from our recent Principals, Partners + Owners Report that AEC principals rank recruitment and retention as the number one most significant challenge they face. This is not a surprise, and we all know this to be true! As a follow-up to sharing that fact, I asked for a raise of hands to the question, “How many of you have a recruitment plan in place at your firm?” Any guesses how many hands went up? Yep, zero. Zero!
Does anyone else find it mind boggling that for one of the most consistent and significant challenges in our industry, few firms respond to this critical issue with an actual plan?
Most firms don’t have recruitment plans because our industry was built around projects and clients, and that’s where the focus has always been. We carefully plan scope, schedule, and delivery for every project, but recruiting the talent to deliver the work is mostly on a scramble and hope strategy! Recruiting is a human endeavor and there is no silver bullet. Because of this, it feels unpredictable, difficult, and intimidating. Here are some key components to a recruitment plan:
- CEO is the champion. Recruitment needs to be explicitly owned by the CEO and leadership team and not outsourced to HR alone. Every initiative needs an influential spokesperson at the top and this is no exception. Hiring the right people is the single most important factor for your firm’s growth and sustainability – and everyone should be working on it regularly.
- Create a formalized annual budget. In many AEC firms, HR spending is buried somewhere inside the general overhead structure rather than managed through a clearly defined annual budget. Recruiting, leadership development, compliance, and employee programs often get funded reactively instead of strategically. That approach makes it difficult to improve recruiting and retention outcomes. Firms that want to compete for talent need to treat HR the same way they treat marketing, technology, or operations: as a planned investment. A formal HR budget should account for HR staff, recruiting costs, HR technology, leadership development, compliance, and benefits administration – and it should be revisited annually as part of the firm’s broader business planning process.
- Establish a recruiting and hiring infrastructure. Begin with appointing a champion, usually the Chief People Officer, to shepherd the plan. Invest in an applicant tracking system, a rigorous and attractive LinkedIn and social media presence, ongoing recruitment outreach campaigns, interview training for hiring managers, etc.
- Build a continuous contact, referral, and candidate pipeline. The firms with the highest commitment to recruitment are strategically recruiting constantly. This effort requires thoughtfully creating and maintaining a working list of referral contacts and attractive candidates to pursue with thoughtful and consistent intention. Do not underestimate the power of nurturing this important network.
- Incentivize your employee referral program. This is by far your firm’s lowest-hanging fruit. Your staff already know talented people in the industry. They also know who would fit your culture, as well as the technical and professional expectations of the firm. We’ve seen clients benefit almost immediately by implementing a structured referral program that rewards employees for successful introductions. Start with $2,500 per successful hire and increase from there for more senior or specialized roles. When referral rewards are robust, your people will act.
- Provide interview training for all hiring managers. This is an often overlooked but critical component of your recruiting infrastructure. The interview is your opportunity to wow candidates and your chance to thoroughly assess candidate fit. If interviews feel chaotic, disorganized, or uninspired, you risk losing strong candidates and damaging your reputation. Many otherwise capable leaders have never been trained to interview well. They often talk too much, ask weak questions, appear unprepared, and leave without the information they need to decide next steps. The fix is simple: invest in training all staff involved with hiring on how to interview. Every interview broadcasts what it’s really like to work at your firm, and the talent market is paying attention!
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Define and support the recruiting engine. Make things easier both for potential candidates and for your existing employees by clearly defining your strategy. Firms that know who they are and where they’re going are the most attractive. Your recruitment plan sets the strategy in motion by clearly defining candidate criteria, role specifics, growth path, compensation strategies, performance management programs, timelines, etc.
Your recruitment plan should define the day-to-day activities that keep the engine running. Build relationships with universities and professional networks. Track candidates the same way you track sales leads so promising people don’t disappear. And maintain a “bench” of people you stay in touch with even when you’re not actively hiring. Recruiting works best when it’s treated like a strategic, ongoing business function, not a reaction to an empty chair or new project won. - Tie recruitment to backlog. One of the simplest ways to add discipline to your recruitment plan is to tie hiring directly to backlog. Backlog represents committed future work, so it also represents the future labor capacity your firm must deliver. When you divide backlog by your monthly net service revenue, you can estimate how many months of work are already sold. Firms that consistently maintain six to nine months of backlog but wait until teams are overwhelmed before recruiting are setting themselves up for missed schedules and burned-out staff. A smarter approach is to treat backlog as an early hiring signal: when backlog climbs beyond your target coverage ratio, recruiting should begin immediately so that new hires are onboarded before the workload arrives.
The hard reality about recruiting and hiring in the A/E industry is that there is no easy fix. It requires a real commitment and must be treated as one of the firm’s top strategic priorities, which means adopting a formal recruitment and hiring plan.
What I didn’t have time to address in this article was employee retention, which is the second and equally important half of your plan to stay competitive for talent. When your strategic, recruitment and retention plans are integrated and treated with the same commitment as the rest of your business, your firm will have a fighting chance to compete in today’s fiercely competitive talent market.
A strong recruiting plan is essential, but sometimes firms need help securing the right leaders. Zweig Group’s AEC-focused executive search team partners with firms nationwide to identify and recruit high-impact talent across disciplines, levels, and geographies. Learn more about Zweig Group’s executive search services.
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Chris Catton is director of Talent consulting services at Zweig Group. Contact her at ccatton@zweiggroup.com. |
