Hone Your Hiring Skills

This is an excerpt from an article in Construction Business Owner. The magazine conducted a survey to find the most pressing workforce management challenge that its readers are facing. 

... More than half of those surveyed stated that finding skilled employees was their greatest hurdle. Another 20 percent of readers stated that effective hiring was their top challenge.

This issue takes on even more importance considering that the need to hire employees is on the rise for most companies. According to the “SMB Hiring Outlook Survey 2013” by Sage construction software, a third of small- to mid-sized construction companies reported an increase or plan to increase the size of their workforce in 2013. With such growth comes immense pressure on business owners to make smart hires. CBO interviewed three business management experts to glean insight into how to create an effective hiring process.

Recruiting is the First Step 
The consensus among the experts is that if you wait until you have a position to fill to begin hiring, you have already failed. Jack Daly, a widely recognized sales management consultant and the author of “Real World Management Strategies that Work,” drives this point home: “Sports teams are quite frankly run better than businesses.”

Would Nick Saban or Rick Pitino ever entertain the thought of filling their roster without active recruiting years in advance? Surely no coach, even a less successful one, would consider selecting replacements only as their senior players are preparing to graduate. Yet, business owners often do just this. “There are businesses that aren’t spending any time recruiting good people to come into their company, and then they wonder why their performance is suffering or lacking,” Daly says.

He encourages business owners to act as if their companies are never fully staffed, principally because waiting until you have to find someone often puts you at the mercy of the pool of active job seekers. Stan Davis, founder of Standish Executive Search, concurs: “Active job seekers are maybe 20 to 25 percent of the people you want to attract.” Since no smart business owner would reasonably choose to ignore 75 percent of the talent pool, the need to prioritize recruiting is undeniable. “You’ve got to go where these people are, and you’ve got to dig them out. That’s what good search firms do—they build a network,” Davis says.

The full hiring and recruiting article is available on the Construction Business Owner website.