Talented, skilled prospects don’t typically walk in the door, fill out an application and get to work. The challenge for industrial construction is even more onerous because the candidate pool is insufficient to meet the demands of our industry. The lack of qualified candidates can have a harmful impact on our business, such as project delays and increased costs. It can also have a negative impact on project safety.
It’s obvious we need to develop a recruiting strategy to bring on qualified, talented employees, and that starts with being a company for which people and skilled individuals want to work — being an “employer of choice.”
Providing competitive compensation and benefits are a given; being a “destination employer” goes beyond that. Ideally, you don’t want people applying for a job at your company; rather, you want them applying for your company. You want to be viewed as a desirable employer in which employees care as much about working for the company as they do about their job titles and responsibilities. It’s challenging but not impossible. It begins with developing and fostering a culture of opportunity in which employees are enthusiastic about growing with the company.
Becoming an organization in which talented people want to work starts with building a well-designed culture. In a 2013 culture and change-management survey of more than 2,200 individuals, 84 percent believed culture was critical to business success and 60 percent thought culture was more important than both an organization’s business strategy and business model. Company culture starts at the top and works its way down. So it’s up to you to define and mentor your company’s behavior, beliefs and attitudes with the same passion and diligence with which you plan business strategy.
But being an “employer of choice” is only half the battle. Finding the right talent to fit into that culture is equally important because the wrong fit leads to turnover, and continually having to hire and train new employees is costly in terms of money, time, lost opportunity and downtime.
At AltairStrickland, an inherent part of our culture is we operate as a family in many respects. We listen to one another. We sometimes agree. We sometimes disagree. We all work together for a common good. We try to treat each employee with respect and provide an opportunity to succeed. When we’re recruiting new talent, the needs of AltairStrickland and the talent and skills of the prospect have to be a near-perfect match. We also know our best recruitment is from within our own industry.
While our industry is considered large, the people are a close-knit group. A person’s reputation, good or bad, quickly makes the rounds; there aren’t too many secrets. This makes it easier to determine if a prospect is a good fit.
At AltairStrickland, we’ve found the recruitment works best grounded in first-hand experience. Our candidate pool usually includes individuals who are known to our employees or have an excellent reputation within the industry. We ask our leadership team to identify prospects with the right skills who will also have a positive impact on the AltairStrickland family. Once identified, we go deeper to gauge how well these individuals will fit into our culture. By hand-picking candidates, we have been successful in selecting skilled, talented employees who are a good fit. And never forget the right candidate might already be working for you in another capacity. “Employers of choice” know by providing opportunity to their existing employees they burnish their reputations as a desirable company to work for.
In a close-knit community like ours, we can frequently take care of our recruiting through networking, but we also need to understand recruiting and hiring strategies are evolving and new tactics might be needed when a candidate can’t be found through networking. Many companies are now going beyond the traditional application and inter-view process to include exercises designed to see how an individual will fit within the company’s culture.
There is no exact science to recruiting talented employees, but these three approaches will create waves in your talent pool: becoming an “employer of choice,” creating a family culture and asking your leaders to recommend candidates.
For more information, call Jeffrey Webber at (281) 478-6200 or email him at jwebber@altairstrickland.com.