Despite modern day advances in networking tools, easy access to information and increased ability to connect to people remotely, most construction companies continue to rely on job postings and traditional recruiting for their hiring. And when hired candidates leave, quit or disappoint, those same companies simply repeat the cycle.
Let me put this simply. In the words of Albert Einstein “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.” Despite this well-known quote, so many companies continue to blow money on job ads and experience the same lackluster results over and over.
Traditional candidate recruiting is dead (well, dying). That’s because the A players aren’t sitting around on the sidelines bopping out resumes on Career Builder and Monster. In fact, 90% of the A players are already happy and thriving in their existing roles and haven’t taken the time to consider working for another company. And it takes an incredible amount of time, knowledge and emotional intelligence for a search consultant to work through that network of A players to identify the top performers and match them up to the construction industry’s best companies.
While identifying an executive search consultant that truly understands passive candidate recruiting and how to tap into this base of high-level talent is a great place to start, there are many tasks to tackle internally as well that are important to address for success.
- Don’t Wait for a Vacancy – Too often, companies wait until there is a critical need. At this point, they either pour thousands into featured job ads or reach out to speed-based recruiters to fill the vacancy and while it takes the sting out of the wound, it certainly doesn’t help to elevate the level of talent.
- Choose Your Partners Wisely – Ask your third-party recruiting or search partners how they identify top performers. Do they work with active or passive candidates? How do they vet their candidates? How familiar are they with the types of roles your need to fill? Are they looking for quantity or quality?
- Establish an Employee-Focused Culture – the efforts you put into identifying talent internally, providing opportunities for growth and training and allowing employees to contribute outside of their traditional roles will naturally attract the industry’s highest performers. (Stay tuned for a future blog post on this).
- Promote Your Company on Social Media – go past simply your projects. Dive straight to the core of your being – what is your company’s mission and what do you do to achieve it? Go behind the scenes and show the world what you have to offer.
- Own Who You Are – If your website and messaging say one thing but you know you are another, it’s time to take a step back and analyze. The fact is that people talk, and these types of discrepancies stand out to others in the industry and will negatively impact your business in a variety of ways.
- Check Reviews Online – Wining and dining candidates won’t help if Google and Glassdoor are chock full of negative reviews that expose the deficiencies at your company. There is no easy fix for this but at the very least, creating an internal initiative to address those deficiencies and what can be done internally to move away from them will be critical if you realistically want the best players on your team.
- Know What the Market Bears – You owe it to yourself to know what your competition is paying for top talent. No one is saying you need to be known for paying the highest salaries – far from it especially if you’ve taken the steps to build up an incredible company culture. But paying far below market rate and expecting A-talent is simply foolish. A high-level contributor is not an “expense” – it’s an investment.
Need more ideas? Drop me a line at ashleigh@schoonersearch.com
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