578: Hiring Hacks Every Architect Needs to Know with Jamie Van Cuyk of Grow Your Team: Otter Voice Meeting Notes

578: Hiring Hacks Every Architect Needs to Know with Jamie Van Cuyk of Grow Your Team

Enoch Sears54min

Unknown Speaker

00:00

We have to build the workforce that we want.

Rion Willard

00:02

Hello and welcome to the business and architecture. I'm your host, Ryan Willard, and today we're embarking on a journey into the realm of team building and strategic leadership. Our spotlight shines on Jamie van Kirk, a maestro in the orchestration of small business teams with a career spanning over 15 years in leadership roles, Jamie the owner and lead strategic growing your team wields a masterful command over the art hiring and onboarding. Drawing from her extensive experience, she guides her clients with the labyrinth of recruitment, ensuring they find not just employees, but kindred spirits who will form the bedrock of their enterprise. But Jamie's expertise extends far beyond the boardroom. Nestled in the sunshine state of St Petersburg, Florida, Jamie finds solace in the company of her husband and two daughters. Yet amidst the daily hustle, she cultivates a passion for Vinny culture, crafting her own elixirs as a hobby winemaker, and when she's not tending to the vines. Jamie take flight in pursuits that defy gravity, whether scaling cliffs in rock climbing escapades or gracefully pirouetting in aerial dance. In this episode, we go deep into the hiring process for a small business, and Jamie's expertise was really phenomenal. Here we talk about how to build a team effortlessly, where to be posting your adverts and the language that should be used in them to ensure that you're attracting the right kind of talent. We look at the sorts of tests that you could be doing and the sorts of questions that you can be asking inside of an interview to make sure that you're filtering out and finding a combination as the right fit for both of you. And we look at how to effectively screen for the right person and ensure that they're the right fit for the right role. We also talk about the onboarding process, which is the piece that so many small businesses and architecture firms miss out what happens in those first three months is absolutely critical. So Jamie gives us a lot of direction and insight into that. So sit back, relax and enjoy. Jamie and kite. It's time to announce this month's 200 304 100 club. If you missed our episode on the 200 club, listen to Business of Architecture Episode 485 to learn more about this new initiative for benchmarking small firm performance. So are you ready for this big congratulations to our 200 club members, Ramiro, Torres, Jorge, catran, Julia, Aria, Sean kakigi, Philip yang of odds, Lina boella, jogesh, Mistry, Chris Driscoll, Marina, Robina Andrea Nemechek,

Unknown Speaker

02:55

Brad Hubble,

Rion Willard

02:56

Judy and Larry, April and Cameron Krueger. Now onto our 300 club members. That means $300,000 worth of net operating revenue is being produced per every single full time employee of these firms. So Mark Elster, Charles scram, Irini Adams and Christopher Brandon and our 400 club members are Drew and Justine Tyndall and Kimberly dote. Great job to all of our 200 304 100 club members. Keep it up. If you're interested in becoming part of the two three or 400 club get in contact with us at Business of Architecture and find out about our smart practice program. This podcast is produced by Business of Architecture, a leading business consultancy for architects and design professionals. This episode is sponsored by Smart practice, business of architecture's flagship program to help you structure your firm for freedom, fulfillment and financial profit. If you want access for our free training on how to do this, please visit smartpractice method.com or if you want to speak directly to one of our advisors about how he might be able to help you, please follow the link in the information. Hello, listeners. We hope you're enjoying our show. We love bringing you these insightful conversations, but we couldn't do it about the support of our amazing sponsors. If you're a business owner or know someone who would be an excellent fit for our audience, we'd love to hear from you. Partnering with us means your brand will reach over 40,000 engaged listeners each month. Interested in becoming a sponsor, please send us an email at support@businessofarchitecture.com. Jamie, Welcome to the Business of Architecture. How are you

Speaker 1

04:43

doing? Well? Thank you so much for having me absolute

Rion Willard

04:47

pleasure. So you are the owner of growing your team. You're a small business hiring strategist, you're a speaker. You're also a podcast host and. And really your expertise is in the world of ensuring that businesses manage to find the right talent. They put them in the right places, they put them through the right process to get them actually on boarded. And here in the architecture industry, we know that, you know, hiring has become, certainly, over the last few years, one of the most difficult parts of running a business, and we see businesses resorting to, you know, more and more extreme things such as purchasing other businesses in order to start to get talent, because the talent pool is so constrained. So perhaps we could start with a little bit about your own career, and how did you come to found growing your team?

Speaker 1

05:41

Yes, I love this question, and I'll try to make it a short story out of a long journey. So I began my career in well, after a few stops along the way, really began my career at an international marketing company where I was an internal operation. So I was in the grew up and went all the way up to the leadership of that department, and really gained a lot of leadership skills while I was there. I knew I always wanted to start my own business, so about 2016 after I returned to work, after my second daughter was born, finally it hit me one day, what am I waiting for? Now's the time. Let's do it. My husband was a software developer. We always talked about starting a software development business together. So I went home that night and I was like, I'm tired of waiting on you to start this business. I'm quitting my job, I'm learning how to program, and we're starting this development business together. I lasted about six months in that business and realized I hated it. I was miserable. It wasn't even that I didn't like the coding. It was that I just didn't like talking about things in that space. I went to a conference, and I was like, seeing listening to other people's passion. And I was like, I am never going to have this passion about what we're doing. I need to figure something else out. I was lucky enough that when I left my corporate career, the company kept me on as a consultant for six months and working on a few different projects, wrapping up a few things, but two of the things I absolutely love were these two projects that had that were all around leadership developments. The one was around helping a brand new, first time people manager really step into that role, learning the things you don't know that it takes to be a good people manager until you're actually a people manager. And I was just like, I love this. Okay, I'm not ready to go back and get a consultant or get a corporate job yet. I'm gonna try doing this consulting thing. And I was in my mind at that point in time, I was going to be a consultant for people in the corporate world that were stepping into that first time manager role. Because I looked back at when I became a first time manager, and I had a lot of guidance from senior leadership and everything, but there was still so much I had to learn on the job that I learned from I did something that I thought was right, and then someone coming back and being like, Well, you didn't quite handle that situation as you should, and me being like, well, I didn't know What I didn't know. So that was my plan. My problem was, because of my corporate journey, I had no network. I didn't know how to go out and sell anything. I didn't know how to even start conversations, or what to pitch, or anything like that. So I decided to take advantage of the chamber membership I had at that time and just go do a lot of market research. I was like, I'm going to go to networking events. I'm going to meet a bunch of people, I'm going to find out what challenges they have, make connections, so that way, a few months down the road, I can put together a product that I can start pitching, and then I'll have connections so I can possibly pitch too. But the thing was, every time I go to these networking events, I would find myself gravitating to small business owners instead of corporate representatives. And I was like, Okay, well, I'll still ask them their questions, because they're still in the business space. They're still gonna have problems as well. And the majority of what people wanted to talk about in the small business space was the challenges around hiring. And I'd give them some tips, because I had a lot of skills that I gained around hiring when I was in the corporate space, but I really wasn't going to focus on small businesses. That wasn't my plan yet. But they kept asking me to like, Okay, you gave me these great tips. They helped. Can you help me more? And I would tell them, No, I'm starting a business. I'm going to consult for corporate companies, helping first time leaders and all that stuff, but I will find you someone that can help you with hiring. And I couldn't find anyone at that point in time. If I was trying to find someone that was going to help small businesses with hiring, they refer to small businesses as companies that had 50 plus employees. Okay, that's great, but what about the businesses that don't have 50 employees yet. They will never get to a point that they can have 50 employees if they don't hire well early on. Or if someone talked about hiring, it was inside a very large business coaching and consulting package, where some of these businesses didn't need all that. They specifically needed the hiring support. So it took a while, but finally. Had dawned on me. I was like, companies want the support. They need the support. No one is really offering the support. So why am I not doing it? So now it's been six years that I've been running, growing your team, focusing on helping small business owners get the help and support they need. Learn how to delegate, learn how to define positions correctly, inside their in their company, and then get the right people into those positions. What

Rion Willard

10:25

do you see is actually some of the biggest challenges around hiring that small businesses actually face. Why is it so? Why is it so difficult?

Speaker 1

10:36

Yeah, so I'll talk about two of the challenges that I see. The first one is time, if a small business is hiring, it is typically because they're already lacking time, and they don't realize how much time and effort it actually takes to find a good quality hire. They think that they're going to post a job on one day, they're going to get the perfect resume the next day, they're going to complete in one interview, and then they're going to be having someone on their team that needs no onboarding and training and could just be an amazing employee. They don't realize how much time it actually takes, and some of that time you spend directly with candidates, and some of that is the time you spend behind the scenes preparing for those conversations with candidates. So that way you're asking the right questions and you're focusing on the right people. And the other thing that I think really holds a lot of small businesses back is the fact that they lack a lot of knowledge of really what it takes to find a successful and good hire. They don't know how to really define their positions, because sometimes they're too close to it. Sometimes they're saying, well, I need all this. And as small business owners, we do everything. We are jack of all trades, because we have to be, but we don't realize that that doesn't always work when we're hiring team members, that we need to be specific. We need to know what we're looking for, and not only what technical skills this person needs to have, but what it means to fit inside our organization. What is our management style, like, do we need someone just like us, or do we need someone completely different than we are? If we need something completely different, are we prepared to manage someone that has a very different style than we have, or even though we would be, it would be great to get that person that's very different from us. We need to go somewhere in between, because we still need someone that we can manage and is going to fit inside our organization. And when they don't do this planning of really figuring out who they need and then creating a hiring process around that specific person, it tends to lead them to the wrong person, and it creates a very challenging process. It's

Rion Willard

12:35

very interesting. One of the things that we often see with a lot of architects is, you know how you know that, just as you described, they can be very reactive in their hiring. So they suddenly win a whole lot of new work, and then it's sticking advert out on and on. Indeed, haven't really done much of in terms of figuring out what the business actually needs and why there's why there's such a sort of stress and overwhelm that's happening. And then all of a sudden, then they hire people. And one of the things we see a lot is, is hiring a lot of inexperienced team members, and who were never, who were never the right fit for what the business was, was calling out for in the first place. And then that becomes another two year struggle for both parties, where it was never really a fit. And then the process kind of starts, starts again. So how would you advise a small company, then to audit what do we actually need? What's that kind of process? How does, how does an intelligent, thoughtful, how should we do it properly?

Speaker 1

13:37

Yes, so I'm going to start this from the perspective of you already kind of know what general help you need in your organization. So for example, maybe as an architect, you need someone that's going to be helping you, kind of like behind the scenes, that junior architect that's doing some more of the the basic work on projects with you. So you already know that that's the type of help that you need, and that's the type of help that's going to move the needle the most in your business. So one of the first questions that I always ask my clients when we're going to define what the idea candidate looks like is, what does success look like? So a year down the road, six months down the road, or whatever that time frame is, what would make you go this person had the right impact on the team, on the company, on our clients, on the projects. So when you start there to say what should happen, because I hired this person, it helps put you on the right frame, mind frame, excuse me, mindset and everything. So then really kind of dig a little bit deeper. This is what I need to achieve. Okay, if I need someone who can eventually take over smaller projects so I can focus on the bigger projects, that's a completely different person, then I just need someone who's going to help me stay organized, take care of the details the admin type work on these projects so I can focus on the. Bigger picture items on these projects, the more advanced work on these projects. So once you know that that impact with that measurement of success, you can then dive deeper into well, what makes up that idea candidate got

Rion Willard

15:14

it, and when you're looking for an ideal candidate, then what sorts of like? How do you break down their skill sets and their their kind of personality and their attributes and and I mean again. Then, once we understand that, then how do we what? What do we do to attract them?

Speaker 1

15:32

Perfect, great question. So first, I want to start with one of the things that you made comment of, of one of the problems that you see is they hire people that really don't have the right skills, or kind of like more inexperienced. And I think there's a great distinction of hiring someone that is green in the role and then hiring someone who has the wrong skills for the role. And the reason why I want to touch on that is a lot of times we really rely on other people to train the employees that we want. And sometimes we have to realize that we need to be a part of training the workforce as well. So we also have to be in a place where you can do that. Are you a person that can train others? Do you like being coaching and mentoring? Do you have the ability to give that little bit of extra time? And if the answer is clearly no, then you know you do need someone who already has a certain level of skills, versus someone who shows the that have the right backgrounds and can learn those skills. So once you know kind of like where you need to be, what we like to dive in for an idea candidate is, I always tell my clients picture the idea candidate in your head. When you make up that idea candidate that picture, there are going to be things that are non negotiables. These are the things that a candidate has to have in their background, skills, things in their personality or whatever, in order to be qualified for the role. If they don't have these things, they are an automatic No. We then also want to look at what we call our nice to have criteria. So this is the stuff where it's like, these are kind of negotiables. Maybe there's a list of five items, and we would just like it if they could have three of these things. Or it's, well, it would be great if they could have this. But if they don't have this experience, I am capable of training them on the job. Some of those things where it's also like that icing on the cake. It's not, it's not a requirement, but I would, it would be amazing if I could have these. So we really start looking at what is the must have and what is the nice to have. We know that the must have are non negotiable, so we need to go out the door looking for those items to then find the right person. It really comes down to that job posting and the interviews. So with the job posting, you want to speak directly to that idea candidate. If you think about it, is a lot of people become very aware with marketing, if you market to everybody, you really market to nobody. You're supposed to know your idea client. You're supposed to talk directly to your idea client. We don't care about the people who are not our idea client. We want to talk to the people that we want in our business. It's the same with hiring. We're not talking to everyone out there who wants a job in this space. We are talking directly to the person that we want to hire. So we advise using a lot of language in the job post that clearly calls out that idea candidate, we use language like the idea candidate for this position is this position is for you? If and really call out those skills, that backgrounds, that work, style, whatever it is that make up that idea candidate, we then want to post that job where that idea candidate is going to see it, we always post every job, and we that we post on behalf of our recruiting clients, and when we are advising other one, advising our consulting clients, to always post on Indeed, because we feel like we can, if you have the right job post, you can get a lot of great candidates from indeed. Outside of that you want to look to say, where is my idea candidate looking? If you have, if you're hiring for a position where you have an idea candidate that's always networking on things like LinkedIn, that might be a great place to post if your idea candidate is most likely not going to have a LinkedIn profile, because it's a platform that doesn't matter for their position, posting there is not going to really probably get you much traffic. So you want to really figure out where is my idea candidate looking. There's a lot of niche job boards if you're hiring, if you're willing to hire someone entry level. There's a lot of colleges that have job boards where you can target the colleges that have the specific programs that are are required for the position, and look to see where can I go to put this in front of the idea candidate. And then that brings us to the interview. When we invite candidates into an interview, we really need to dig into their experience. Every question you ask should tie back to that idea candidates. So if you want to know if they have great attention to detail, you need to ask questions to uncover if they have great attention. Attention to detail. And you don't want to say, you know something along the lines of, do you believe you have great attention to detail? You want to ask questions that, either directly or indirectly, pull out the experience and things that they've done in the past that show they have that great attention to detail.

Rion Willard

20:18

This is interesting because this is, again, this is one thing that we see a lot with either our own clients or architects in the space, is that they'll, they'll get the advert out, they'll have a list of candidates. Again, partly because this is all done in such a rush and so reactive, somebody will come on and then they discover that what they were told in the interview wasn't the truth, or certainly with with with candidates for they've got portfolios of work, and obviously, in an architecture practice, you're showing drawings that, for the most part, a lot of different pans have touched them, okay? And there's often there's different you've had different roles in them. But it's not always clear what was your role in the production of these, of these drawings, for example, and so sometimes the portfolio might be a little bit misleading, and that could be very, very, very problematic when, certainly, when you've got somebody who comes in and then they can't do them, got the expertise, what sorts of things would you suggest in terms of testing, like, how important is it to test people with their like, their their ability on certain software or their kind of technical knowledge? How do you How would you advise companies to go about testing? Yeah, so

Speaker 1

21:32

when it comes to testing, it really all depends on the position. There are a lot of great tests out there that will test candidates in software skills and some of those technical things. And for some positions, I feel like that that is important, because a candidate can tell you everything, but how do they prove it? And there's some things that they can prove it to you because you ask the right interview questions, and there's other things that they're going to have to prove it to in other ways. So we always look at it a case by case basis of what does this person really need to know? And is there a good quality way of testing it that requires some sort of assessments? So there are, you know, kind of going into a different direction. But just for example, we sometimes help companies hire bookkeepers, and sometimes we'll do more advanced QuickBooks testing and things like that. So far, if you use, I know there's some very popular ones and then there's some other ones in the architecture space, but if you use a specific software, and there is testing for that software, and that's the only way to test out if they have beginner level knowledge or expert level knowledge, go ahead and do that testing. I always say, we save that testing till later in the process. There's some people that want to jump in and do this testing right away, because they want to weed out candidates. And the reason why I say to do it later in the process is sometimes the good quality tests cost you money, and we don't want to be telling 100 candidates to do a test that's going to cost us a lot of money, when we can narrow it down and say, Okay, this is the person that we feel matches the position going to match our organization. Now let's just do that final test to make sure that their skills are where they need to be. So you really want to make sure you put out the right step of the process. The other reason to put it later in the process is there are candidates that won't spend their time doing a test until they also know that they want to work for you. And that interview process has to be a give and take. It cannot be just the in the company saying, Give me your time. I need you to give me your time before I'm going to give you my time. It needs to be that give and take. So if you ask for a testing too early in the process, you might have great quality candidates that just don't take it because they don't they're not convinced yet that you're the place where they want to work. Some of the other things is you can just ask really good interview questions. So I agree 100% you look at someone's portfolio, you have no idea what they did versus what someone else did. You just know that they had some hand in some part of that project. So sometimes, to get around that is, we'll ask questions along the lines of of challenges. Tell me about a time there was a challenge on a project. Tell me about a time when something like this happened. Tell me about a time where something was presented to a client and then they came back requesting changes that you didn't necessarily agree with, and you had to talk to a client on how, why that wouldn't work, or things like that. That says, let's actually jump in to figure out what you did. Because, yeah, anyone can show you pictures, they can put together a beautiful portfolio, but it doesn't actually show you their thought process and their skills, and do they have experience with clients, and was it actually their work, or they just were on the project? Okay,

Rion Willard

24:54

for in the actual interview process itself, how. Would you advise a company to actually, you know, test their own questions? Or, like, Are there do you own for example, do you guys have, like, a list of really good questions that you encourage employers to use? Or do you do the interviews for certain businesses? Or how does it work? Yeah, so

Speaker 1

25:19

a bit of all of it. So for our recruiting clients, we do the first round of interviews, and then for all of our clients that we work with, we create what we call hiring strategies. And part of that is we create the interview guides that they will use as well. And so we do have a bank of interview questions a lot of times we pull from so we create what first we after we after we go through a bunch of questions with our clients to really pull out from them. Who are you looking for? Who's gonna be successful? We summarize all that and say, Okay, this is the idea candidate. And then we'll pull questions from our interview bank that fits pulling out the right information in an interview. If we don't have a question currently in our interview Bank, we create a question to figure out, how do we dive directly into this? So it's about creating that prepared interview guide that's going to help you dive into the right information. One of the things we tell our clients all the time on these interview guides is, sometimes we're direct with our questions, other times we're not so direct. And I love the power of a follow up question. So one of the things I always say is we don't want to lead the candidate to exactly what we want to hear. So sometimes we ask a general question, and then we have follow up questions to be like, Okay, now that you started sharing about this example, we're going to narrow it down. Narrow it down. Narrow it down. Okay. Now I'm getting to the information I really want to know. Or sometimes it's if I mention this topic, where does a Canon go first with their thought process? So we don't always want to go right out and say, this is directly what I want to know, but this is us going to start the conversation that's going to uncover what I want to know. And if the candidate really has experience in this area, one of the things that sometimes we do a lot is sometimes to see if a candidate is telling us the truth or telling us just a really prepared question is we'll ask sometimes their opinion about something, or what does it mean to be successful in this area? And then we'll say, Okay, we'll support that with an example from your work. And sometimes you'll have candidates that be like, Oh yeah, I do that all the time, and this is what I do, and this is how I would handle those situations. And then you go ask for the example, and it's just like, oh, well, I can't think of anything. It's like, Well, is it something you really do all the time? If you don't have one example to support it,

Rion Willard

27:35

what are your thoughts on tools like personality profiling, resources like, didn't like, like this profile, or, I mean, even even more kind of Wilder ones, like the Enneagram or wealth dynamics and things like that. Because I Yes, are they? Are they useful? Are they something that you would recommend, that businesses use? Or

Speaker 1

27:58

I would say yes and no. So the first thing that I am adamant about is unless you have had every person who's currently on your team take that assessment as well, so you really understand your team and you're using it for day to day management, do not bring it into the hiring process. So do you use something to hire that you're not using to make sure you have an effective team. Ongoing is not it's not useful. It's a waste of your time. The second thing is kind of like we talked about with testing before, you want to do it later in the process, because a lot of these assessments you have to pay money for, or you're getting really high level, not really, those in depth, results. And if you're going to pay money for it once again, you want to make sure it's your you're only doing it for a few candidates, versus spending a lot of money on a lot of candidates to take this assessment. But you also want to make sure that either you are qualified to really interpret those results, or you're working with someone who is qualified to interpret those results. Too often, I think people will go and say, like it, let's talk about a DISC assessment. I need someone who is a C in this position, and they don't really look at the combination of what came out. They're just like, Is this person a leading C? Okay, they're not. I don't want them and things like that, words, you kind of just look at things high level, where someone who really reads the results can help you see is this person right? What's coming out of these results and everything. I also believe is when you have the right interview questions, and you know how to interview well, a lot of that information that you pull out on assessments, you're pulling out in the interview anyway. So for example, I was just recently helping with recruiting clients where they were adamant about using assessments in the process. That was their thing. They are using it with their entire team, you know. So they they were working with someone that was helping them interpret the results. So it was like, Okay, you have everything that I say should have in order to do this successfully. So we'll do it. And the person that they ended up hiring, you. Was the person that I would have said after diving in and really understanding their idea candidate and going through a first round interview with that candidate was the person they probably should have hired anyway. So I feel like it does provide some value at times, but I also feel like when you have the right interview process set up and you really understand your idea candidate, it's sometimes just adding the same information you're going to get elsewhere. It was very

Rion Willard

30:23

interesting. You were saying, you know, to actually put these sorts of things later on in the process. And you know, when is too many interviews, and when can you as an employer, be, you know, you're taking too much from somebody before you've actually given them. I mean, I I recall when I've had friends who have worked in finance and who have gone for very high level positions in places like Goldman Sachs, where they've had, you know, my brother, even he had, like, nearly 25 interviews there. And it was, it was that that sounds obsessive, but I know, I know in the in certain, you know, very high level positions, then, okay, maybe that's, maybe that's necessary. But how much is too much? And how do you know how to judge and balance it? And when is it being, you know, not fair on the candidate? Yeah,

Speaker 1

31:14

yes. Great question. So I believe there should always be a minimum of two interviews. And the reason why a minimum of two. And we'll start with that, and then we'll go into how much we'll go into how much is too much is sometimes people show up differently from the first conversation to the second conversation sometimes. So when we do recruiting on behalf of our clients, typically we have a little bit longer of a first interview, because we have the ability to take the time, and that's our job, to really be detective with these candidates, to really dive into a lot well, my clients are doing their first round interviews. I always say it should be a short it should be a 15 to 20 minute conversation. You're just asking enough questions to say, is this person worthy of a deeper interview? Because you don't want to spend an hour with every candidate, if you don't need to spend an hour with every candidate, but also just doing a 30 minute interview with every candidate and then making your final decision is not going to give you enough to give you enough information about a candidate. So always two rounds, anything more than two rounds, there needs to be a very specific purpose, and that purpose cannot be that you're just afraid of making a decision. There needs to be something else going on that says this round of interviews is different than the round before. So there are some times I work with clients that they have maybe an existing team of five to eight employees. They work really collaborative as a team. So this person needs to fit in, not just working well with the business owner, it needs to fit in with the rest of the team. And so sometimes they'll just do a team interview that also gives the candidate an opportunity to meet the people that they're working with. And it'll be sometimes we'll make it a more kind of informal interview. So won't just necessarily be bombarding the candidate with questions, it'll be a lot of times where the candidate can ask a lot of questions themselves, you know, and things like that. So we'll bring that in. Sometimes, if we are doing those things where there's going to be some sort of testing, some of the testing is assessments that can just be done online and then reviewing the results. Sometimes the testing is going to be asking the client to do some sort of case study, or things like that, where then that third conversation is sometimes the review of that work, the review of what you're having them put together, or having them do a little bit of a presentation. So typically, that third interview is not just a straight question and answer interview, it's a little bit something different. The only other time I would say to bring it in that third interview is when there's someone else who really needs to be a part of this decision making process, and it makes more sense for them to talk to that candidate individually or in a different round, versus having it done all in those previous rounds. So for example, we were hiring someone that was going to be a manager of a certain division of an organization. So the person that so it was a recruiting client. So we did the first round of interviews, the hiring manager did the second round of interviews, she narrowed it down to three candidates that she really liked, and then she had the peer manager that was leading another department do another round of interviews, just so that way, because these people would work very closely together. And she said, Okay, I'm having a hard time deciding between these candidates. These people are going to work very closely together anyway. Let's have that round of interviews done, so that way I'm getting that additional opinion, and this person actually has an opinion in the decision and can help influence the decision, instead of just like, Okay, well, I don't really trust myself, you know, let me go talk to someone else, but I'm really going to listen, or I might not listen, to what they have to say. You if you're going to have someone else do another round of interviews, you have to be willing to accept the decision that they make. If you're not going to accept the decision that they make, don't waste your time, or the candidates time, or other people's time in the company. Because I know, like in the past, I was sometimes in corporate a part of an. Interview round where my opinion really didn't matter. It was like, why am I taking my time to do this interview? Why are the candidates taking their time to meet with me? If my opinion doesn't matter in the ultimate decision, it's just like, Oh, that's nice. Like, tell us what you what you found out, but your opinion really doesn't matter. You can say you don't want us to hire this person, and we're going to hire them anyway. Yeah. So you have to make sure that you're making every round valuable

Rion Willard

35:27

and and I guess the next part is actually, when you you know the arrangement of bringing somebody on and getting them, getting them all signed up onto a contract. But I mean, we know, we've, we've had this before, and sometimes we kind of live, we try to live by the dictum of hire, slow, fire, fast type of thing. But we, you know, obviously we don't want to spend a lot of time investing in somebody and then to find out that they're really not a fit, or there's things that we've missed, or what all, or whatever. How do you sit? What does, what does the first few months look like for a new a new person, and what sorts of safety valves would you suggest about put in place, both for the employee and for the employer? Yes,

Speaker 1

36:12

so great question. So first, just want to kind of reiterate the fact that if you have really good interview questions, it does help kind of get around a lot of those things, of we hired the wrong person, because you did jump into a lot of their skills. Hiring is never going to be 100% so there might occasionally be the person that comes in and you're like, Wow, I never even thought about asking that. I was completely thrown off that they're going to act this way, or do have the skill, or don't have the skill when they're in there. So there are times where, hopefully it's very few, but you will get the wrong person in because something comes up that you didn't uncover during the hiring process. But when you do the right when you have a very thorough hiring process, that chance gets smaller and smaller. But the first few months are so important, and this is, we call it a continuation of the hiring process, only because we find a lot of businesses forget to onboard their employees. So we're saying hiring doesn't stop. The hiring process doesn't stop, in our opinion, until that person is fully onboard and enter their job. And onboarding is not a day one orientation. It is everything that's going to take that person from being a day one brand new hire to being super successful in their role and being able to operate in their role independently. A lot of companies want to say, All right, here's your computer, here's your task. Go at it. Do your job. Hopefully you're doing great, but at the same time, people need to really understand and be taught what it means to do things well in your organization. So let's go for example, that we hired someone that has a lot of technical skills. We've identified in the interview that they are very good at their technical skills. So we're saying they're really good. They've done this job for other organizations. There's not a lot I have to train on them, and they kind of just let the onboarding plan be once again, like, here's your computer, here's the project, start taking things over, because you know what you're doing and it is right. They know what they're doing, but they don't know how to do it right for you. Yet they don't know what it means to do it right in your organization. So sometimes onboarding is a lot of teaching of skills that you've identified during the hiring process that this person doesn't have, and other times, the onboarding is strictly focused on, what are the expectations of the role, and how do we make sure you're doing it right and effective? So another part of onboarding plans that go into a place when we're working with our clients, we help them create these plans, is what are the goals? So at the end of 30 days, what should this person be able to do inside the organization based on what you decided that you're going to train them on in the first 30 days? And sometimes we have to look at it like we're teaching a kid to ride a bike, because then we also look at 60 days, and we look at 90 days, you don't just put a kid on a bike and say, go for it. You put a kid on a bike with training wheels, then you might loosen the training wheels a little bit, lift them off the ground, so there's a little bit of that wobble. Then the training wheels eventually come off, and typically, you're still holding that bike for the kid as they're as they're going, and they're getting used to their balance without the training wheels. Then you're running alongside them. Then finally they're going down the road, and you're just watching them go, and you're there in case they fall over. You're staying close. And then you're letting them go more on their own. They're independent, and onboarding has to be a lot like that. How am I doing it along with you? How do now you start doing it with a little bit of support and guidance or checking or communication. Now, how do you eventually become independent? And I trust you, because that's the thing. We have to be able to trust the employees as much as the employees have to be able to do the job. So we need to learn to let go. And that is the problem I see with a lot of small businesses, is small business owners are afraid to fully let go. So. They either keep stay too much into it, or they're under the mindset of, I hired this person to do a job, and I'm throwing them into the fire, and hopefully they'll survive

Rion Willard

40:10

in what are your thoughts on? Kind of more like contract workers and outsourcing roles that we see more and more of these days, and this is something a lot of small businesses are kind of taking on because it's a lot safer, in a way, and that they can but there and but the thing is that it can end up being you can be a little less thorough with the hiring process of outsourced or contract workers or or other other firms like that. How do you guys suggest that teams look at using contract work as outsources. And how does that work? And is there any difference?

Speaker 1

40:47

Yeah, so I think it's sometimes a very smart way for small businesses to hire because sometimes you need someone that's very skilled at their job, very technical, but you don't have the ability to bring someone in full time, and sometimes you can find really great part time workers. I KNOW the One of the things that I talk about a lot is there's this whole category of parents that have left the workforce because they want to be able to be more involved in the raising of their children, but they're not ready to fully step out of the workforce, so they're looking for just sometimes, part time roles where they can use their skills and be a parent at the same time. But that's a little ways the case. And sometimes you in your area and what you need, you might not be able to find a good part time worker. You might have work that fluctuates. So maybe one month you need this person 20 hours the entire month. Next month you might need them five hours the entire month. And so contract work allows you to have a little bit more of that flexibility. You can get the talent when and where you need it, at the level you need it, without having to worry about, well, what am I going to do with this person when I don't have this work? And the thing is, you just have to make sure that you're still doing your due diligence. So with that contractor, you still have expectations, and this person needs to meet those expectations, so you still need to make sure they have the right skills. You still need to make sure that their work style and everything matches what you're looking for. You might not have the same day to day interaction with this person, but you're going to still want the same quality of output. So you need a process when you're evaluating contractors to make sure that output is what is going to work for you, that the timelines that they work on is going to work for you and so forth, and then making sure that if you hire someone as a contractor, you're actually treating them like a contractor, and you're not misclassifying them, then you're really treating them as an employee. So if you're hiring some as a contractor and you're not sure the difference of employees and contractors, make sure you do your due diligence to look things up on websites and everything. There's a lot of guidance that will help you distinguish the two. I will say there is a lot of gray area. So if you're ever on shore of that gray area, and you're like, Well, my position and what I need really falls into this gray area. Please do your due diligence. Talk to an employment lawyer, talk to an HR consultant, or someone that can help you learn how to navigate that gray area, because you can get in a lot of financial trouble if you hire someone as a contractor, but then treat them like an employee. So employee.

Rion Willard

43:21

Brilliant. Thank you very much, Jamie, it's been really, really insightful about just one last question. I think we're just coming up to time here, but it's been so, so insightful of your sharing your expertise here, going back to the beginning of the hiring process, and we were talking a little bit about, you know, making sure that there's a kind of marketing element to the way that you're writing your job posting, so that it's in the language of the target candidate, so that they it would be more appealing to them. We've seen in the architecture industry, there a kind of perceived shortage of talents. Now, there's all sorts of we could, we could unpick that, and there's all sorts of reasons why, and maybe, maybe it's more perception than actual reality. But often what businesses or firms experience is, you know, and I've heard people say this to me before, you know, well, a few years ago, we would just stick a note up onto indeed, and we'd have 50 high quality postings, and now we get nothing. And obviously there's a lot of culture shift that's happened where people wanted to work from home. And certainly, if I'm working with businesses that are in more remote places in the country, they've got less of a call to be, to be drawing upon. What's your advice here, when you're trying to find somebody and it feels like you're really struggling to get any candidates at all that are even nearly qualified? What? What options does a business have? Yeah,

Speaker 1

44:57

yeah. So this is a great question. This is. Actually a problem that I ran into recently with a client in the architecture field. One of the things that we looked at was what she wanted a candidate to do and the skill level she wanted it was really two different roles, and once a candidate got to that level of their career, they would be more selective about what they were doing. So we had to actually go, in that case, split it into multiple roles and hire on a part time basis. Instead of saying, I need someone who can do X, Y and Z, and do it at a level that they've been in the field for X amount of years, those candidates really didn't exist where she was. So sometimes you have to look at to say, is there a way for me to split this role? Sometimes you really need to look at saying, What can I change in order to be able to attract more candidates? Sometimes it's as simple as changing something on your job post that you're really not being super clear. You're not really calling out that idea candidate and things like that. Where people are being as you mentioned, culture is changing. People are very selective of where they're going to work. So you need to make sure that you're really explaining what it's like to work with you, who you want to work with you, those, I would say, benefits and things that you have. Yes, a lot of people want to work remotely. There's a lot of people who say, what's the point of going into an office to do this work? I can do it from wherever. There's other people who want hybrid there's other people who want to be in office. And so it's being very clear on what you want and understanding that that might make an impact on the candidates that you get and and that's okay if someone's gonna be miserable coming into an office every day, you don't want that candidate if your job is 100% in the office. So the other thing to look at is sometimes understanding, and I talked about this a little bit earlier in the interview, is we have to build the workforce that we want if you really cannot find someone at the level that you're looking for, and no one can. It's probably because there was a period of time where no one was helping to train that workforce and get to that level. If you think about, you know, years ago, during the recession in the US and everything, there was a lot of not hiring happening, which meant there was a lot of people coming out of college that then weren't getting those entry level positions, that weren't getting trained up. And then there comes a point in in the career where those advanced, more advanced positions, there's no candidates for them, because no one has reached that point in their career yet, because people didn't come in for a certain period of time. There's also, right now, if you're looking at it, because of covid, there was a lot of internships that didn't happen. So there's a lot of candidates that are struggling to find opportunities because they couldn't get that internship experience. And sometimes we're like, but I don't want to be the person to train someone from the ground up. And for some people, that is 100% the right decision, because, as I talked about earlier, not everyone can be a good trainer, but sometimes we have to do our due diligence. We have to figure out, how can we help advance the workforce so that way we can get the people that we want, and we have to sometimes look at this as a long term issue, instead of just focusing on the position that we're trying to hire for today. So kind of, if you can, if you're having a really hard time, look at your position and say, What can I change? Another thing that really goes into a lot of it is pay. One, make sure you have your pay on your job. Post, no one's going to work for free. People have a budget. They have things they need to pay for. They need to be able to pay for the rent. They need to be able to pay for their car. They need to be able to pay for food. And candidates sometimes refuse right now to apply for jobs if the pay is not posted. So if your pay is not posted, post it. And then I really want you to do your due diligence to make sure that that pay is adequate for what you're trying to hire for, and not just adequate compared to your budget, but against other jobs out there. And it makes a difference if you're not providing health insurance and other companies are, that's something that's probably coming out of that candidate's pocket. So that makes a difference. So if you can't adjust your pay, you're going to need to adjust your position to fit your budget.

Rion Willard

49:11

That's really interesting. I think one of the things we've we've often seen, is that pay is one of the biggest factors in actually being able to attract talent. We've seen clients, you know, one client who's putting a posting up for 75,000 and then another one who's posting up for 130,000 relative Same, same experience. The 130,001 gets the gets the top tier candidates, almost within, within a week. It's, it's, it's, you know, and if

Speaker 1

49:40

you think about it, is, if you are a candidate, and you've put a lot of time and effort to get an education to possibly, depending on where you are in your career, been got certifications and all those things, and like, you've put a lot of time and effort, you want to be paid appropriately for it, if it's completely different than if you're hiring for you. An entry level admin position that doesn't necessarily need a college education and all those things. It's when you're when you're looking for high quality, talented workers. You need to be able to pay high quality, talented workers. And I know sometimes as small businesses, we can't afford to pay more, and that's a reality. It really is a reality, and that's why sometimes going to that contractor routes where we can just do fewer hours, I had a client once that they were able to use the same budget and put it as a part time role instead of a full time role, and then they were able to immediately fill the position, because someone's saying, hey, I can make X amount and only work 30 hours a week versus 40 hours a week. Yeah, that that's doable for me.

Rion Willard

50:45

Yeah, love it. Brilliant. Jamie, I think that's the perfect place for us to conclude the conversation. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing all of your expertise. If people want to work with you or they people listening to this podcast, have got their own hiring challenges. What's the best way for them to reach out to you?

Speaker 1

51:05

Yes, so you can head over to growingyourteam.com you can learn about everything that we do. You can learn about the growing your team podcast and all the different ways that we work with our clients. Or if you know you need help and you want to schedule a call, go to growingyourteam.com/jumpstart growingyourteam.com/jumpstart, jumpstart being all one word, and you can schedule a call with me, and we can talk about what's going on your hiring challenges and put you on a path for for hiring success, we can help you determine the right next step that you need

Rion Willard

51:35

to take. Amazing I'll put all those details into the information of the podcast. Thank you so much.

Unknown Speaker

51:40

Thank you for having me.

Rion Willard

51:42

I'm that so rat.

Speaker 2

51:44

Hey, Enoch Sears here, and I have a request, since you are a listener here of the Business of Architecture podcast, Ryan and I, we love putting this podcast together. We love sharing information as much as we can glean from all the other industries that we're a part of to bring it back to empower you as an architect and a designer. One thing that helps us in our mission is the growth of this podcast, simply because it helps other architects stand for more their value spreads the business information that we're sharing to empower architects together so architects, designers, engineers, can really step into their greatness, whatever that looks like for each individual. And so here my my simple ask is for you to join us and be part of our community by doing the following, heading over to iTunes and leaving a review of the podcast. And as an expression of our sincere thanks, we would like to give you a free CEU course that can get you one professional development unit, but more importantly, will give you a very solid and firm foundation on your journey to becoming a profitable and thriving architect. So here's the process for that, after you leave us a review, send an email to support@businessofarchitecture.com support@businessofarchitecture.com let us know the username that you use to leave the review, and we will send you that free training. On the training, you'll discover what 99% of architecture firm owners wished they would have known 20 years ago, and the other 1% well, they just didn't even know that. They didn't know head over to iTunes and leave us a review. Now

Rion Willard

53:26

this episode is sponsored by Smart practice, business of architecture's flagship program to help you structure your firm for freedom, fulfillment and financial profit. If you want access for our free training on how to do this. Please visit smartpractice method.com or if you want to speak directly to one of our advisors about how he might be able to help you, please follow the link in the information. Hello, listeners. We hope you're enjoying our show. We love bringing you these insightful conversations, but we couldn't do it about the support of our amazing sponsors. If you're a business owner or know someone who would be an excellent fit for our audience, we'd love to hear from you. Partnering with us means your brand will reach over 40,000 engaged listeners each month. Interested in becoming a sponsor, please send us an email at support@businessofarchitecture.com the views expressed on this show by my guest do not represent those of the host and I make no representation, promise, guarantee, pledge, warranty, contract, bond or commitment, except to help you be unstoppable. I.

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