Construction Trailblazers: Paving The Way to Excellence

[00:00:00] High turnover can feel like an inevitable part in the construction industry and it really makes it tough for some hiring managers to figure out, should I hire this person because they seem like they've got a great character or do I need to hire someone who knows what in the bloody heck they are doing?

Hey everyone and welcome to another episode of Construction Trailblazers Paving the Way to Excellence, your go to podcast for innovation, success, and streamlined excellence in the building industry. I'm Samantha C. Prestidge, your host and expert in operations and processes. I've seen the transformative effects of adopting people focused, tech forward, lean practices.

And these changes not only boost company revenue, but they also restore peace of mind for leaders and managers overwhelmed by the daily grind. Our trailblazing tactic today is about understanding when you can afford to follow those higher based on [00:01:00] soft skills practices that we hear a lot from Fortune 100 and 500 executives.

And honestly, when you just can't afford to do that. If you're all about leaving behind the daily firefighting and moving towards a future of freedom and predictable success, then you're in the right place. Discover more about us and catch up on past episodes at ConstructionTrailBlazers. com Alright, so this topic can really easily become a domino effect when you're trying to figure out what to do and what processes you're going to need in place.

So, because you know I'm all about practical application of strategies and theories, I just want to preface this episode with the fact that I'll talk about a few different things today, because figuring out if you can afford to hire someone based on soft skills alone will really cause you to look at the job description, the SOPs you have in place, how you interview, and then your onboarding and training plan.

So there's a lot that can go into this. But as always, [00:02:00] I'm going to try to break it down into super simple, actionable chunks. this is something I hear from a lot of different clients, the idea of hiring on soft skills, right? So they will say things to me like, this person seems like a great culture fit, or they've got all these skill sets, I think we can train them on XYZ.

Sometimes these are comments that I hear because they just want to copy the strategies that they might be hearing on LinkedIn or from a TED Talk or some other platform where a CEO is saying to not be picky about someone's resume, right? And understand that soft skills are paramount and that you can train on all the other shit.

Other times I hear these comments because they're coming from a place of desperation. So they're really struggling to find the perfect fit and they've already had a really high amount of turnover so they're coming at it from a place of we've just got to get someone in this role sooner rather than later.

So let's really break this down of what [00:03:00] this looks like successfully if you were to hire someone on soft skills alone. if you wanted to hire someone like that, maybe they have some of the technical expertise or some in basic industry experience, but really they're starting from ground zero and you're just really confident in their ability to learn what they need to learn quickly.

So here's what you would have in place if you were to do this successfully. There's Four or five different things here. Number one, there's someone on your team that will have the capacity to train them and oversee their performance consistently. This is either going to be their supervisor, maybe it's another peer, so maybe it's someone else that does the same role that they do and you're like hiring a duplicate for this role.

But you're going to have someone who is dedicated to helping this person succeed. And the person that you're assigning to them, right, their mentor, their trainer here, has the capacity to be dedicated, right? So they have the capacity to answer [00:04:00] questions throughout the day, throughout the week, to check in on their performance, see what they're doing right, to call out what they're doing wrong.

So this is someone that understands healthy conflict and feedback. But you're looking for someone on your team who's going to have the dedicated capacity to train and mentor someone to get them up to speed. The second thing that you would have in place to do this successfully is you have processes that this new hire can clearly follow what they're supposed to do and meet expectations.

So there are resources in place, there's SOPs, maybe you use a platform like but there's things where Yes, they have a dedicated mentor or trainer that they can go to, but they also have other resources that they can fall back on and look at to meet expectations to learn and, and again, get caught up to speed.

Speaking of that, that will lead us into number three here. You have clear expectations. A lot of times expectations live in our head, and we might discuss them at an annual review with an employee, or [00:05:00] more often than not, we're just talking about our expectations when we see that someone has messed up, right?

Really, if you're bringing someone on that has just the soft skills for their role, not a lot of technical experience for what you're hiring them for, you need to set them up for success and let them know very clearly what are the expectations for their work so that they know, okay, they can put in perspective when they're looking at processes, when they're hearing feedback from their trainer, they can put it into context with their expectations and they understand what they're striving for.

Number four. You want to have clarity on what the soft skills you're looking for are. I know this sounds really basic and obvious for me to mention, but this is something that can be missed a lot. You want to understand what you're looking for so that you're not easily swayed by someone who comes into an interview and just smiles a lot.

That kind of makes you feel good. That can sway us, right? We could be like, oh my gosh, I really like this person, but. You [00:06:00] don't really know if they're capable of the role that you need them to do, right? So you want to understand what does it really mean for someone to be a culture fit? What are the character traits for this role?

What characteristics would make an ideal fit? And do we have the interview questions to really pull this out of someone and make sure that they're not just a good interviewer, but they really have the skills we need? So, for instance, let's say you're hiring someone who will do a lot of scheduling. Maybe they're a project coordinator, maybe this is part of a project manager's role, whatever it is, one of their roles and responsibilities is scheduling.

So some of the soft skills I'm going to be looking for. is someone who can understand all the pieces of a puzzle, how everything fits together, and who's going to enjoy the critical thinking of putting those pieces together. I'm going to look for someone who takes pride in their work. So if they see a mistake on the schedule, if they see something that might cause an issue, they're going to speak up.

So they're going to communicate it, they're going to [00:07:00] work with the people who would be affected by this to get this resolved, right? So they're, because they take pride in their work, they're not just going to let something slip by. I'm also going to look for someone who probably communicates really well with different personalities, because they're going to have to work with people in the office and with our field personnel.

So I want to make sure that they know how to communicate with different types of people. If you're hiring for maybe an office manager, then you're really going to look for someone who has a figured out personality, who doesn't stop at the little problems that might come up. Because A, they are likely going to be taking calls from people with questions, right?

If they're sitting at the front desk, most office managers also have some receptionist duties. So they're going to be taking calls from people and those people are going to have questions. And if we're building a brand on customer centricity, Then that office manager needs to be able to find the answer to those questions.

We're not looking for someone that's just like, Oh yeah, you need to talk to Steve or you need to talk to Jeff or whatever. No, we're looking for someone who's [00:08:00] either going to say, Hey, I don't have those answers right now. Let me look into this a little bit. And call you back. Let me get your phone number.

Or they're going to be able to dive into all our different spreadsheets, different systems, and find the answer for that person, right? They're not just going to stop at, that's not my problem. B on this is office managers often become the catch all for a lot of random things that need to get done that either no one else has the time to do or no one else knows how to do.

And so your office manager needs to be able to complete tasks that they have likely never done before. And that takes a certain kind of personality, that figuring out character traits. So really understand what are the real soft skills it takes for them to fit into your culture and excel in their role.

And then make sure you have interview questions to pull that out of someone during their interview. Number five, if you were to hire someone on soft skills alone, number five to do this successfully is are you prepared for someone who, once they are fully trained and [00:09:00] integrated into their role, are you prepared for someone who's going to have ideas?

For This is a really big culture question. If you're hiring someone on, on their amazing soft skills, then they are likely going to become a rock star type of employee. And these employees do not sit idly by when they see things that don't make sense or feel inefficient. So do you have a culture where employee ideas are heard and valued?

If not, then once this person really knows what they're doing in their role, they will eventually get frustrated in their role. because they're going to have ideas, they're going to have questions on things, and if they aren't being heard and valued, then they're going to get frustrated. And this is either going to cause tension in your team, because they might be gossiping, they might be complaining about management, it's going to cause some kind of tension in the team, which is not good for our culture, or they're just going to start looking for work elsewhere.

So now we've invested in a whole lot of time and energy in someone to get them the technical skills they need to [00:10:00] succeed in this role, get them really trained up on our company. But because we weren't able to support them once they were fully integrated, they're just going to dip out and go somewhere else where they do feel heard and valued.

So if you're hiring on soft skills, make sure you have the culture to support the people that are these rockstar type of people. And I agree that hiring people based on, on soft skills can be an awesome strategy. This can help solve some labor shortages when you're really struggling to find someone with all the experience you're looking for.

It also means you maybe can hire, maybe below, uh, your original pay range for this role because you're, you're pulling someone into role but they need a lot of training, right? So they, maybe we can hire on the lower end of our, of our pay range, um, and really work with our budget there. So there are some, some pros in this space, but to do this successfully, it's actually a lot harder.

in real life to put this in place, then we might realize, because we can hear a TED talk all day about saying, [00:11:00] yeah, hire on soft skills. Don't judge the resume. But at the end of the day, if they don't have the technical skills, they need to be trained on their role. So for example, I hired my mom as my operations manager, uh, January of 2023.

Let me just say I'm very blessed to be able to have an amazing working relationship with my mom, but she will agree with me when I say this, that there were people way more technically qualified to do her job. I just also really wanted to be able to support my mom in that way and bring her onto my team.

But, and I also knew she had all of the soft skills for the role, for what I needed. I also knew her work ethic cause I, you know, saw her work growing up and I knew that she would be a great fit for this role if I could get her trained in some certain areas, but that decision to bring her on meant that some of the projects I assigned her were going to take longer because she had to take the time to learn what was needed in that project.

Also understand the context of [00:12:00] that project, right? What were really the outcomes that I needed from this? She also probably Or not, probably she could not contribute to certain strategic conversations when she first started because she had to get up to speed on the industry. Even if I communicated what my goals were, she didn't have the context of the industry of, you know, how we operated of our clients and our general work.

She didn't have the context. put those goals into and she needed to learn that. She needed time to learn that. And I also needed to dedicate time and resources to getting her up to speed. So it wasn't just, Oh, we'll see where she's at, you know, in a year or in six months or whatever. It was also, okay, I know certain things are going to take longer.

I also know that I need to carve out time in my schedule to support her training. So she's thriving now. She is an amazing member of the team. Again, I'm very blessed to work with my mom, but it did take a while to start seeing those results because there was a lot of technical learning that she had to do.

So now let's look [00:13:00] at if you hired a well rounded candidate. So this is someone that has the soft skills and technical skills. So let me be clear that I'm never going to advocate for you hiring someone just because they have all of this industry knowledge and they have the technical skills to do their job.

They also always need to be a culture fit in some way. There has to be some non negotiable character traits that you're not going to hire someone if they, you know, don't behave in a certain way, if they don't have a certain work ethic, right? So when we're talking about the flip side of this, the hiring based on technical skills, we cannot negate the soft skills that would be required.

Okay, but this is where training will really just focus on your specific software, the general way of doing things, but for the most part, they wouldn't need a lot of technical or industry training. So I would recommend you go with this route. You hire well rounded candidates. You do not hire on soft skills alone if any of these things resonate with you.

One, if you're still figuring out what your processes even are, [00:14:00] then you want someone who has the technical skills and that strong experience and foundation to contribute to conversations early on about how you can do things better. They can't contribute to that if they, again, don't have the context for your processes.

Number two, if you're in a rapid phase of growth and the manager who this person would be reporting to does not have the bandwidth to really support them. So even if they have a peer on their team who can be their trainer, who can be that dedicated mentor that we talked about before, if the manager does not have the bandwidth to support this person, then you want someone who has the technical expertise to excel right out of the gate.

Number three, if you've had a lot of turnover recently and you need to tighten things up, then you'll want someone who can dive in straight away. Now, if you've had a lot of turnover, that could also be cause for you to say, okay, what are the soft skills? Maybe we do need to bring someone in with a fresh perspective, right?

So I take number [00:15:00] three with a grain of salt here, put it into context of the uniqueness of your business, the uniqueness of your team. But if you have had a lot of turnover and you really need to tighten things up, you can see that processes are slipping. Hire someone with the technical expertise to come in and help tighten that shit up.

Number four here, last one. If you are not in a position to wait for amazing results, so maybe because of rapid growth, maybe you've got some really amazing clients, you need to make sure that you excel with these big clients immediately. If you need to see a high standard of expectations met in a short time frame, then you cannot afford to hire on soft skills alone, because that person will need training.

They will take a while to get up to speed. And even though they could be an amazing member of the team months or a year and a half from now, you need someone who's going to excel in a very short timeframe, right? Two to three months in that 90 day period, you have full confidence in them kicking ass, and then We need to hire someone that has the technical skills to go kick [00:16:00] ass.

So again, if any of those four resonated with you, then you want to consider hiring someone with technical expertise and not hiring someone on soft skills alone. And this doesn't have to be an either or like black or white situation. You can have a blend of hiring on soft skills and hiring based on technical skills.

It's really just a matter of figuring out what's most critical to what you need now for this specific role. And what can you train on? You can also take a look at what your current team roster looks like. Do you have a lot of technical doers on your team? Do you need someone that can offer a fresh perspective?

Sometimes we can learn a lot from those that have worked in other industries. Sometimes we don't want to hire someone who has been doing it the same way for 20 something years or 15 years. We want someone who's going to bring a fresh perspective, who's going to look at it with a different set of eyes.

That could be really great. It really depends on what. Do you have on your current team? What are the needs of your business? What are the new clients you're bringing on, new customers, and what is the next phase of [00:17:00] growth look like for you? But in the end, the decision to hire based on soft skills or technical expertise is not going to be a one size fit all from company to company.

It's also not going to be one size fit all from department to department. You've got to look at the needs of that role, the bandwidth of that manager, looking at that whole picture of team and processes here. No matter what though. Hiring on a new hire that needs a lot of training, hiring someone that can hit the ground running or not, no matter what, the key here is really to figure out what does it take to set them up for success, right?

So, clear expectations, ongoing support, and a culture that's going to value their work and their contributions. All right. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Construction Trailblazers. I would love to hear your story on hiring, culture, or just leadership in your team. You can share your thoughts with me directly on LinkedIn or email hello at construction trailblazers.

com. I'll see you next time.