Construction Trailblazers: Paving The Way to Excellence

[00:00:00] Do you ever wonder why your hiring process feels like a gamble? Or do you ever find yourself crossing your fingers that this new hire is actually going to work out? Today I'm going to help you get confident in hiring and not be scrambling around for luck for every new hire. Welcome to Construction Trailblazers Paving the Way to Excellence, where we dive into innovation, success, and streamlined excellence in the building industry.

I'm Samantha C. Prestidge, your host and ally in simplifying operations and empowering dynamic teams. I know the transformative effects of adopting people focused, tech forward design. Lean practices, and these changes not only boost company revenue, but also restore peace of mind for owners overwhelmed by daily chaos.

Today, we're talking job descriptions, specifically [00:01:00] how to stop leaning too heavily on vague BS job descriptions that just say other duties as assigned and get clear on the practical, effective steps to bring on the right people every time. If you're ready to leave behind the daily firefighting and move toward a streamlined operation with a team that consistently delivers success, then you're in the right place.

Discover more about us and catch up on past episodes at constructiontrailblazers. com. All right, let's dive into it. Most managers go into interviews with a vague idea of what they're looking for and maybe some gut feelings. But for the most part, a lot of the managers I've spoken with are going into an interview room with really no idea what they're doing.

And it's not exactly because they haven't been trained on how to interview. What's really happening here is that they don't have a good sense [00:02:00] of what their role is, what the expectations are, and what the ideal candidate is going to look like. In essence, they don't have good job descriptions to lean on for these interviews.

And it ends up being swayed by candidates that are really charismatic or smile a lot and just make the interviewers feel good because they know how to interview well. And it doesn't result in the managers actually feeling confident in who they're hiring. Now, not only are we not confident in who we're hiring, we also end up with quite a bit of turnover because we didn't really bring the best person onto our team.

And now we're stuck in this cycle of interview, hire, train, let them go, interview, hire, train all over again. So instead of being a manager where you get to focus on higher level things and what your actual job description is, you're just focused on this spiraling descent of chaos with interviewing and training people [00:03:00] on your team over and over and over again, which could also lead to then you not being confident in the rest of your team.

or other team members that are under you seeing all the turnover in one position and feeling a little bit nervous about their position. And then you might have turnover in more than one position, which just makes things crazier and more chaotic for you. And now you don't know who to trust on your team, who to delegate new things to you.

And it's just this crappy whirlwind, honestly. A lot of this can be solved if you had a good job description to lean on because effective job descriptions will require you to have several other things in place that create clarity for you and for that role and everyone on your team and make things easier for you in the long run.

Not only do these clear job descriptions help in that interview process, but it also helps you place accountability on [00:04:00] your team. Because now we can say, yep, this is on your job description. This is something you're responsible for. I'm going to hold you to these expectations. I now have a clear training plan on how to get you up to speed to meet X, Y, and Z expectations.

And these other things fall under someone else's job description. Instead of, hiring the person that smiled a lot in the interview. And then when they start, we just say, yep, go shadow this other person and you'll figure things out. Cause that's not setting anybody up for success. That's just setting us up for inefficiencies and frustration.

So when we can have these great job descriptions, we can then go into our interviews, being very clear on who we want to bring onto our team. And we no longer have to just rely on your gut feeling, because honestly, your gut feeling is probably biased and probably not a reliable source of information, and also not something you can train on, because eventually you should be able to [00:05:00] delegate interviewing.

So if you got promoted into a new role, and whoever steps in to fill your role doesn't know what they're looking for when they're interviewing. then you can't effectively delegate that. Now they're going to be stuck in a whirlwind of interviewing poorly, hiring poorly, and having to train not the best people on their team because you couldn't tell them what your gut feeling was and how to figure out who that ideal candidate is.

It's just not an effective approach to things. A lot of people are going to tell me, Oh, I have a gut feeling. I know people most likely, you know, that because you've been in your role or you've been in the industry and have interviewed so many people over the years that now you have a better understanding of the type of people you encounter in interviews, but you still don't have an effective way of saying.

This is what an ideal candidate looks like. These are what my expectations are. And now, because you don't have that, you won't have an effective way of training anybody else on your team than mimic your [00:06:00] gut feelings. So instead, we're not even going to focus on training on interviews first. We're going to focus on what the role that we're actually hiring for is.

And I'm going to break down this process for you because once you can get in the habit of using this framework for your job descriptions, so many things from interviewing to onboarding to training and developing people becomes so much easier because we have an abundant Abundance of clarity. Your very first step here is to go to the regular responsibility section of whatever position you're looking at.

And we're going to get super clear on this. A lot of job descriptions are created by HR departments, and this is no offense to HR because HR is usually dealing with whatever data you provide them. So good data will create good output. Bad data will create bad output here, and most of the time, we're not effectively [00:07:00] collaborating with HR, so they have bad data for our job descriptions.

They often just kind of go off of whatever the industry norm is for a certain role. or what their own research based off of the job title is, or maybe some things they've heard here and there based off the manager and the role. But for the most part, it's guesswork. It's a job description that is not built off of the specific needs and uniqueness of your team.

And this leads to very formal, very vague job descriptions. So then when someone goes to read it, we're Whether that's an internal person wanting to understand what the role is, or it's a candidate that's going to apply for it, you don't really understand what their real work day to day looks like besides having some familiarity with whatever the job title is.

So instead, we want to either collaborate with HR or just brain dump on our own first, what the very specific day to day work, what this person [00:08:00] does when they first come in, what they do throughout the day, who they collaborate with, what processes they are involved in. We want to get very specific here. I also get that sometimes we avoid being specific because we view job descriptions as something that should be posted publicly on a job board when you're hiring.

I would encourage you here to get as specific as possible. And then we can decide, hey, does this have a lot of confidential information on it? Things maybe we don't want our competitors to know. Okay, then we're going to keep this one for internal use and we'll revise it, still with some specifics on the workload, but we'll revise it so that it does not contain anything confidential and we can post it when we need to hire.

Okay. But for this exercise, we're going to be as specific as possible in those regular responsibilities. And when I say get specific, when I say clarity here, it's not just saying, oh, this [00:09:00] person has to pull reports or this person is doing business development. I want you to clearly say what reports are they pulling?

Why are they pulling the reports? What systems are they using for these reports? Who are they collaborating with? Like, who are they sending these reports to? We want to be obnoxiously clear here on what the actual responsibilities are for their role. That way, when any, whenever anybody looks at the job descriptions and they look at their regular responsibilities, they can very clearly understand, yep, this is what this person is doing.

Whether it's a project manager, field supervisor, office manager, permitting coordinator, whatever it is, you are not going to use other duties as assigned. Maybe you think through what those other duties usually are. What are usually the things that you'd pass on to somebody in this role? What are the things that other departments request from this person?

Are they kind of a catch all position? If you're hiring for a duplicate of this role or you're promoting [00:10:00] somebody in this role to a different position, Then you can go to that current employee and ask them, like, I want to get a better understanding of what your real day to day work looks like. Can you break down for me some of your tasks?

Definitely do not recommend doing this if you plan on letting somebody go. That's a little bit sneaky and sly to do. So again, I recommend that if you are hiring for another person of that position or you're promoting somebody, but hey, that's your on the ground intelligence. So ask that employee what all goes on in this role.

Then, once we have specifics here, that's going to help us understand what the expectations are for the role. Expectations is something I stress so heavily with any role. All of my clients because it's something that we get wrong a lot or we just are way too vague on. It's a big pitfall in delegation because it means that we actually don't have anything that we can hold [00:11:00] people accountable to.

So when it comes to expectations, you should be able to answer questions like, What does success look like in this role? What is the value that's created when somebody does all of these tasks and responsibilities really well? How would we know if someone is not meeting the mark or if they are falling behind and failing in the role?

This is not something that can just be a gut feeling. We need to be clear on what we want this person to be doing and what bar we're setting for them that they need to meet. If we don't have clarity here, we are setting. everybody up for failure because we have no idea what they're striving for. And if they mess up on something, we have nothing to fall back on to keep them accountable and to help them improve moving forward, which again is just going to contribute to turnover in this position.

Let me give you an example here. I was working with a client who was hiring for a general manager, and this was the first time that they were hiring for this role, [00:12:00] brand new position, so we're building a job description from scratch, and they realized that they needed this role based off of just the demands of their growing team, and him as the president or CEO, realizing that he didn't want to be responsible for all of these things.

There was just too much on his plate that he needed to pass off to a general manager. And when I asked him, how will you know if this person is the right fit after they've been brought on? Right, so how do you know, hey, they're doing all the things I needed them to do, they're meeting the mark. And really, this person's only answer was, well, I guess I'll be less involved.

Okay, that's a great first step, but what would your signs be to be less involved? Eventually, they're going to need to prove that you can trust them to do certain things. So what does that look like? What would success in these things look like so you don't feel like you need to step back in? This [00:13:00] person couldn't really answer that question, but they moved forward with trying to hire a general manager anyway.

And the first month of that person working, the general manager was like, I don't really understand where you need me. I don't understand what you want me to be focusing on, where the overlap is between me and you and this other upsy sweet role. And it created a lot of confusion in that first month that was completely unnecessary.

And then, if he had taken the time to clarify expectations before he hired this person. For those directors or senior manager roles, for any position really, what are the signs that you as the hiring manager can take a step back, that you don't need to micromanage, you don't need to oversee every little thing that this person does?

What are those signs so that you can then focus on more of the things that fit into your own job description? It's so important that we have those markers so that we can effectively delegate and train these people and give [00:14:00] them clear feedback, clearly hold them accountable to certain things so they can get better and we can take an even bigger step back.

Once we have clarity on the day to day regular responsibilities and the expectations for this role, a lot of other things start falling into place. This is where the magic happens. Because when we have clarity here, now we can understand who's actually the right fit for this role. Who are the people that will be capable of meeting these expectations consistently?

This is the part of the job description where you will typically see labeled as requirements or qualifications. I definitely encourage you to have some technical qualifications or requirements based off of the role. If it's a, you know, if it's a higher level role than a certain number of years in the industry, or in a similar type of role, or just proof that they can handle those higher level things, maybe [00:15:00] it is a role where compliance wise they need to hold some kind of licenses.

Those are technical qualifications. You can start there because for most of us, that's what we're used to thinking through, but I don't want you to stop there because certain familiarity, certain experience can be helpful, but it's not the full picture of the ideal candidate. And we had a different podcast episode on when you can hire based off of soft skills alone versus when you should hire for technical skills.

That would be a great episode to check out when you're building out this job description to really understand that technical versus soft skill element here. Nevertheless, I want to encourage you to think further into the soft skills here, and we're going to get a clear idea of of, hey, this is what it would look like for someone to be a fit for this role.

This is what it looks like for someone to not be a fit for this role. To do this, you're going to look at your expectations and those specific tasks and ask yourself, what type of person do you need in this role [00:16:00] to do these things? If it is a very data entry focused role, then we're looking at attention to detail skills.

We're looking at someone who has a preference for routine and repetition in their work, We don't want to bring on somebody that likes to do a lot of different things. And that can hop around because this is data entry. They're probably doing a lot of the same things throughout the day or from one day to the next.

If this is a role like a dispatcher, then that's going to be coordinating with a lot of different people. And we want to find someone that has a service attitude and someone who doesn't get frazzled because their routine is going to be disrupted pretty often throughout the day. So they need to be flexible.

And then looking back at that service attitude. They need to be able to communicate with different personality types. They'll probably be dealing with field supervisors, drivers, some of our office schedulers. So we want someone that's very adaptable and that has that customer service approach in this role, but who can still see things from a high level, put all [00:17:00] those puzzle pieces together and deal with the different challenges that come up in their day to day.

Really think through the specifics of the tasks in this role and those expectations, and that will help you understand who is the type of person you're hiring for. And then, a little bit more magic happens here, because once we have clarity on this third piece of the puzzle, then now we know who we're Now we can structure interview questions that are not just about our gut feeling, but where we can filter out for those great candidates who can meet these thoughtfully crafted checkboxes on expectations and qualifications versus those suave, charismatic candidates that interview well, but wouldn't really be able to meet XYZ for this job.

As you can see, all of this has a domino effect in clarity, starting with day to day tasks, which leads to clarity in our expectations, which [00:18:00] leads to clarity in our qualifications for a candidate, which leads to clarity in the interview questions we need to be asking for. Once we have all those pieces in place, we can interview, um, With way more confidence in who we'd be offering the role to, who we bring on board, and we don't have to just cross our fingers and hope that they work out, because they have a high likelihood of working out, because we filtered for them specifically.

And then we can go one step further. This is kind of a cherry on top. I talk about this in our currently free course for building your best team, but we can take all of that information and create a strategic onboarding plan. Because if we have clarity in the day to day tasks, then we can really easily create a training plan for this person that says when they start for them to get up to speed.

And then they should be able to meet these expectations at the 30, 60, or 90 day marks. And that's [00:19:00] all because we took the time to get clear on what the tasks are and what the expectations for this role are. Hopefully this gave you a different perspective on your job descriptions and how to approach interviews in a more thoughtful and strategic way for effective hiring.

I go way deeper into all of this and give you the practical tips and more strategies on how to nail those job descriptions. Figure out the right interview questions and get new hires up to speed without all the guesswork in our currently free building your best team course. So I will link that in the show notes for you if you are interested in checking it out, but as always, I want to hear your stories.

So tell me about your hiring mistakes or your hiring victories either directly on LinkedIn or email me at hello at construction trailblazers. com. Thanks for hanging out with me on this episode and I'll see you next time.