TZL 1436 (web)

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F R OM T H E F O U N D E R

I n any professional sports team, recruiting is a really big deal. Teams are made or broken based on how effective they are at recruiting the best raw talent and experienced players alike. Both are critical to their short- and long-range success. Just like any professional sports team, your firm is made or broken based on how effective you are at recruiting talent. Get more aggressive with your recruiting

Firms in our business are in much the same situation, except our “season” never ends! When it comes down to it, what AEC firms really do is assemble teams and then market the talents of those individual and collective team members to their clients. Those teams perform the work that the client wants or needs done – either successfully or not so well. That’s it! So recruiting is a really big deal and a function that has to be done well. Here are some things you can do that I have found actually work when it comes to recruiting: 1. Save every single resume and application that ever comes into your firm indefinitely. Get all of these into a searchable database. If you have any firm of 50 people or more and you do this over a period of years, you will eventually have information on thousands of people you may want to hire at some point. Just because you

passed the first time doesn’t mean they won’t be someone you’d want to hire after they just got four more years of experience working for a competitor, or someone you’d want to hire for a completely different role or location than what you were looking for when they first contacted you. Go back to them. Update your information. See if they would be willing to talk to you now. I could fill as many as 50 percent of job openings an individual firm may have through a database like this if it was built over a multi-year period. 2. Find out who is in the role you need filled at one of your competitors. Call them directly and tell them you would like to get to know them better. Suggest a lunch or coffee meeting. Stroke their egos. Tell them you want to “compare notes” on what is happening in the marketplace. Ease them into the idea of a job change slowly. And if they

Mark Zweig

See MARK ZWEIG, page 12

THE ZWEIG LETTER APRIL 11, 2022, ISSUE 1436

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