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FROM THE FOUNDER
If you want the best people, you have to sell – the company, the role, and the location – and move fast when you get a good one! Recruiting and hiring more effectively
I regularly stay in touch with a young fellow who works for one of our competitors whom I met about four years ago when he was working for a different company.
I have been impressed with the guy since I first spoke with him. He’s a very talented and capable individual who is also very introspective. And he is also a great writer who is unusually capable at expressing himself through his writing. Exactly the kind of person we like to hire on our consulting/advisory team – especially when you combine that with significant work experience in a firm that is part of the market we serve. And he has been very successful in his new job over the past year and brought in a bunch of new clients. The point is this: We could have hired him ourselves had we moved faster. And there have been other situations like this that I have experienced over my long career, both in businesses I am involved with and even those I ran. A big part of leadership and creating a successful company comes down to building the right team. Recruiting and hiring processes have to
be designed in recognition of that fact and work to create a favorable impression on the best people in the industry – those looking for new roles and those who aren’t. That takes SELLING . And effective selling means you take the friction out of the process and strike when the iron is hot. I have long felt that too many AEC firms have a hiring process designed to keep bad people out moreso than to get good people in. I can – at least in part – blame the involvement of HR people who often have a negative bias (probably because they have to deal with all the problem people). In any case, I have always felt marketing people need to be more involved in recruiting than they typically are. It’s just too important of a function to ignore their input entirely as is typically the case. In my role at The Walton College, where I teach
Mark Zweig
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THE ZWEIG LETTER JANUARY 27, 2025, ISSUE 1570
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