TZL 1406 (web)

ON THE MOVE WARE MALCOMB ANNOUNCES ANITA GROSS PROMOTED TO ASSOCIATE PRINCIPAL, CORPORATE ACCOUNTS Ware Malcomb , an award-winning international design firm, announced Anita Gross has been promoted to associate principal, Corporate Accounts in the firm’s Irvine, California-based headquarters office. In her new role, she leads the Corporate Accounts Team, which supports the project delivery of corporate accounts nationally. Gross joined Ware Malcomb in 2005 as a Project Manager and has held multiple roles within the company throughout her tenure including promotions to studio manager and director. In 2017, she was promoted to director, Corporate Accounts to assist in the strategy and growth of Ware Malcomb’s Corporate Accounts team, capitalizing on her leadership, client management and technical skills. “With more than 25 years of industry experience, Anita brings extensive knowledge to our Corporate Accounts program and truly embraces the Ware Malcomb culture,” said Ted Heisler, vice president, Interior Architecture

and Design at Ware Malcomb. “Her mastery of account management has allowed us to successfully grow the Corporate Accounts program to comprise more than 50 percent of Ware Malcomb’s business.” Gross holds a bachelor’s degree in Architecture from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Master of Business Administration degree from the University of Phoenix. She is an active member of several industry organizations including the Orange County Chapter of Commercial Real Estate Women Network, and the National Association of Industrial and Office Properties Southern California Chapter, where she is an Alumnus of the NAIOP Young Professionals Group. Ware Malcomb’s Corporate Accounts program spans a variety of industries including office, industrial, retail, science and technology, restaurant and education across markets. The unique program facilitates the delivery of consistent, integrated design services for clients, with both local, specialized staff and the vast companywide resources of a North American platform. The firm has completed

projects for one in three companies listed on the Fortune 50. Established in 1972, Ware Malcomb is a contemporary and expanding full service design firm providing professional architecture, planning, interior design, civil engineering, branding and building measurement services to corporate, commercial/residential developer and public/institutional clients throughout the world. With office locations throughout the United States, Canada and Mexico, Ware Malcomb specializes in the design of commercial office, corporate, industrial, science and technology, healthcare, retail, auto, public/institutional facilities and renovation projects. Ware Malcomb is recognized as an Inc. 5000 fastest-growing private company and a Hot Firm by Zweig Group. The firm is also ranked among the top 15 architecture/engineering firms in Engineering News-Record’s Top 500 Design Firms and the top 25 interior design firms in Interior Design magazine’s Top 100 Giants.

JIM PAPPAS, from page 9

management department to handle the increased workload. However, it was the ATS system that supported the fivefold productivity growth. Even with the additional HR staff, there was no way we could have attained that growth without the ATS system. ❚ ❚ Integrate for improved efficiency. Our system was working well, but problems began to surface. We had islands of functionality that needed to work better together. We decided that it was time to integrate the components into a comprehensive system that was highly efficient, and was also more accessible to all employees. After much consideration, we decided on ADP Workforce to integrate all the outstanding components. Workforce would also serve as a platform were we could add employees in other countries, as ADP software is used in more than 100 countries worldwide. ❚ ❚ Automate for scalability. Transitioning our system to ADP Workforce would allow us to infinitely scale our talent acquisition and management system to achieve our goal of hiring 1,500 employees by 2026. We migrated all of our components into Workforce, other than Talent Pool Builder. Instead we opted to create links to ADP Workforce so we could continue to use our best-of-breed applicant tracking system. The resulting system was stable and ideally suited to our needs. Best of all, the system was scalable to support our continued growth. Why didn’t we just use ADP Workforce from the start? As a start-up, we needed to better understand our needs before we jumped into a system that may not have been best suited for us, or one that was not customizable enough for our needs. We needed to educate ourselves on our homegrown system before we could determine what would be best for us later on. In other words, we had to walk before we could run. JIM PAPPAS is head of talent acquisition and management at Mitrex Inc. Contact him at jim.p@mitrex.com.

❚ ❚ Creating a workable manual process. The challenge with a start-up is that you don’t know what you don’t know. We opted to develop workable procedures and combine them into a comprehensive system that worked. As we started hiring people and flushing out potential limitations, we were able to quickly modify our system until we reached a point where the system’s functionality met all of our needs. We used Easypay for payroll, an existing time-clock for clocking work hours, Indeed for finding candidates, Zoom for remote interviews, HRprimed for onboard training, and Dropbox for storing candidate/new hire files, resumes, and video interviews. We administered our benefits program manually. At this point, the demands of this system were fairly low, at about two hires a month. “Developing [a new company] in such a way that it can grow quickly while maintaining its entrepreneurial, ‘can do’ culture requires systems and procedures that are smart, effective, efficient, and, most importantly, scalable.” ❚ ❚ Improve system effectiveness. As the demand for hiring people grew, we decided to take the best-of-breed route and improve the effectiveness of the most critical part of our system – namely the talent acquisition. We looked at various systems and decided on Talent Pool Builder software, an innovative applicant tracking system. With automated video interviews, and being able to pull candidates from additional sources such as LinkedIn, Monster, and ZipRecruiter, we greatly improved our effectiveness in acquiring highly talented candidates and in greater numbers. At this point we brought on two more staff in the talent acquisition and

THE ZWEIG LETTER AUGUST 30, 2021, ISSUE 1406

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