Your team members are some of the most important assets you have as a glazing subcontractor. While this sentiment might seem obvious, finding the right employees for your team can be challenging.
Where do you start looking?
What kinds of tools should you use to spread the word about openings available?
Are there aspects or efforts you can focus on to make the process easier?
Luckily, we’ve done our fair share of research to provide you with a unique and tested approach to finding the best team members for your glazing company.
Recognizing The Best Talent
Looking for and recognizing the best talent means setting your bar high. You need to find talented people who can not only get the job done but also fit in with your company’s culture.
The position you are hiring for should have desired outcomes (more on this below), and you need to find a candidate or multiple candidates with a high probability of fulfilling those outcomes.
This means that you should look for greatness over experience. Unfortunately, many new business owners believe that experience is the true testament of someone’s ability.We have found that this is often a misconception.
There’s an adage you’ve probably heard before: “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”
The idea here is that an “experienced” employee may not be the best choice in your business especially if your team is one that updates their practices and procedures regularly in order to maintain their competitive advantage. Instead, you might want to focus on an employee with “talent” or “greatness.”
Look for A-players — those who are willing to work hard, easy to teach, and excited to be there. An employee with these marks of distinction will have a higher likelihood of being more adaptable to the needs of your business and have better growth potential.
Understanding The Skills That Matter More
As a business owner, you should be tuned in to the attributes and skill sets necessary for an employee to find success within your organization. There are specifics that you can teach, though when it comes to things such as strong customer rapport and empathy, that is another story.
No matter who you speak with, you need to look for these innate skills.
For example, if you’re looking to hire an Operations Manager that works well with a team, remember that the ability to work well with others is far more challenging to teach.
You might be on the fence regarding this decision between a potential operations manager with 20 years of experience and a major ego and another with ten years of experience with a well-balanced managerial style.
We feel it’s far better to go with the latter and teach them the best way to operate with your business goals in mind.
Creating a Scorecard
A scorecard is a plan or series of statements that define or outline your business goals for the position to be filled, which may be used as a checklist and rating tool for each candidate you speak with. It’s up to you to develop a scorecard so that you can find candidates who align with where you see your business in the future.
There are a few important elements to provide with your scorecard, including:
The Mission for the Position
The mission statement for the open position should be a short statement regarding why your team has created this new role in your glazing company. For example, you might be looking to hire for a Sales Estimator position for your company. In that case, your mission statement example might read,
“The mission for our sales estimator position is to prepare bid proposals for public and private projects while collaborating with other sales team members.”
Desired Outcomes
Making your outcomes as clear and objective as possible is a great way to ensure the employee you’re looking for will achieve such. For example, one of your outcomes might be “improving our system to file and track preliminary quotes in order to increase efficiency by 10%.”
Now, the amount of detail you want to put into these objective outcomes can vary based on your specific goals, though we’ve found that it’s better to provide clarity upfront for the sake of your and your potential employee’s time.
With that said, you may want to consider only listing your major outcomes or functions rather than a laundry list of expectations, as no employee wants to feel like they are being micromanaged before ever entering the position.
Culture
Be upfront about the culture of your company and the standards that you hold people to. For example, some of your core values might be honesty, efficiency, and a customer-first mentality.
If that’s the case, be upfront about those in your scorecard and seek feedback from the applicant about these values when interviewing. It will allow you to weed out those with character traits that don’t align with your company’s culture.
We want to ensure the accomplishments expected of the new role(s) are as clear as possible.
Each position that you are hiring for should have anywhere from three to eight outcomes, each of which should be ranked in order of importance. Again, try not to be overly specific when providing these outcomes, and instead, place your focus on the ones that are most important to your company.
For example, one of your desired outcomes might be to expand your service from residential glass replacements to commercial glass replacements by the end of the year.
A true A-Player will be able to see your goal through. Most people do not want to fail and have to move to a different company. If your outcomes are set with high enough expectations (though not too high that they are out of reason), you’ll weed out the candidates who are less likely to help you reach your desired outcomes.
Specificity provides your new team members with the knowledge of how to know if they are “winning” and what levels of performance will be expected, motivating them to work harder to reach those goals.
Additional Elements To Consider
Here are a few additional tools you might find beneficial to use to find quality team members:
- Careers Page: Add a ‘Careers’ page to your website that can help you reach motivated job seekers.
- Job Descriptions: Study job descriptions of glazing companies similar to yours to see what they’re doing well or what may be lacking. Use that knowledge to develop intriguing, crystal-clear job descriptions for your company.
- Identity: Tell your potential employees what makes you such an excellent company to work for. What separates you from the rest? What makes your company’s identity so attractive?
You should always make sure to reflect upon these elements to ensure you are describing your organization’s culture appropriately and accurately. The last thing you want is an inaccurately described identity to be part of your organization’s reputation.
Final Thoughts
The best thing about the methods for finding team members above is that you can use all of them. Keep the critical points in mind and determine what methods work best for your glazing company. Advantage Drafting wishes you the best in building your team and reaching your company’s goals!
