In the high-stakes world of architecture, the difference between a successful project and a costly failure can often be traced back to the talent and expertise of the team at the helm. As such, hiring the right personnel plays a critical role in an architecture firm’s success. A good hire can become a positive addition to your architecture firm.
However, the hiring process is riddled with potential pitfalls and costly errors that can impact the firm’s reputation, bottom line, and future growth. What may seem like standard industry practices and interview questions may actually be detrimental to your search for a good candidate. Here are some of the mistakes your firm may be making and top architecture job application interview advice for employers.
Common Hiring Errors Architecture Firms Are Making
Here are some of the flawed hiring practices common in architecture firms to avoid and our top architecture job application interview advice for employers on what you should be doing instead.
1. Being Too Reliant on Employee Referrals
Employee referrals are a great way to reach out to potential qualified candidates. However, some architecture firms make the mistake of assuming that all referrals are the most qualified in their pool and give preference to referred candidates. After all, if they’re in the network of someone who works in your company, they might also have what it takes to provide the same level of work, right? Not exactly.
By relying too heavily on referrals, you could miss out on someone with better skills or work ethic on the market. Instead of giving referrals a fast pass toward a job offer, finding a balance between your referrals and job applicants is essential.
2. Focusing on Skills and Experience
Have you ever experienced hiring an employee who, on their resume, had the perfect skills and experience for the job but ended up performing poorly and leaving a few months into their role? You’re lucky if you haven’t, but Recruiters and HR professionals have learned that the perfect candidate brings more to the table than just their skills and experience.
Today’s market considers more than just skills and experience. If you want to improve your employee retention, consider the following aspects when interviewing a potential candidate:
- Culture: Employees don’t have to be friends with everyone, but they have to respect each other and be willing to collaborate, especially when they work on the same project.
- Pace: Do they habitually get the work done early, or do they tend to rush towards the end of a project? This could affect the timeline and workload of everyone involved.
- Work Style: If your company believes in going above and beyond for your clients, this could be an issue for employees who only believe in giving the bare minimum.
- Values: Employees work for more than just a paycheck; a company needs to address what employees value most. For example, employees who value professional growth will want to work in a company that promotes its qualified employees before hiring externally.
3. Reactive Hiring Efforts
One mistake recruitment teams make is taking a reactive approach towards hiring. These teams only make an effort to find candidates to fill a spot or when waiting for leads to come to them. This could prevent you from connecting with quality talent currently in the market.
Recruitment efforts should be a proactive approach to finding talent that could benefit your business. This ensures that you already have a list of candidates suitable for the role when you need to fill a position. Some strategies you can implement for your firm include:
- Creating a talent pipeline of qualified candidates
- Branding initiatives – reaching out to schools or job markets to get your firm’s brand out there
- Encouraging employees to leave employee reviews on Glassdoor and then responding to both positive and negative feedback
4. Having No Hiring Strategy
Speaking of reactive hiring, another top architecture job application interview advice for employers is to avoid recruiting without a strategy. It’s easy to fall into the trap of hiring reactively based on your firm’s needs, but it could become an inefficient strategy that costs more time and effort than necessary.
If your recruitment team doesn’t have a strategy, it’s best to create one as soon as possible. Discuss your resource plan and decide where to allocate recruitment efforts based on company growth. Consider branding efforts, job marketing, employee referrals, and other ways to attract talent. Finally, streamline your interview process. This can minimize the time and costs incurred when hiring talent.
Interior Talent Delivers Proven Recruitment Results
Hiring top talent is crucial for fostering growth and progress in architecture firms and maintaining a competitive edge in an ever-evolving industry. Architecture firms can ensure they attract and retain quality employees by avoiding these common mistakes.
At Interior Talent, we specialize in recruitment for architectural firms and understand what a good candidate looks like for our clients. Since 2003, we cater to the needs of modern businesses and deliver the best practices to find the best talent. Get in touch with us to learn how we can improve your recruitment efforts.