Simply Put, Hiring for the Remodeling Profession is Complicated

We all want to hire the best and brightest but finding and assessing skill and talent for the remodeling profession is a significant challenge—and I imagine many of you feel likewise.

I don’t have it all figured out, and I much prefer the bigger picture to the nitty gritty, but I’ll share a few ideas I presented to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies on what skillsets and qualities I think can help someone succeed in the remodeling profession and also examine some of the issues facing the industry that can make it hard to hire.

The ability to constantly recalibrate

What really distinguishes those of us in the design-build profession is the ability to develop creative solutions within the constraints of an existing environment. It’s a little bit of an art form, if you will, that demands a certain level of skill, a profound attention to detail, and very rigorous quality-control standards. Even the slightest deviation in the work can undermine the integrity or the aesthetic of a project, so having the ability to recalibrate is critical.

We can—and do—face delivery issues. We’ve had clients say, “no, no, I don't like that anymore.” We’ve had architects who presented us with great ideas that feel impossible to execute. We’ve encountered complications with fitting modern mechanical, electrical, and plumbing into an old infrastructure.

This is why we must be nimble and flexible and say “yes” first and then work backwards to figure it out. We never start off by saying “no.”

When looking for talent, we go through resumes to see what kinds of complexity someone has experienced. The best hires are those who understand that the job requires them to execute on the building side and also know what it’s like to bump up against complications.

It’s vital to show versatility

Successful design-build firms also need to be expert project management companies. It's not only about having an intimate knowledge of construction methodology and design sensibility, but also about the craft of delivering solutions, managing costs, and adhering to schedules.  When a client presents us with a problem, we must manage a process to solve it—if we don’t, then why are we in this business?

Our differentiation in the market is how our expertise equals our versatility. Every project is so inherently unique, and each one demands a very high level of customization, so success comes from being flexible and tailoring solutions around the idiosyncrasies of a client's vision along with the idiosyncrasies of an existing structure.

We’re in Boston, so we're constantly adapting to historical nuances and facing significant architectural constraints—but that’s part of the fun!

When looking for talent, a question we face is whether to hire a builder and train them to manage, or hire a manager and train them to build?  

What I see happening these days is that the “build” part is diminishing in meaning. Many schools don’t have shop class anymore, so there’s no woodworking experience or encouragement to go into the trades. The experiences younger people are having now are entirely different from those of my generation. They spend their nights and weekends playing sports, gaming, and on social media. They do not spend them building decks or a tree house in the woods.

The people who have a passion for construction are getting a four-year degree in construction management—which is great—but they don’t have actual experience putting something together from the ground up. You can't manage something if you don't know what the process is, and then your trades get frustrated. So how do you overcome that? It's an enormous challenge that we haven’t fully resolved yet.

One thing we are doing is celebrating careers in the trades and encouraging students, especially girls, to enroll in vocational-tech schools; I see a shift happening but not as quickly as I’d like, so in the short-term, it's a huge problem.

Value relationships with clients

A lot of the success in our industry comes down to personality and whether someone has the ability to talk with very successful people who are paying hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to remodel their homes.

Clients are involved emotionally and financially, and it's not like they hire us and then go away. We’re in their house, in their lives, in someone's personal space at 7:00 am rain or shine five days a week until the project is finished.

We want our clients to have beautiful homes, but the reality of what it takes is having someone who knows what they're doing. It’s a hard job, and we know homeowners are thinking: Can we rush this along? What are you doing? Why did you use that? I think you did it the wrong way.

It's exhausting, but obviously we can’t tell them to butt out and let us do our jobs. We have to balance technical expertise and emotional intelligence, offer clarity, and have patience. We let them know they are heard, their input is valued, and help them feel more relaxed.

Someone told me once that remodeling isn't rocket science and that if I just brought in a bunch of people, I could get projects completed faster. But we all know it doesn’t work like that. We can’t just have a bunch of people swarm a house. We need skilled project managers who know how to take care of all of the pieces and put them together.

Manage your ego

Most of the training I do with my team focuses on the belief that everyone is a leader, which doesn't necessarily mean hierarchically. It’s about knowing who you are so that you can use your particular talents and strengths to the best of your ability.

And we need to manage our egos to a certain extent. We can be really good at what we do, but it takes a self-aware, patient, curious, and humble perfectionist to do this job. We're being hired by smart people who have worked really hard to be able to afford a remodel, so I want my team to include the smartest people in the room, but who don't need to be identified as the smartest people in the room.

Address the aging workforce

A term that may be familiar to some of you is Gentelligence, coined by Dr. Megan Gerhardt and referring to how opportunities are created through generational diversity and how people of all ages understand, appreciate, and work well together.

Our firm is instituting a more collaborative, mentor-driven structure that leverages the wealth of experience from our seasoned professionals and from our younger workers to foster a system of continuous innovation—kind of a learning ecosystem, if you will—that breaks down the paradigm that only the older can mentor the younger.

The average age of our employees is 48, and they tend to be more structured and methodical, and they have a devotion to craftsmanship that we can’t afford to lose. In contrast, we have younger workers who grew up in an era of technological advances, more rapid communication, and a flat organizational structure. As workers get older, physical endurance can become a limiting factor, so we need to get away from the mentality of “the more shingles I carry up the ladder the better” and pivot toward a mentality of better efficiency and technique. This is an area where older workers can learn from younger ones who may be able to deliver a level of craft and consistency through technological advances.

The world has moved so fast, but in remodeling we often look backwards. We talk about miter joints and biscuits and doing things the old-fashioned way. But if we want to modernize the profession, it's clear to me that we need a way for all generations to work together for the sake of the craft.