Making The Cut
We’ve all seen full-grown adults who still hadn’t figured out how a broom and dustpan worked. They may have been agreeable enough people, the kind of folks you don’t mind having over for dinner once or twice, but shift the conversation to something higher stakes, like being an employee and you’re thinking with far more scrutiny. You might have hired them because they aced the interview: they said all the right things, had a dazzling resume, and a radiant smile that emanated immaculate dental hygiene. Then, a month later, they were a no-call no-show. Maybe you gave them the benefit of the doubt and offered them another chance. Later, they used the excuse that they were attending their mom’s funeral twice in the same month. Or, they flat-out quit because they explained to you the job wasn’t what they expected. Now you're out both time and money spent training someone who lasted the length of a Mayfly hatch. It’s a problem.
So, how do you find the right people to work with you? Optimum Construction doesn’t have a magical formula to answer that question, but if you look at our employee track record, it’s obvious we’re doing something right. Our employees love working for us, and we love working with them.
We don’t put our candidates through BUDS like a Navy Seal or interrogate through a rigorous examination to get to the cream of the crop; our process is a lot simpler and, frankly, more human. First, we want to get to know the person that we’ll be potentially spending long, gritty hours with. The only way to do that is through conversation. Through dialogue, we’re evaluating three categories: values, will, and skill.
Values
At Optimum, we know who we are and what we’re about. Whenever we speak with prospective employees, we set the expectation right off the bat—do your values align with ours? You may have worked with every contractor on the Eastern Seaboard, or been on the team that built Foxborough stadium, but it won’t amount to a hill of beans if we don’t share the same ideals.
Anyone who has been desperate for work knows that a person will say almost anything they think the interviewer wants to hear in order to land the job, but anyone with a healthy dose of discernment can cut through that bullshit. It doesn’t take google wizardry to figure out what Optimum's core values are– they’re plastered in bold on our website and on the windows of our work trucks. So if right out the gate a potential hire rattles off the phrase dura-beauty we'll probably pump the breaks in the conversation.
At Optimum, we don't stand on ceremony or hide behind pretense, and if you’re interviewing with us, neither should you. We want to know who you are and why you want to work with us. Do you want something different than what your last job was able to offer you? What is it? Or are you a lone cowboy carpenter looking for a temporary place to hang your spurs? We aren’t looking for troubled, narcissistic hot-shot receivers like Antonio Brown; we’re looking for team players who care about the shared success of the team over personal glory (Think: Detroit Pistons who annihilated a star-studded Los Angeles Lakers team in the 2003 NBA finals). There simply is no room for over-inflated egos on our team.
If you’re with us so far, and you think the ideal employee we're describing is you, how would you answer: ‘Tell me about a time you failed…’ This prompt should sound familiar, it’s asked in every interview. You might have been coached to answer this question by spinning a little mishap in a positive light where you come out victorious– We don’t want that. Successful people fail, that’s a fact. If you haven’t failed, you haven’t taken any risk worth taking. What we want to know is if you have the capacity to recognize your failures and if you have enough self-awareness to know what you would have done differently. The places where we screw up can be mines of gold if we dig deep enough. That’s why we don’t hold people’s failures against them, but we can’t work with people who aren’t willing to learn from and grow through their failures. Optimum Construction allows space for our employees to grow, but not if they insist on doing things the same way, and making the same errors.
We don’t always get it right. Even those of us who’ve been working in this business for years make errors in judgment or insist on having our voice heard even when it is not the one needed. The point is, we set an ideal that we’re constantly striving towards.
Will
To know if you have the right will to work for Optimum Builders, all it takes is answering a simple question: are you self-motivated? Few people willingly face the admission that they weren’t. Almost every resume we’ve come across has that descriptor lurking somewhere, probably because most people know that is an essential characteristic at any job. Few people, however, have the courage to face that question honestly: am I actually self-motivated?
The fact is, a large swath of the working populace needs to be told every step of the way what to do because they don’t want the responsibility of exercising their agency in any meaningful way. There’s a name for that: a buck passer (if you’ve ever spoken with a bureaucratic agent after being on hold for over an hour, only to be transferred half a dozen times because ‘that’s not my department,’ you’ll know what we’re talking about). We wish those people no ill, and all the best of luck to them, but they will never work with us.
We want to know if you’re going to show up every day and do the job– whether that’s after a nor easter in February, or in the sweltering humidity of July. We don’t motivate people to do their job. We’re not cheerleading motivational speakers at a pep rally. Neither are we micromanaging bureaucrats patrolling the job site to check if you’re doing your job. Rather, we are leaders of self-motivated people–those are the kinds of people we love to work with. We never want to hear the question, ‘this is Not my problem, what do you want me to do?’ We want to hear, ‘this is my problem, this is how I’m thinking about solving it. What do you think?’
Skill
There’s no getting around it, skill is an essential part of the job. That doesn’t mean we don’t hire greenhorns because we do. We’re willing to work with people where they’re at, but only if they meet the above criteria. Other companies can keep their lone-wolf savant carpenters; we want people who are willing to grow in equal measure at their craft as they are in their relationships.
It may seem odd that we don’t have as much to say about a criteria that might be the number one qualification at every other contracting company, but If you speak to any of the companies or contractors we’ve worked with, the quality of the work speaks to the quality of the team and the reputation of the company.
Lots of people say it, we mean it.
This isn’t some marketing scheme or a hiring ploy– there is no Optimum Construction without our core values. Our core values are truly who we are, they’re not just words on a plaque. Just look at our employee retention: people who share our vision love working with us, and we love working with them. We may be brazen, even aggressive about our values, but when people are confronted with them, they either light up and say "where do I sign?" or they turn their sights on other opportunities. We never know which way things will go when we start these conversations, that's why we have them.