How to Find Good Employees – What Works, What Doesn’t
Shawna Armstrong, a former corporate recruiter who now helps construction companies develop hiring processes, comes on The Dirt to offer advice for contractors looking to hire better workers and develop a strong pipeline of candidates for future openings.
She explains what works and what doesn’t when it comes to attracting talent. She primarily works with small contractors to develop hiring systems. Such systems include software to grow a database of candidates, writing job descriptions and social media copy, digital prescreening of applicants and interview guides.
So if you’re struggling with finding workers in today’s increasingly competitive job market, check out the latest episode of The Dirt.
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In This Episode:
00:00 - Hiring in the Construction Industry
00:37 - Who is Shawna Armstrong?
03:18 - How to Create a Hiring Process
07:26 - The Importance of Always Having a Job Posting
09:05 - Show People What it’s Like to Work for You
10:34 - Always Be Recruitment Marketing
11:54 - Active Job Seekers Aren’t the Ones You Want to Hire
13:51 - What Size Company is a Good Fit for Shawna?
18:17 - Advice for Companies Who are Hiring
23:07 - Get in Touch with Shawna
23:25 - Final Thoughts

Video Transcript:
Bryan Furnace:
Today, we're here to talk about hiring practices, that's something that our industry is really struggling with these days, with the lack of workforce, and then there's finding qualified people, and then there's just the fact that our industry, let's face it, isn't the greatest at conducting interviews and doing hiring. Today, we're talking to Shawna Armstrong, who's going to help us maybe with some ideas on how we can better this process for our industry. So, for the audience, can you just give them a really quick overview of your background and what it is you currently do?
Shawna Armstrong:
Sure. My background is in recruitment and hiring, I spent about 20 years in recruitment process outsourcing, which is essentially a large corporation doing hiring for other large corporations. So, I spent about 20 years there, working across different industries, different job levels, different hiring systems, through different labor market scenarios, developed a real expertise in recruitment and hiring, and uncovered challenges in the hiring process, that, in that environment I wasn't really able to fix. After I left that corporate recruiting world, I went over to Buildwitt, which was a smaller startup at the time, serving-
Bryan Furnace:
Not anymore.
Shawna Armstrong:
Not anymore. Not anymore. They were a small startup at that time, serving the dirt world, and at that point we're looking for somebody to help build their hiring system, because they were growing very quickly, or getting lots of requests for companies to hire them. So, they needed to build their team very quickly, so I came in and built their hiring system, and then built a recruiting business for the construction industry, which we very quickly decided not to move forward with, because of the fact that recruiting is such a competitive sport, and Buildwitt being a company that wanted to serve the entire industry, and help elevate all companies within the industry. Hurting one company to help another did not align with that mission, so stealing employees obviously hurts a company.
So, we decided to not move forward with that business, and so I left Buildwitt, and a year ago went out on my own, and what I do now is I build hiring systems for the construction industry. Taking the compilation of all of my knowledge in recruitment and hiring, and all of my experience with what works and what doesn't work, my love for the dirt world, and the construction industry, and the understanding that this is something that is really needed to help solve the workforce issue, and so that is the trajectory of my career.
Bryan Furnace:
Gotcha. And so, if I were to, as a company, or as a small business even, engage with you to try to formulate some sort of hiring practice, what is the process there? How do I even start engaging with you, and then what does that process look like?
Shawna Armstrong:
Yeah. So, the first engagement is really a conversation, what are you currently doing now? What does your hiring process look like? What are your challenges? What are your needs? What are your goals? And build something from there. So, what I essentially build is a hiring system. So, I'm not a recruiter or a recruiting agency, and I actually don't even do any of the recruiting, but what I do do is get a hiring software system, or an applicant tracking system embedded to deliver the hiring process...