Hiring “Experience” vs “Schooling and Desire”

This week, we sat down with ENM co-founder Daniel Greenhalgh, to discuss his philosophy on hiring staff with years of experience versus people fresh out of school with a hunger to learn the business.

There are pros and cons to both. The pros of having a less experienced person is that I can shape them before they’ve developed any bad habits. The industry is constantly changing, and there may be ways of doing things that don’t work anymore. If a new employee comes in, I can make sure he/she is starting off the right way. They’re also already in a learning frame of mind, which can be really helpful.
 

But the cons are pretty big too. As people say, common sense is not that common. It’s hard to ask a new employee to have what we’d consider common sense when they’ve never been faced with any practical experience. You can’t pre-plan for what you’ve never seen. Someone with experience will inherently organize himself differently based on what they’ve done before. You just can’t replace that kind of mentality with new people.
 

So my preference is to hire experience. You have to train them less, and you usually get more productivity.

Yes definitely. When we hire someone for construction work, it’s usually for a six month to one year project. At the most, two years. So, we really don’t have an incentive to invest in a long-term development and watch the person grow for 10, 20 years, like you would in another industry. I just need to get the task done, so yes, it’s usually just a cost for me to train a guy, and the pay off comes with the next guy that hires him. In our model, for our labor and unskilled staff, it usually doesn’t make sense to train people. Any employee is better off with experience.
 

However, in management, it does make more sense. I can bring in someone new, who’s fresh off learning the most up-to-date practices in the industry, and they can get a good sense of how to organize the work site, how the flow of information gets back to me and the other managers in the office.

Our ultimate tool for assessment is the CHAIR acronym, which stands for Competent, Hard-working, Ambitious, Intelligent, and Reliable. We rate every potential employee on a scale based on this, and if a less experienced person rates a lot higher than someone with a lot of experience, we’ll probably hire him. That being said, it’s typically more difficult a less experienced person to rate higher on competency and intelligence.
 

There is an age factor for us. With millenials, I do find there’s a work ethic gap. The expectations for a job are just different, and I think when they’re coming into the work force, these expectations are setting them up for failure. There’s a shock when reality hits, and you see 30 year olds who are kind of amazed by it. But the trade-off is, they know more of the new technology, so as long as the work ethic is there, there’s a place for them.