The recruiting experience report by Mr. Michael Mayer, Managing Director of Mayer Ingenieure GmbH.
Our company
We are an engineering office in southern Germany and specialize in civil engineering. Our customers are municipalities that have their infrastructure maintained and renovated by us. Over the past decades, we have made a name for ourselves as a reliable and innovative partner. Our company has been around since 1926; we are a third-generation family business. My brother and I took over the company from our father in 1999.
Growth and change
In recent years in particular, we have realized that it is important to pursue a course of growth in order to remain competitive and maintain margins. As a result, our company has grown from 6 to 21 employees over the last nine years.
This was not just growth, it was also a fundamental change process in our company: My brother and I used to work as engineers ourselves and managed projects ourselves. Our employees have helped and supported us. This has changed fundamentally. Today, it is our employees who manage projects. They manage the projects completely independently, they look after the customers on their own, make their own decisions – and thus support us significantly. We have shifted responsibility to our employees and thus greatly enhanced their activities.
>>> Read here:
Why you should actively shape value management in your company
Lack of applicants
Unfortunately, good applicants are not exactly queuing up in our industry, especially not at a medium-sized company like ours. Fortunately, we are regarded as professional and reputable in our industry; we are an attractive employer. But many people simply don’t know us.
Personnel decision risk
A personnel decision is always a risk. It takes an enormous amount of resources to find an employee and make them fit for work. It’s not just the effort involved in the job search itself that costs time and money. Valuable capacities are tied up that are urgently needed elsewhere, especially in a medium-sized company like ours. This is worth it to us, because good employees are our most important asset.
As we do not have our own HR department, we managing directors take care of personnel selection ourselves. It always takes a lot of time to look through all the application documents. And even though we had carefully checked all the documents and gained a good impression at the interview, we never knew for sure whether this impression would turn out to be true. We only found this out once we had been working with the new employee for a while.
Suboptimal personnel decisions in the past
We have made the wrong decisions a few times.
A secure recruiting process
Based on this experience, we decided to go through a software-supported recruiting process that was new to us.
With the help of the berlin team, we have set up this process, which safeguards us when making personnel decisions. This way we can be sure that we have selected the right candidate. On top of that, we were optimally prepared for the interview with little effort. That was really impressive.
The applicants
We were looking for a site manager. We had preselected three candidates for this position. Our requirements:
The candidate should have the ability to take over and organize project management efficiently, to make decisions independently, as well as to act positively, friendly, binding and with a win-win orientation in customer contact. This is not easy to verify in the interview.
The analysis procedure
>>> Read here: Recruiting: How we found the perfect employee.
The job interview
Conclusion
>>> Read more here: How to find the right recruiting tool
What is more important: experience or soft skills?
We had a long discussion in the team about which applicant we should give preference to: One of the applicants had a lot of experience, but performed slightly worse in Developer. The other applicant had excellent leadership and customer contact skills, but came straight from university. The decision was not easy. Of course, it’s good if someone has experience, because you save yourself a lot of training time. But we ultimately opted for the second applicant. Soft skills are difficult to retrain. Leadership skills, empathy, the ability to act constructively in conflicts and to create a winner-winner situation – all of this is relatively difficult to retrain. You can gain experience, you can acquire hard skills, you can learn or acquire them, someone can teach them to you. A good applicant may be able to adapt quickly. The new employee has now been with us for three months – and we haven’t regretted it for a single day!
Are you interested in recruiting and personnel recruitment? Please contact us.
