Hiring Is Construction
Hiring is construction. If you want durable results, you need the right foundation, the right structure, and the right finish.
TJ Kastning
Construction leaders know the truth: you can’t build a plumb, square, level house without structure. The same principle applies to hiring.
A disciplined process is the foundation of every successful hire. Without it, you get crooked results, no matter how talented the people involved may be.
The Parallels Between Building and Hiring
Crestwood Construction put it best when they compared our recruiting process to their daily work:
- “When you start getting into the comparison between what Crestwood does on a daily basis and what Ambassador Group does on a daily basis, it’s very similar. You start with the foundation, you work your way through it. If you don’t build a house that way, you don’t end up with a plumb, level, square, straight, parallel house.” — Tad Herrington
That’s the essence of disciplined hiring:
- Foundation: A clear definition of the role, the culture, and the problem the hire is meant to solve.
- Structure: A step-by-step process for finding, filtering, and fitting candidates—just like framing a building before finishing it.
- Finish: A thorough onboarding and integration process, so the investment doesn’t warp under stress later.
Why Shortcuts Don’t Work
Every builder knows the temptation of speed. Skip a step, cut a corner, and you might think you’ve saved time. But the errors show up later—in leaks, cracks, or costly rework.
Hiring is no different. Leaders who bypass discovery, skip structured interviews, or fail to debrief properly end up paying in turnover, lost productivity, and broken trust.
What Crestwood Learned
By leaning into structure, Crestwood not only hired the right superintendent but also strengthened their own internal practices:
- “It really upped the game and pulled out a lot of information out of a candidate that you may not have gotten to if you weren’t referencing the guideline along the way.”
- “Some of the tools that we used have been incorporated into our processes today.”
In other words, they didn’t just build a hire, they built capacity for effective hiring.
