| Haselden Construction: The Right Stuff |
| Construction | |
| Written by G. Jeffrey MacDonald | |
| Monday, 01 October 2007 | |
 Finding and hiring the right people to serve its customers is the foundation on which this business is built. Without any input from him, however, his workforce of more than 350 wasn’t relaxing at home by the fire. Instead, they supplied the heavy equipment necessary to keep a local hospital client accessible. Then they used their own four-wheel-drive vehicles on their own time to deliver nurses and other essential staff who otherwise wouldn’t have made it to work.  Ed Haselden, CEO “This is a people business,” Haselden said. “We build buildings, but at the end of the day we provide a professional service.” Exceeding customers’ expectations gives Haselden Construction a long-term advantage, he said, and enables the company to remain among the 10 largest construction companies in Colorado. Building schools, hospitals, high-end resorts, and municipal projects keeps the company constantly in demand. Licensed in every state west of the Mississippi River, Haselden Construction has projects underway in Colorado, Wyoming, and Arizona. With $300 million in annual revenue, the firm wouldn’t have much trouble recruiting nationally for top senior talent. But because Haselden bases its success on the cultivation of a unique entrepreneurial culture, executive searches are largely unnecessary. In fact, 85% of the company’s 150 managers joined the company during the first six years of their careers and have now been with the organization for at least 10 years. “It’s much easier to teach those guys at the beginning of their career than it is to hire a person who is already set in their ways and try to change their behavior or to go through an exhaustive kind of search process,” Haselden said. Getting the grade Building a solid culture hasn’t happened overnight at Haselden. The company has at times learned the hard way about the importance of getting the right applicants in the door—and making sure the wrong ones never get job offers. “We’ve had some bad hires,” Haselden said. “It cost us money. It cost us reputation. It cost us credibility with some people in the organization. We finally said, ‘We’ve got to stop hiring these bad people. We can’t do it. It’s unacceptable.’” For a time, Haselden knew his company could do better in terms hiring the right people, but he hadn’t quite figured out how. Then he came across the work of business consultants Geoff Smart and Brad Smart. He read Brad Smart’s book, Top Grading, and sent about a dozen senior people to Jeff Smart’s seminar in Denver. Result: the firm learned that it needed a highly systematized approach to hiring. “We were making all of the classic mistakes,” Haselden said. “We spent too much time selling ourselves instead of finding out what these guys were all about.” With new insights in hand, executives developed a system on the basis of the top grading concept. All applicants, even those applying for entry-level jobs out of college, now go through a rigorous series of three or four interviews. The first one screens out misfits in about 45 minutes. The second goes in-depth to determine if an applicant has the right technical and personal skills for a specific position. Then finalists spend four to six hours with a hiring manager, and in certain cases, they also meet with an independent consultant. “You have to ask open-ended questions with a formulated answer in your mind,” Haselden said. “If they answer the question with an answer that’s close to your formulated answer or the way you expect it to be answered, there could be a fit with respect to that issue. But if they respond to that question with something that’s totally different from your expectation, there’s a disconnect there. And you do that about 60 times.” After new hires get in the door, Haselden Construction makes sure each one has a clear career path in mind and takes the right steps to get there. Workers become specialists either in the design and planning stages of projects or the execution stages. To help them figure out the best fit and develop the necessary skills to move up in the organization, Haselden this year hired a human resource development specialist. That person makes sure everyone stays on track to help the company achieve its workforce development goals—and to make sure employees go where their potential is pointing. Haselden Construction currently hires about 12 new college graduates each year. Haselden’s hope is that at least one will reach a senior management position over the subsequent 15 or 20 years. But career advancement isn’t limited to those with a college degree. Haselden Construction helps finance a construction industry program known as Carpenter Apprentice that enables laborers to learn skilled trades or gain skills for managerial positions. The program has paid off. One former laborer has reached the prestigious position of project superintendent. Other laborers are well aware of such success stories, and the ambitious ones want to work at Haselden because they see an opportunity for advancement. By focusing on career development and opportunities for employees, Haselden Construction can afford to be choosy about who joins the team, and that kind of selectivity bodes well for retaining a unique culture for generations to come. G. Jeffrey MacDonald is a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor. Based in Newburyport, Mass., he can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it |
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American Executive is a RedCoat Publishing publication.
American Executive is a RedCoat Publishing publication.
