People-Centered Skills: The Missing Piece in Construction Leadership Hiring
When it comes to hiring leaders in the construction industry, many organizations prioritize technical skills and years of direct experience. It’s understandable. Construction is a field where technical precision and project expertise are critical. But when we’re talking about leadership roles—those responsible for managing teams, contractors, and complex projects—focusing solely on technical know-how is a mistake.
People-centered skills—such as adaptability, communication, and leadership—are just as important, if not more so, for success in these roles. Yet, these skills are often overlooked during the hiring process. Why does this happen, and what can be done to fix it?
The Importance of People-Centered Skills in Construction Leadership
Let’s start by understanding why people-centered skills matter so much for leaders in construction. Imagine a project manager overseeing the construction of a large commercial building. Their job isn’t to personally lay every brick or install every electrical component. Instead, they need to:
Coordinate with contractors and vendors, ensuring everyone meets deadlines and quality standards.
Motivate and manage their team, resolving conflicts and maintaining morale under tight schedules.
Communicate effectively with stakeholders, explaining delays or cost overruns in a way that builds trust.
Adapt to unforeseen challenges, like weather delays or supply chain disruptions.
Technical knowledge might help them understand what’s feasible on-site, but people-centered skills determine how well they lead their team and keep the project on track. A leader without these skills is like a foreman with a blueprint but no tools—they might understand what needs to happen, but they lack the ability to make it work in the real world.
The Current Problem
Despite the critical role of people-centered skills, many hiring processes in the construction industry fail to assess them adequately. Instead, they focus on easily quantifiable factors, such as:
Years of direct experience in a similar role.
Familiarity with specific construction methods or software.
A college degree from an accredited program.
While these can be important, they paint an incomplete picture of a candidate’s potential. In my view, this focus often comes down to two factors:
Comfort with the Tangible: Hiring managers feel confident assessing technical skills and experience because these are straightforward and measurable. People-centered skills, by contrast, can feel subjective and harder to pin down.
Reliance on Gut Instincts: Without tools or methods to evaluate these skills, hiring managers often default to their gut feelings. They might claim they can "read people" or have a "good judge of character," but these unstructured approaches are unreliable and often biased.
The Cost of Overlooking People-Centered Skills
Neglecting to assess people-centered skills can have serious consequences. For example, consider a company that hires a technically brilliant project manager who lacks adaptability and communication skills. They might excel at planning but struggle to manage team dynamics or address unexpected challenges. This can lead to missed deadlines, higher turnover, and damaged relationships with clients and contractors.
On the other hand, a leader with strong people-centered skills but slightly less technical expertise can often learn the technical aspects on the job. Their ability to navigate complex interpersonal and organizational challenges will set them up for long-term success.
One Solution: Competency-Based Structured Interviews
One of the first steps construction companies can take to address this issue is to incorporate competency-based interviews into their hiring process. These interviews use standardized questions and evaluation criteria to focus on key people-centered skills like leadership, problem-solving, and communication. For example, candidates might be asked to describe a time when they successfully managed a difficult contractor relationship or resolved a conflict within their team. Note that their responses can be based on situations that are different than the specific type of construction that the company engages in.
Structured interviews reduce bias and ensure all candidates are evaluated consistently. They’re a practical way to start assessing people-centered skills without requiring significant changes to your existing hiring process.
If you’re interested in implementing this approach, you can find free interview guides tailored for construction managers, estimators, and directors on our website (www.abetterchoicehire.com).
Taking It Further: Structured Role-Play Assessments
For an even deeper insight into candidates’ abilities, structured role-play assessments are invaluable. These exercises simulate real-world scenarios, giving candidates the chance to demonstrate their skills in action. Here’s how it works:
Create Realistic Scenarios: Develop scenarios that mimic common challenges construction leaders face, such as mediating a dispute between contractors or responding to a project delay.
Engage Expert Assessors: Trained professionals interact with candidates and observe how they handle these scenarios, focusing on behaviors that reveal key people-centered skills like problem-solving, communication, and leadership.
Provide Structured Feedback: The assessors use standardized criteria to evaluate performance, ensuring the process is fair, objective, and consistent.
For example, let’s say a candidate is asked to role-play a meeting with a contractor who’s fallen behind schedule. The assessors would look at how the candidate communicates their concerns, proposes solutions, and maintains a collaborative tone—all while keeping the project’s goals in mind.
Broadening Recruitment with a Competency Focus
One of the most significant benefits of focusing on people-centered skills rather than just technical expertise is the ability to broaden your recruitment pool. By evaluating transferable competencies, companies can consider candidates from non-traditional backgrounds.
For instance, I’ve worked with home construction firms to assess candidates coming directly from the military. While they didn’t have direct experience in building houses, their military background provided other situations to build leadership, adaptability, and problem-solving skills. Using structured interviews and role-play assessments, these candidates were able to demonstrate their potential, allowing companies to make confident hiring decisions while fairly comparing candidates from different backgrounds. Expanding recruitment in this way not only diversifies the talent pool but also helps companies find leaders with fresh perspectives and innovative approaches.
Why This Approach Works
Unlike traditional interviews, which often rely on hypothetical questions ("How would you handle a delay?"), role-play assessments show what candidates actually do in the moment. They’re a bit like a test drive for hiring: instead of taking a candidate’s word for it, you see their skills in action.
This approach also addresses the discomfort many hiring managers feel about assessing people-centered skills. By relying on expert assessors and structured criteria, companies can move beyond gut instincts and gain reliable insights into a candidate’s abilities.
A Call to Action for Construction HR Professionals
If you’re involved in hiring leaders for construction roles, it’s time to rethink your approach. People-centered skills are not a “nice-to-have”—they’re essential for success. Start with competency-based structured interviews, and when ready, consider adding structured role-play assessments for an even more comprehensive evaluation.
Investing in better hiring practices isn’t just about filling roles; it’s about building a stronger, more resilient workforce. And in an industry as demanding as construction, that’s a foundation worth laying.