Does your applicant pool suggest a lost generation of younger designers?
The lingering effects of the recession have changed the structure of the workforce. Are you assembling teams differently?
HugHes: Young designers have struggled to find or retain work these last five years.
Many have left the profession. Some have done so temporarily, but others will never return. Some designers have gone on to pursue additional degrees in the hope that opportunities will be more abundant when they graduate. kLawiter: We see the lost generation coming, but not quite yet. It’ll be the incoming junior designers who cannot beat out the intermediates in experience for wages required. This has been going on already for some time. Byrnes: Today’s population of well educated, trained, and experienced talent is shrinking due to many factors, one of them being the high cost of education versus the return-on-investment of that education in the real world. My clients are missing an experienced next generation of leadership that works effectively in a collaborative environment, produces a high standard of design while mentoring younger designers, and has the business savvy to build and sustain service-oriented relationships.
HugHes: Our mantra is “One Global Team.” We are looking for talented designers who can easily move between projects and work well with diverse styles and cultures. Here’s a scenario that recently occurred: We designed a project in Seattle, worked up the construction documents in Mexico City, created elaborate renderings in Shanghai, and performed project management from Dallas. We want to use the best talent we have, firm-wide, for any given project; in this particular instance, our design experience was primarily in Seattle. Another reason is that a global reach allows us to work around the clock, compress our production schedule, and deliver faster. Finally, there’s cost. On some projects we can assign workloads globally and avoid having to increase head count. And when we have an overflow of work, we prefer to go the route of consultants. Doing so gives those consultants a chance to experience Callison and gives us the opportunity to evaluate someone for a longer-term position. kLawiter: We have actively cultivated a large pool of consultants with varying skill sets, allowing us to structure project teams with a mix of them and full-time staff. The staff members give us consistency with clients, while the consultants give us flexibility to, for example, staff up for production phases without long-term carrying costs. Consistently using the same consultants allows us to integrate them into our standards and procedures without a learning curve before each deployment. We’re typically looking for people who have multiple consultant opportunities or their own outside projects. We’re looking for flexible but not needy. Hopkins: We use contract employees to help during short periods of heavy workload. This gives us time to try them out, and vice versa, although managers are now confident about market trends and hire more regular employees than contractors. Either way, the concept of a seller’s market and buyer’s market is real. With the expansion of anonymous social media like glassdoor.com, firms need to be very cognizant of how each applicant is treated during interview and employment periods. Lee: We look for commitment from our new recruits, and we like to reciprocate that commitment, so we typically do not hire temps. Byrnes: It is important to examine a firm’s business model, to make sure that its workforce structure is realistically compatible to that model. My clients assemble a strong workforce, and within that structure, appropriately build teams on a project-by-project basis.
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