A Talentist: Buildings that Stand

In 1979 Christopher Alexander published a book titled The Timeless Way of Building. Alexander opens the book by saying:

There is one timeless way of building… It is not possible to make great buildings, or beautiful places, places where you feel yourself, places where you feel alive, except by following this way.

For recruiters that “one way” is transparency and authenticity.

In our virtual time it is easy to forget that we find ourselves as much through the buildings we occupy as through the relationships we keep. We may be LinkedIn to a thousand people, but we are only truly connected to a relatively few of those individuals, and that connection often began in a building.

Most of our modern social networking has become ego-centric and self-gratifying. And while both of these motivators may be timeless, neither leads to what we are trying to accomplish. We seek to “count” how many people we know (I certainly have) only to lose site of the richness of the buildings through which those relationships have become created. If I am only concerned with filling a requisition I may only care that I know five people who may fill the job. But if we are all concerned with building affiliations of people who may someday be of as much service to us as we are to them, then the buildings those people have occupied become every bit as important as my knowledge of that individual’s existence. Our need to immediately satisfy a hiring manager’s need may have undermined the age-old practice of creating genuine and useful relationships. We cannot let a new innovation undermine our basic human connections.

When we recruit we build. We tell people that they will participate in creating something, and through that creation they will lay the foundation for those yet to arrive. This is how we build in the most obvious sense. There is another way we build that is more ephemeral, but in a way, far more important. As recruiters we build through the brands we create. Brands are structures for shelter and attraction. They are convenient shorthand to describe the richness of the experience that we wish our future employees to inhabit. In this sense brands are attractors. It is easy to believe that the more powerful the attractor the more powerful the brand. But great brands are far more important than a nice front yard and new coat of paint. Brands are the entire structure: every room, every knob and fireplace and patio.

When we endeavor to build a brand we are attempting to create a virtual building, a building that is not there, but that people want to visit and, one day perhaps, inhabit. Our branding activities are a tactic admission that all our relationships with our future candidates must first create interesting and important buildings.

Since we don’t literally deliver a building to every candidate, we use words to create a structure in which the candidate’s mind can start to dwell. These words are as important as the real structures within which we sit. But words seem so easy to assemble into pretty sentences that it is easy to be careless. As we build our house we work diligently to ensure that the people within that building are not harmed by failing timbers or loose boards, yet we all too frequently forget that the same care must be applied to the virtual buildings we create through our words.

If our words paint our virtual building blue we will encourage all those who love the color blue to work with us. When they arrive only to find a yellow building they will be disappointed. We may still “close” them. They may still choose to work with us. But that disappointment is a foundation for a different building than where we want their mind to dwell. The concrete of this foundation is a deeply held belief that in the world the company (and, by extension, the recruiter) creates, words and reality do not correspond. The yellow building will speak to them every day of the incipient frustration of the next meeting, the next seemingly thoughtless strategic decision. Over time this other building occupies ever more space, becoming a smoky filter through which all management actions are perceived. Every ambiguous signal is interpreted to the company’s disadvantage, until, in the end, we are left with the wreckage of that original disappointment: the cost of finding someone to take that disgruntled person’s place and the cost of trying to disarm the viral message of disgust that emanates from their home computer and mobile phone. The yellow building is always razed. It is just a matter of time.

The greatest possible risk we can take in the development of our brand buildings is that we focus more on the decoration than the architecture, more on the filigree than the foundation. When we hurriedly cover a hole in a wall with a pretty picture we create the future disappointment of the employee who finds the hole, but even worse, sees physical evidence of our duplicity in trying to cover it up. Better to tell the candidate “We have some holes in our walls, but the location may be of interest and the building is (strong, interesting, exciting, vibrant, daring…).” Better not to point out the pretty pictures; best to point to the hole before they find it.

There is a timeless way to building, and it starts with transparency and authenticity. There must be coherence between our words (our brand) and our daily work realities (our building). The language we use to recruit is the brand within which we dwell, and we therefore must be every bit as careful in how we create and maintain our virtual buildings as with the roofs over our heads. Or, as Alexander said:

If your language is empty, your buildings cannot be full. If you language is poor, you cannot make good buildings until you enrich your language. If your language is rigid, your buildings must be rigid. If your language is florid, your buildings will be florid. Your language generates the buildings you make, and the buildings live or not, according to the life your language has.

* I owe John Sumser much thanks for sending me The Timeless Way of Building several years ago as part of the Interbiznet book club.