Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 29 – Part 2 – Attracting and retaining new surveyors to your business with Hilary Grayson, Sava
60 Plays1 year ago
In part TWO, of this week's episode with Hilary Grayson, we're discussing how to attract new candidates to your business.
Hilary joined Sava in 2003 and is now a Director focusing much of her time on the development of new qualifications.
Following a degree in Estate Management at Southbank Polytechnic (now LSBU), Hilary qualified as a General Practice Surveyor in 1983 leading her to work for private consultancies in London and Bromley Council before joining RICS at Great George Street. She joined Surveyors and Valuers Accreditation Ltd which was later acquired by NES Ltd (now Sava). At Sava, she went on to set up the original assessment centre and created the Diploma in Residential Surveying and Valuation.
In part two, we cover:
🗞️ The importance of marketing and sales processes to attract new blood into the surveying profession
🎓 What a typical graduate looks like / is there one?
👋 How to attract new graduates to your practice
🫶 How to support and train new graduates
✅ The benefits of graduates who come from non-property backgrounds
Plus more...
Recommended
Transcript
Attracting New Talent: Challenges and Strategies
00:00:00
Speaker
So for our second topic we're going to have a look at attracting new candidates into your business and then obviously how you sort of train them well and keep your teams trained well generally over time. I suppose in starting on the first part how do you successfully attract new people to your business? Whether that's I suppose whether that's Harvard graduates or whether that's you know experience fairs generally. Do you have thoughts on the best ways of attracting new people to
00:00:28
Speaker
That's really interesting and I'm not sure quite how businesses
00:00:42
Speaker
businesses, so residential surveyors and valuing businesses, quite how they go about attracting new blood into the sort of profession. And if I'm honest with you, I don't think they do. And I completely get why because that's not what they're about. Traditionally, I think it was very much left to the big corporate
00:01:11
Speaker
And they would just basically go around the troll around the universities the graduates and pick up graduates and that was how they that was the only new blood coming in.
00:01:22
Speaker
We are, I think one of the things that we have done, and I'm not sure that people really appreciate how much effort goes into this, one of the things we have done is we've invested a huge amount in our marketing processes
00:01:39
Speaker
and our sort of sales processes and sales channels because we are getting out there and finding people who may not have thought surveying was an option and it's not easy and it is a bit of a needle in a haystack job
00:02:00
Speaker
But we look to generate a certain number of leads every week because we know that only a small percentage of those leads will actually turn into potential sales for all the right reasons, you know, because it's not for them or whatever.
Creating Qualifications for Fresh Talent
00:02:16
Speaker
So we have these target on leads that we look for every week in order to keep our sort of funnel of new blood coming through. I think that it's probably fair to say
00:02:34
Speaker
that other than the new graduates that still come through on various corporate programs, we are probably the only, the key route for bringing new blood into the profession. Because certainly when we started this qualification,
00:02:50
Speaker
There was basically, it was a bit of a closed shop and everybody was chasing the same dwindling pool of surveyors and people were just jumping from one firm to one other firm to another firm. There was no fresh blood coming in and that was one of the drivers to create the qualification in the first place.
00:03:08
Speaker
So I think, you know, it's hard work, but I think we're good at it. I think we're very good at it. But, you know, we have a PR company. We play stories in national media, in main media as well. We've been trying to play something recently in the Metro, I think, about one of our graduates who was
00:03:32
Speaker
salon to Surveyor because she started as a hairdresser and came through our process. She won the RICS Young Surveyor last year in the residential category. So we invest a lot in that sort of thing to spark people's ideas. Yeah, and it takes quite a long time. I think the average of somebody being in our CRM before they buy a course is about 18
Graduate Expectations Across Backgrounds
00:03:58
Speaker
months.
00:03:58
Speaker
and I know that recently we had one guy start a course and he said I first contacted you eight years ago and it took him eight years to commit so you know and that's fair enough it to take that length of time to work out that this was really for him. It does what you said as well about working out this for you and having the right support at the right time and yeah everything else is aligned isn't it? Yeah, yeah. From the candidates that or your graduates sorry off the program do you know what the
00:04:27
Speaker
typically looking for from a surveying firm. I see it'll be varied. It's very varied, it's very varied, it would depend on their background, it would depend on their experiences. We've got the average age of our graduate, well the average age of our learners is mid to late 30s, so by definition most people have done something else, so therefore
00:04:53
Speaker
what they have done will then influence where they go afterwards.
Tailored Training for New Surveyors
00:04:59
Speaker
So quite about two or three years ago now we had a graduate who had been in the police force and he found the
00:05:12
Speaker
the bureaucracy of being in the police completely stifling. And he knew that there was no way that he could cope in a big corporate environment. That was what he wanted to get out of. So he's actually ended up now self-employed and he has got his own practice.
00:05:30
Speaker
because that was what, you know, that was what he needed that escape from that corporate world. But you'll have others who actually they do want the company car, they want the salary, they don't want to worry about where the next job is coming from. And they want that safety net that some of the larger employers will put in place. So it's a bit horses for courses, you can't, there's no sort of one size fits all really. That makes sense. Yeah. Okay, so I suppose my next question then as a
00:05:59
Speaker
training provider obviously you're very skilled at this side of things so if you are bringing someone new into your business particularly if it's a Sarva graduate as an example someone sort of newer to the industry how can you support them better and what does a good training program look like from a perspective of starting through to you know ongoing reviews?
00:06:21
Speaker
So that will depend on the businesses. Businesses like EServe, they will usually take on graduates at about 80% through the process. They don't wait for them to finish. And then because of the way they work with their lenders, they have quite a structured kind of induction process.
00:06:43
Speaker
Which gradually means that an individual build up the number of inspections, evaluations that they do a day and they'll start with the vanilla stuff and get onto the more and more complicated. It's very much a hand holding and a risk managed process because of the way they work with their lender clients.
00:07:02
Speaker
Smaller businesses, I think it's a case of you have to make a judgement on the learner. And again, it's a bit of a not of a one size fits all. So if you've got somebody who has been running their own business perhaps,
00:07:23
Speaker
who's got a lot of experience on site, you would need to have a much more flexible and open approach almost to what can they teach you as much as what can you teach them.
00:07:40
Speaker
recognize that when people leave us, they are not experienced surveyors, they are new surveyors, but they could be very experienced in something else and work to those skills if you like.
Enriching the Profession with Diverse Backgrounds
00:07:56
Speaker
If somebody is really, really skilled at communication because they were in marketing perhaps before,
00:08:02
Speaker
then work with them to review all of your communication processes with your customers. And while you and they are doing that, then that will include report writing and the delivery reports and you will begin to meld together. So I think it's...
00:08:22
Speaker
It's a tricky one to answer. Just recognize they're not experienced, they're new surveyors, but they could be incredibly experienced in other environments. Like the policeman, really, really experienced on health and safety. My goodness me, walking up a drive with him,
00:08:39
Speaker
he will see risks as a surveyor, you wouldn't even occur to you because he will always have been cutely trained around crime scenes and risks associated with those sorts of things and very different to you walking up thinking, oh, well, you know, it's the age of the property or, you know,
00:09:05
Speaker
location, things like that. I think it's really interesting how a graduate could potentially enrich what you already do as a
Role of Assessors and Trainers in Surveying
00:09:16
Speaker
small business. That's an interesting point then actually. I suppose it's quite important to try and look at people you bring on having
00:09:22
Speaker
You've been different to you in terms of you know, not just I mean not everybody is you know mid late 30s I mean, we've got some people now, you know, we've got several people on the course of 2022, you know, they won't have those experiences But you know if somebody has been doing something for the last 15 20 years They have got a lot to offer you You know, it really
00:09:44
Speaker
just because it wasn't surveying, just because it might have been they were in the army, they were in the RAF, they were in the police force, they were teachers, they will have skills and experiences and knowledge that you won't have and that makes it much richer actually, that we're not just cloning lots of new sort of surveyors and blank
00:10:08
Speaker
sort of slates, what we're doing is we're taking, we're making, I believe we're making the profession more varied and more interesting.
00:10:16
Speaker
If you're then a surveyor that wants to see how you can potentially help from a trainer perspective or assessor perspective and help with new people coming through that are already on the course, are there ways they can get involved with that? Yes, that's a really good question because we are only successful because of our assessor and trainer team. There's no doubt about it.
00:10:39
Speaker
We are always on the lookout for assessors in particular. We've got a team of about 40 at the moment, assessors. Now, they drop in and then drop off. But because of the arrangement we have with RICS, they have to be chartered swears. We have to use RICS. It can be asset risks as well. But you have to be RICS members. So we're always looking for assessors to bring on board.
00:11:04
Speaker
We put you through a training process because we're off-qual regulated, assessment has to be done in a certain structured way that meets the off-qual standards and we'll train and induct you into that process.
00:11:22
Speaker
And we tend to recruit our trainers now from the assessor pool. So if the assessors sort of kind of get it and are seen to be committed and engage with us, then we might sort of start to bring them forward to train.
00:11:38
Speaker
Training is a bit of a skill. It's a bit of an art form. So it's not only about having the technical knowledge, but it's about being able to share that technical knowledge and not everybody can. And in fact, some people are really, really good in a live environment.
00:11:54
Speaker
and some people are really good in a virtual classroom environment, and some people are great in small groups of 10, but useless in the classroom. So we work then, we usually, as I say, pick from our assessors and then bring them on to our training, into the training cohort, depending on where they are most comfortable and where their communication skills are sort of best suited.
00:12:23
Speaker
But if anybody is interested in being an assessor, give us a ring. I can imagine it's quite a useful thing to do because it gives you a chance yourself to reflect on what you know and how well you're communicating it. Because if you're not able to communicate it well to a learner,
00:12:38
Speaker
potentially you're not then communicating it as well as you could be in a report to a customer. Do you know what? I completely agree. I think our assessors in particular, I think they get a huge amount of value from what they do with this. So even though you're assessing on your own, you are in a network, you're sort of kind of supervised, not quite the right word, but can't make it a better one for the moment, but by a more experienced assessor.
00:13:05
Speaker
But there's always the opportunity to discuss and to evaluate and to consider things. And I think the assessors really value that. It gives, especially if you've been a sort of a sole practitioner or in a very small business, the ability to sit down with a group of like-minded people and sort of say, discuss how evaluation was done or discuss an approach to this or whether that fits certain lending criteria.
00:13:34
Speaker
I think they find that really valuable and we provide a lot of CPD for our assessors. I think some of them just rely on us for the CPD and actually assessing. It's a great way to give back to the profession as well. There's quite a few benefits in there I think. I think one of the other one is just that social aspect I would imagine because for a lot of people, particularly if you're a solo practitioner,
Preview: Sustainability in Surveying
00:13:58
Speaker
You're out on the road a lot on your own. So there's opportunities to network and get back together, which is quite good. Interestingly, I suppose we'll move on. So tune in for sustainability and everything about sustainability and surveying.