Episode 29 – Part 2 – Attracting and retaining new surveyors to your business with Hilary Grayson, Sava

The following transcript is autogenerated so may contain errors.

Matt Nally  

For our second topic, we’re gonna have Look at attracting new candidates into your business. And then obviously how you sort of train them well and keep your keep your teams trained well, generally over time. I suppose I’m 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 experience fairs generally, do you have thoughts on the best ways of attracting new people to?

Hilary Grayson

That’s, that’s really that’s really interesting. And I’m, I’m not sure quite how, how businesses, businesses, so residential surveyors and valuing businesses, quite how they go about attracting new blood into into the, into the, into the sort of profession. And I, 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, employers, country, economists, etc. And they would just basically go around the troll, run the universities, the graduates and pick up graduates. And that was how they, that was the only new blood coming in. We, 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, and our such kind of sales processes and sales channels. Because we are, 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. But we, 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. So we have these target on leads that we that we that we look for every week in order to keep our sort of kind of funnel of new blood coming through. I think that it’s probably fair to say that other than the new graduates that still come through on various corporate programmes, we are probably the only the key route for bringing new blood into the profession. Because certainly when we started this qualification, there was basically it was a bit of a closed shop, and everybody was chasing the same dwindling pool or surveyors, and people were just jumping from one firm to another 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. So I think, you know, it’s hard work. And but I think we’re good at it. I think we’re very good at it. But yet we’ve 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 a one of our graduates who was salon to surveyor because she started as a hairdresser. And came through our process. She won the the RSS Yun severe last year in the residential category, you know, and it’s so we invest a lot in that sort of thing to spark people’s ideas. Yeah. Yeah. And it takes, it takes quite a long time. I think the average of somebody being in our CRM before they buy a course is about 18 months. And I know that recently, we had one guy started course and he’d be 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 didn’t take like that length of time to work out that this was really for him. But

Matt Nally

it doesn’t really what you said as well about working out it’s for you and having the right support the right time. And yeah, everything has to align, doesn’t it? Yeah. Yeah. From the candidates that are your graduate story off the programme. Do you know what they’re typically looking for from a surveying firm? I see it very, but

Hilary Grayson

very, it’s very varied. It’s very, very varied. It would depend on their background. It would depend on their experiences. We’ve got the average age of our graduate at the with the average age of our learners is mid to late 30s. So by definition, most people have done something else. So therefore, what they have done, will then influence where they go afterwards. So quite bad to say Two years ago now, we had a graduate who had been in the police force. And he read and he, he found the 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 worked, he has got his own practice. 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 the weapon or where the next job is coming from, or, and they want that safety net that some of the larger employers will put in place. So it’s, it’s a bit horses for courses, you can’t there’s no sort of one size fits all. Really.

Matt Nally

That makes sense. Yeah, I guess I suppose my next question, then, as a 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 server graduate, as an example, someone’s sort of newer to the industry? How can you support them better, and what does a good training programme look like from a perspective of starting through to, you know, ongoing reviews.

Hilary Grayson

So that will, that will depend on the businesses, businesses like II serve, they will usually take on graduates at about 80% through the processor, 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. Which gradually means that an individual will 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. smaller businesses, I think it’s a case of, I think it’s a case of you have to, 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 working running their own business, perhaps, who’s got a lot of experience on site, you would need to have a sort of a much more sort of flexible and open approach almost to what can they teach you as much as what can you teach them. recognise that when people leave us, they are not experienced surveyors, they are new surveyors, but they could be very experienced in something else. And, and work work to those work to those skills, if you like, you know, if somebody is really really skilled at communication, because they were in marketing perhaps before, then work with them to review all of your communication processes with your, with your customers. And while you and they are doing that, then, you know, that will include report writing and the delivering reports. And, and your, you will begin to meld together. So I think it’s some, it’s a tricky, it’s a tricky one to answer. Just recognise, they’re not experienced, they’re new surveyors, but they could be incredibly experienced in other environments, you know, like, like the policeman, really, really experienced on health and safety. My goodness, me, you know, walking up a drive with him, he will see risks as a surveyor, well, you wouldn’t even occur wouldn’t even occur to you. Because he will always have he will have been cutely trained around sort of crime scenes, and risks associated with those as those sorts of things and very different to you walking up thinking, Oh, well, you know, it’s age of the property or, you know, location, things like that. It’s a, it is, I think it’s really interesting how, how, how, how a graduate could potentially enrich what you already do as a small business.

Matt Nally

That’s an interesting point that actually says it, I suppose it’s quite important to try and look at people you bring on having being different to you in terms of, you know, not just

Hilary Grayson 

Well, 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 call. So 2122, you know, they weren’t have those sort of experiences. But you know, if somebody has been doing something for the last 1520 years, they have got a lot to offer you. You know, it really, 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 knowledge that you that you won’t have and it’s like it and that makes them that makes that much richer actually, that we’re not just cloning lots of new sort of surveyors and blank slates. What we’re doing is we’re taking we’re making it, I believe we’re making the profession more varied and more interesting.

Matt Nally

If you’re then a surveyor that wants to see how you can potentially help from a trainer perspective, or assess perspective and help with new people coming through, they’re already on the course. Are there ways they can get involved? Yeah,

Hilary Grayson

that’s yes, that’s a really good question about because this only, we are only successful, because of our assessor and trainer team. There’s no doubt about it. 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 our ICs, they have to be Chartered Surveyors, we have to use our ICS we can be asset rigs as well. So but you have to be RSS members. So we’re we’re always looking for, for assessors to bring on board, that’s theirs, 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 call standards. And we’ll train and and induct you into that process. And, and we also we tend to recruit our trainers now from the assessor pool. So if the assessors sort of kind of get it and seem to be committed and engaged with us, then we might sort of start to bring them forward to train training is a bit of a skill, it’s a bit of an art form. So it’s not only about having the technical, technical knowledge, but it’s about being able to share that technical knowledge. And, and not everybody can. And in fact, some people are really, really good in a live environment. 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. You know, so we 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 on where they where they are most comfortable, and where their communication skills are sort of best, best suited. But if anybody is interested in being an assessor, give us a ring, I’d

Matt Nally

like to discuss quite a useful thing to do because it gives you a chance yourself to reflect on what you know and and how you’re communicating it because you’re not able to communicate it well to a learner, potentially, you know, then communicating it as well as you could be in a report to a customer.

Hilary Grayson

I completely agree. I think our assessors in particular, I think they get a huge amount of value from what they do with us. Because you’re so even though you’re assessing on your own, that you are in a network, you’re sort of kind of supervised not quite the right word, but I can’t think of a better one for the moment, but by a more experienced assessor. But there’s always the opportunity to discuss and to evaluate and to consider things and and I think the assessors really value that it gives, especially if you’ve been a sort of a, you know, 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. I think I think that I think they find that really valuable and we we provide a lot of CPD for our assessors. I think some of them just rely on us for the CPD for their and actually assessing. You know, it’s it’s a great way to give back to the to the profession as well. It’s

Matt Nally 

got a few benefits in there. I think I think one of the other one is just that social aspects, I would I would imagine, because it’s for a lot of people, particularly if you’re a sole practitioner, 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.