Ingram's October 2023

Q: Then there are external fac tors—inflation, for example, in the way it affects compensation structures, or rising interest rates that might affect your project pipeline after you’ve based your hiring strategy on certain revenue projections. How do those factor in? A: We’re always benchmarking to make sure we’re staying competitive in the labor market, whether that’s from a compensation or benefits perspective. What we’ve seen over the course of the last couple of years with changes in the labor market, costs are escalating faster than in previous years, with inflation and the envi ronment we’re in. But we’ve stayed true to our philosophies in regard to benefits and compensation. We believe what we have done is try to pay more attention to the real-time pulse of what’s happening with candidates or exits, getting additional data points there. We always did to a certain degree, but relying more on that to stay up to date on what’s happening is important to us. Q: Kansas City has long been a center of excellence in design/build, how does your growth change the appeal to candidates for the region overall? A: We’re very proud of Kansas City and love serving our community, and we regularly team up with organizations to help attract talent to the area. We partner with TeamKC, a strategic initiative of the Kansas City Area Development Council (KCADC) and other groups that recog nize that together, we can make a bigger impact than any one of us can indepen dently. I think we’ve seen the benefits of that partnership in bringing people to the area. For us, even if they don’t end up at Burns & McDonnell, we know it’s a good thing for Kansas City to bring that level of talent here. It solidifies the region as a place where the engineering, archi tecture and construction work force is a strong part of the community. We want to bring talent to Kansas City, and if it’s good for Kansas City, it’s good for Burns & McDonnell, too.

pipeline to get those candidates interested in STEM early on in their educational experience, all the way down to elemen tary school. We want them interested in STEM so that they will pursue that in their education. We’ve actually hired full-time employee-owners who participated in our STEM outreach events and programs as elementary, middle school and high school students. That’s a great feeling to know we helped inspire students to pursue a STEM career, and we hope we’ll have the chance to consider more students as future candi dates some day. Q: Moving on from recruitment, tell us about adjustments that have been made to on-boarding processes with so many new faces involved. A: We’ve always been very intention- al about creating a good experience for individuals as they step into Burns & McDonnell and transition from being candidate to employee. We want to equip them for success when they start with us, and we’ve built a pretty strong foundation to make sure that happens. Q: You then have to expand on that foundation with hiring at these levels, don’t you? A: From a scaling perspective, we had to make some tweaks to that so everything was right in terms of who is arriving, and for the candidates themselves, to make sure we remained focused on having everything in place to create a great experience and have all the information they need at the right time. We’re growing not just in Kansas City, but in all of our locations, and we want that experience to be consistent for everyone. We shifted from in-person ori entation for new hires to having virtual meetings with them, providing opportu nities for subject-matter experts to speak to them directly, so that everyone hears the same message, has the same com munication about accessing resources, receives the same training. We weave that all together to create consistent, positive experiences.

“We want to bring talent to Kansas City, and if it’s good for Kansas City, it’s good for Burns & McDonnell, too.”

— Renee Gartelos, Director of Human Resources, Burns & McDonnell

background. How can they bring better solutions to the way we look at things? How are people going to make us better as an organization? Shifting the conversa tion that way often helps us identify and consider new potential candidates for the roles we have. We’re really good at coming up with solutions around here, so at times, we might change what we thought was a specific job or role, step back and say we can’t find the right person, so what other ways can we look at this? Maybe this job requires two different roles, or a completely different role to be an opportunity for an internal or a different external candidate. Q: Are those challenges amplified by concerns about diversity? A: We recognize that finding diverse candidates, particularly in the STEM world, continues to be a challenge. There simply are not enough women and minori ties in this space. So we think about that

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I ngr am ’ s

Kansas City’s Business Media

October 2023