Why the Best Builders Hire for Character, Not Experience

For years, Dornford Building Group hired the way most companies do, weighting experience and how well someone interviewed.

Looking back, Jake and Nico found that this was not a reliable indicator of who would still be performing well a year later. A skilled hire who does not fit the culture might work in the short term, but the people who genuinely worked out over time were the ones who shared the company's values.

The pull toward the experienced candidate is strong, because a skilled hire promises less training and a faster start. Nearly every business owner has felt it.

The pattern Jake and Nico kept seeing, though, was that the character-driven choice was the better one for the long term almost every time.

A former CEO of Porsche summed up the principle as hiring character and training skill. Competence can be taught, but the values that make someone reliable, accountable and growth-minded are far harder to install.

Building the interview around your values

Hiring for character only works if you define what character means for your company and then test for it deliberately. Dornford Building Group identified a clear set of core values, including caring for the business, being growth-oriented, taking responsibility, a will to win, and excellence. They then built a bank of around twenty interview questions directly around those values, and Jake and Nico choose which to ask in each interview.

The questions are designed to reveal how a candidate actually thinks. One example, if you had the choice of working an hour of overtime today or leaving the job to finish tomorrow, which would you choose? The answer shows whether someone would help the company by staying an extra hour or would rather return the next day and lose time setting up again. Questions like this surface a person's instincts far better than a list of past roles, and they only work when the company knows precisely what it values. Writing those expectations down is part of the same discipline that governs how policy works in a professional building company, where documented standards replace vague hope that people will simply behave the right way.

Make accountability run both ways

Hiring for values does not end at the interview. Dornford Building Group reinforces its values every week in a Friday reflections meeting, recognising the people who have demonstrated them and encouraging the behaviour they want to see. The values also sit inside every quarterly review. Alongside the usual performance section, there is a section on how well the team member is living the company's values, and, importantly, a section on how well their managers are living those values too.

That two-way accountability is what stops values from becoming a poster on the wall. Staff get to assess whether their leaders embody what the company preaches, which keeps Jake and Nico honest and models the standard they expect. Leaders holding themselves to the same measure they set for others is a core part of developing yourself as an owner and leader, and it is what earns the right to expect values-aligned behaviour from everyone else.

Deal with problems the day they appear

There is one more habit that makes the whole system work. Dornford Building Group does not save feedback for the quarterly review. When an issue arises, they address it immediately, which takes courage and grows easier with practice. Dealing with a problem straight away is uncomfortable, but letting it fester is worse, because a small issue left alone becomes a large one that is far harder to resolve.

The payoff is that the quarterly review becomes a forward-looking, low-stress conversation about goals rather than a dreaded recital of everything done wrong over three months. Dornford Building Group even blends personal goals with work goals in those reviews, so people are helped to achieve what they want professionally and personally. That combination of shared values, two-way accountability and immediate feedback is what turns a group of hires into a team, and it is the human foundation beneath any effort to scale a custom home building company with systems. Systems run the work, but values-aligned people are what make the systems stick.

If your best hires keep leaving and your interviews keep misfiring, the problem is usually what you are screening for.