The firms I've worked for, or known about, want someone who is going to stay around. Being willing to move in from out-of-area implies that you'd also be willing to move out, should the right opportunity arise. Turn-over rates are pretty normal at these places. They lose people with regularity, but there are those folks they get and hang on to. Those are the ones they want. The likelihood of such an employee increases with a local-yokel.
I am currently having issues with this as well... or maybe my portfolio sucks, probably the latter.
This unfortunately makes it difficult to move anywhere. It's much nicer to move somewhere if you know there's a job waiting for you.
On the flip-side, employers do look for reliability, so it's understandable that they would go for someone local. The only downside I see to this is diversity reduction within firms. In the end, I think reliability is considered a much more valuable trait than the diversity one might bring from being from outside the area. And as mentioned above, employee retention is a major consideration for most firms.
Seattle. I ended up talking with someone there who mentioned that firms were currently a bit on edge about hiring, much more so when hiring from outside.
For a city that is a global competitor for architecture you might want to look at Chicago, New York, Atlanta, D.C., LA and San Francisco, apart from a handful of large firms Seattle is not a global hub or architecture and design on the scale of the above mentioned US cities. Many of the supper tall buildings underway or recently completed came from Chicago and New York based firms and in Chicago the labor market is very tight so finding a job should be easier.
It depends what you do and how much experience you have at it. If you're a designer, production person, or assistant PM type, with less than 8-10 years of experience, then most firms are going to think they can find someone more local. You'd have to have a good spiel about how you're moving to that location for deeply important reasons. On the other hand if you're a PM with 10-20 years of experience in the types of projects that they do, or if you're the elusive experienced spec writer under the age of 65, then in the current hiring climate they'll probably move you across the country.
If the firm is anti-relocation, they are not the right fit. It probably means they are nervous you would bail not too long after you start, which in turn indicates they have a crap work environment.
I can also imagine that practice differs from state to state so a certain amount of training would be saved if a firm went with a local employee with experience in that city/county/state
So my boss explained this to me, the hiring of a person is a huge risk, bringing someone one who is local is easier as the firm will likely not pay for relocation expenses and the new person joining the team is likely to be settled into the city and the climate, what we don't want is to bring in someone, pay for their training and then have them leave because they don't like Chicago or our winters or some other reason. If you are a regional candidate this might not be a factor but from an employer's standpoint we are trying to reduce the risk and the cost of hiring as much as possible as we are already losing months of income in the time it takes for a new employee to become profitable and the billable hours other employees need to spend training that employee.
I would advise you to just bite the bullet and move to where you want your career to enter into it's next step, looking as a local is a huge advantage and the economy and job market is really good in some places.
Each city has it's advantages and problems, look deeper into the cost of living, the transit and the number and quality of firms you can potentially work for. Many cities, Chicago included, are affordable and if you have the ability to live on a tight budget for a while you can probably make the move to many of the reasonably affordable cities and not starve. The risk is money and time but the rewards is to become a professional in a city you will love with a community of professionals doing work you admire and respect.
Best you can do is say in your cover letter you will move at your expense. Or get a local phone# and use call forwarding to fake it till you make it. You love that little Thai place down the street in your new neighborhood.
Oct 9, 18 11:08 am ·
·
thisisnotmyname
Lying is never a good idea in job hunting, but it's a good idea to set up a local mailing address and local phone number as part of your job search. It shows you are "in the process of moving". The address can easily be done at a UPS Store or similar mailbox place. Rightly or wrongly, a lot of firms will prioritize pursuing the applicants that appear to be local. At some point you will have to disclose your true current location to the prospective employer, but hopefully you have impressed them enough that the relocation issue is not a deal breaker.
If the majority of projects are local it makes total sense to me to hire local people who know local condition, the place, the people, the city administrators etc.
Hiring someone who's from out of town has the added risk of that person moving to town/city X, and deciding 6 months later that they don't like it there and leaving. We typically lose money on our employees for the first 6 months they work for us, as they're productivity is understandably low as they learn the ropes. There's nothing worse than an employee leaving after 6 months. On the times its happened, I've thought to myself that I might as well have just piled up $5K on the floor and burned it - I'd be in the same place financially - but have saved all the now wasted time spent training him/her.
Oct 9, 18 6:17 pm ·
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randomised
No wonder they're leaving if you pay them $5K/6 per month :)
Oct 10, 18 3:40 am ·
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threadkilla
I'm with randomised - you won't be able to retain anyone with that attitude. $5K / 6 mo. = $5.20/hr in a regular 40 hr workweek scenario. And I have a hunch you're working those poor kids OT.
Doesn't McDonald's pay around $8-9/hr?
Oct 10, 18 5:00 am ·
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Flatfish
He didn't mean he paid them only 5k. He meant that's what was wasted in time to train them and lost productivity. Sheesh, you're all much too literal!
Oct 10, 18 9:15 am ·
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randomised
I put a smiley face for a reason!
Oct 10, 18 10:15 am ·
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kjdt
You're looking at this as if there were an unlimited number of hours that all of us can work, and that we can bill a new person's slower work the same as we would bill an experienced person's work. Neither is true. Let's say my team is working on a few projects, for which there are agreed-upon fees. Longtime Employee Sarah typically works efficiently and I can bill 35 hours or more of her time per week. I myself allot much of my time to non-billable tasks, but am still usually about 40% billable. Now let's say Sarah decides to leave the firm - it's not personal or about job dissatisfaction, it's just that her husband landed his dream job on the opposite coast.
Now I spend a bunch of time on screening job applicants, and select New Hire Bob. Bob is perfectly willing to work well above and beyond 40 hours a week - but for his first few months it doesn't really matter - he takes a lot of supervision and training and though he's spending more hours on the projects than Sarah did, I still have to write off a lot of it as non-billable training, because he's not efficient yet and the fees can't absorb all the extra hours on those projects. Plus, all that training is an investment of time on my part, and it's taking a chunk out of my hours available for billable work. I already put in far more than 40 hours per week and there's nowhere else for more hours to come from - I have family commitments, community involvement, and other aspects of a real life.
Those are the costs associated with New Hire Bob. The thought is that in the long run he'll become as or more efficient than Sarah, and those costs will be worth that. But, if he becomes homesick because he wasn't prepared for life in my location - it's too cold and we don't care about his favorite sport and the political leanings rub him the wrong way. So he quits and moves back to Peoria, and I lose that investment of his and my time associated with his training. That's got nothing to do with what my firm was offering him in the work environment - he just didn't like it here. Now when I look for his replacement I'm more hesitant about long-distance applicants. See?
Oct 10, 18 3:41 pm ·
·
kjdt
So Rick what's the update on your job search? How about refraining from Rick-splaining how firms work to us until you have a full time week in a firm under your belt.
Oct 10, 18 3:52 pm ·
·
kjdt
I'm talking about working as an employee in an architecture firm that has more than 1 person. You spend all this time telling others how to run firms but you've never observed one except your own - and we know that your own firm isn't exactly successful. Get some perspective somewhere else. Learn a little.
Oct 10, 18 4:33 pm ·
·
kjdt
...which is why you should work for an architect. So you can work on real projects. And get experience. So you can finish IDP/AXP. So you can get licensed and work on whatever. And so you could learn some things about how firms operate and not sound like such a naive pretender trying to give advice about things you don't really know. Think about how it would be to actually know.
Oct 10, 18 6:59 pm ·
·
kjdt
... which is all complicated nonsense. No licensed architect is going to want to help you form that firm. As for you getting licensed: there are many states where you can do that with AXP and experience. You're a grownup. Relocate.
Oct 10, 18 7:49 pm ·
·
kjdt
If it's going to be "just paperwork" for you to set up a firm with two architects as your partners, and have them sign off on your experience at that firm, then you're just scamming the system.
Oct 10, 18 8:14 pm ·
·
kjdt
What's the incentive for any architect to want to join that firm? I know there are people who have similar arrangements - but in those cases the unlicensed person has something to offer, usually some combination of: established repeat client base; name recognition; venture capital. Why would any architect partner with you?
Oct 11, 18 9:18 am ·
·
jcarch
Wow, I'm off the internet for a couple of days, and find that my comment has lead to an OED's worth of replies including a PhD dissertation on how RickB will structure his future business. I'm both honored and horrified.
Oct 11, 18 9:36 am ·
·
kjdt
They can just as easily start their own residential contracting business. You don't bring anything special to it. Anyway the startup costs for a small residential contracting business average ~30k and given that you said it took you 4 or 5 years just to pay off 35k in student loans I'm guessing you don't have that sitting around to invest. There are very, very, very few architects who are going to care about a CPBD certificate - it brings no value. In the unlikely event that they did care, they could just pay for their own certificate - why bring you in at all? You need to stop fantasizing about complicated schemes and get a regular job. It's not that the paperwork for your schemes is complicated - anybody can do that - it's that it's complicated to run a profitable business and you've got more than a decade-long record demonstrating that you haven't got what it takes.
I was hired from “out of town” about a month before finishing school. It wasn’t easy, I filled/sent out about 40 resumes/cover letters/ portfolios. In the end I found a good opportunity in a city I’ve grown to love over the past couple of months.
There was a period when I was having panic attacks about finding work. Not hearing from some firms really was demoralizing, you would think they would at say “no thanks, we’re not hiring”.
Oct 10, 18 7:51 pm ·
·
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Are Architectural Firms Anti-Relocation?
It seems as though if you are not a local resident, local firms are not prone to hiring you... is that true and if so- why?
The firms I've worked for, or known about, want someone who is going to stay around. Being willing to move in from out-of-area implies that you'd also be willing to move out, should the right opportunity arise. Turn-over rates are pretty normal at these places. They lose people with regularity, but there are those folks they get and hang on to. Those are the ones they want. The likelihood of such an employee increases with a local-yokel.
I am currently having issues with this as well... or maybe my portfolio sucks, probably the latter.
This unfortunately makes it difficult to move anywhere. It's much nicer to move somewhere if you know there's a job waiting for you.
On the flip-side, employers do look for reliability, so it's understandable that they would go for someone local. The only downside I see to this is diversity reduction within firms. In the end, I think reliability is considered a much more valuable trait than the diversity one might bring from being from outside the area. And as mentioned above, employee retention is a major consideration for most firms.
Where are you trying to relocate to?
Seattle. I ended up talking with someone there who mentioned that firms were currently a bit on edge about hiring, much more so when hiring from outside.
For a city that is a global competitor for architecture you might want to look at Chicago, New York, Atlanta, D.C., LA and San Francisco, apart from a handful of large firms Seattle is not a global hub or architecture and design on the scale of the above mentioned US cities. Many of the supper tall buildings underway or recently completed came from Chicago and New York based firms and in Chicago the labor market is very tight so finding a job should be easier.
It depends what you do and how much experience you have at it. If you're a designer, production person, or assistant PM type, with less than 8-10 years of experience, then most firms are going to think they can find someone more local. You'd have to have a good spiel about how you're moving to that location for deeply important reasons. On the other hand if you're a PM with 10-20 years of experience in the types of projects that they do, or if you're the elusive experienced spec writer under the age of 65, then in the current hiring climate they'll probably move you across the country.
If the firm is anti-relocation, they are not the right fit. It probably means they are nervous you would bail not too long after you start, which in turn indicates they have a crap work environment.
I can also imagine that practice differs from state to state so a certain amount of training would be saved if a firm went with a local employee with experience in that city/county/state
So my boss explained this to me, the hiring of a person is a huge risk, bringing someone one who is local is easier as the firm will likely not pay for relocation expenses and the new person joining the team is likely to be settled into the city and the climate, what we don't want is to bring in someone, pay for their training and then have them leave because they don't like Chicago or our winters or some other reason. If you are a regional candidate this might not be a factor but from an employer's standpoint we are trying to reduce the risk and the cost of hiring as much as possible as we are already losing months of income in the time it takes for a new employee to become profitable and the billable hours other employees need to spend training that employee.
I would advise you to just bite the bullet and move to where you want your career to enter into it's next step, looking as a local is a huge advantage and the economy and job market is really good in some places.
Each city has it's advantages and problems, look deeper into the cost of living, the transit and the number and quality of firms you can potentially work for. Many cities, Chicago included, are affordable and if you have the ability to live on a tight budget for a while you can probably make the move to many of the reasonably affordable cities and not starve. The risk is money and time but the rewards is to become a professional in a city you will love with a community of professionals doing work you admire and respect.
Over and OUT
Peter N
Best you can do is say in your cover letter you will move at your expense. Or get a local phone# and use call forwarding to fake it till you make it. You love that little Thai place down the street in your new neighborhood.
Lying is never a good idea in job hunting, but it's a good idea to set up a local mailing address and local phone number as part of your job search. It shows you are "in the process of moving". The address can easily be done at a UPS Store or similar mailbox place. Rightly or wrongly, a lot of firms will prioritize pursuing the applicants that appear to be local. At some point you will have to disclose your true current location to the prospective employer, but hopefully you have impressed them enough that the relocation issue is not a deal breaker.
If the majority of projects are local it makes total sense to me to hire local people who know local condition, the place, the people, the city administrators etc.
Hiring someone who's from out of town has the added risk of that person moving to town/city X, and deciding 6 months later that they don't like it there and leaving. We typically lose money on our employees for the first 6 months they work for us, as they're productivity is understandably low as they learn the ropes. There's nothing worse than an employee leaving after 6 months. On the times its happened, I've thought to myself that I might as well have just piled up $5K on the floor and burned it - I'd be in the same place financially - but have saved all the now wasted time spent training him/her.
No wonder they're leaving if you pay them $5K/6 per month :)
I'm with randomised - you won't be able to retain anyone with that attitude. $5K / 6 mo. = $5.20/hr in a regular 40 hr workweek scenario. And I have a hunch you're working those poor kids OT. Doesn't McDonald's pay around $8-9/hr?
He didn't mean he paid them only 5k. He meant that's what was wasted in time to train them and lost productivity. Sheesh, you're all much too literal!
I put a smiley face for a reason!
You're looking at this as if there were an unlimited number of hours that all of us can work, and that we can bill a new person's slower work the same as we would bill an experienced person's work. Neither is true. Let's say my team is working on a few projects, for which there are agreed-upon fees. Longtime Employee Sarah typically works efficiently and I can bill 35 hours or more of her time per week. I myself allot much of my time to non-billable tasks, but am still usually about 40% billable. Now let's say Sarah decides to leave the firm - it's not personal or about job dissatisfaction, it's just that her husband landed his dream job on the opposite coast.
Now I spend a bunch of time on screening job applicants, and select New Hire Bob. Bob is perfectly willing to work well above and beyond 40 hours a week - but for his first few months it doesn't really matter - he takes a lot of supervision and training and though he's spending more hours on the projects than Sarah did, I still have to write off a lot of it as non-billable training, because he's not efficient yet and the fees can't absorb all the extra hours on those projects. Plus, all that training is an investment of time on my part, and it's taking a chunk out of my hours available for billable work. I already put in far more than 40 hours per week and there's nowhere else for more hours to come from - I have family commitments, community involvement, and other aspects of a real life.
Those are the costs associated with New Hire Bob. The thought is that in the long run he'll become as or more efficient than Sarah, and those costs will be worth that. But, if he becomes homesick because he wasn't prepared for life in my location - it's too cold and we don't care about his favorite sport and the political leanings rub him the wrong way. So he quits and moves back to Peoria, and I lose that investment of his and my time associated with his training. That's got nothing to do with what my firm was offering him in the work environment - he just didn't like it here. Now when I look for his replacement I'm more hesitant about long-distance applicants. See?
So Rick what's the update on your job search? How about refraining from Rick-splaining how firms work to us until you have a full time week in a firm under your belt.
I'm talking about working as an employee in an architecture firm that has more than 1 person. You spend all this time telling others how to run firms but you've never observed one except your own - and we know that your own firm isn't exactly successful. Get some perspective somewhere else. Learn a little.
...which is why you should work for an architect. So you can work on real projects. And get experience. So you can finish IDP/AXP. So you can get licensed and work on whatever. And so you could learn some things about how firms operate and not sound like such a naive pretender trying to give advice about things you don't really know. Think about how it would be to actually know.
... which is all complicated nonsense. No licensed architect is going to want to help you form that firm. As for you getting licensed: there are many states where you can do that with AXP and experience. You're a grownup. Relocate.
If it's going to be "just paperwork" for you to set up a firm with two architects as your partners, and have them sign off on your experience at that firm, then you're just scamming the system.
What's the incentive for any architect to want to join that firm? I know there are people who have similar arrangements - but in those cases the unlicensed person has something to offer, usually some combination of: established repeat client base; name recognition; venture capital. Why would any architect partner with you?
Wow, I'm off the internet for a couple of days, and find that my comment has lead to an OED's worth of replies including a PhD dissertation on how RickB will structure his future business. I'm both honored and horrified.
They can just as easily start their own residential contracting business. You don't bring anything special to it. Anyway the startup costs for a small residential contracting business average ~30k and given that you said it took you 4 or 5 years just to pay off 35k in student loans I'm guessing you don't have that sitting around to invest. There are very, very, very few architects who are going to care about a CPBD certificate - it brings no value. In the unlikely event that they did care, they could just pay for their own certificate - why bring you in at all? You need to stop fantasizing about complicated schemes and get a regular job. It's not that the paperwork for your schemes is complicated - anybody can do that - it's that it's complicated to run a profitable business and you've got more than a decade-long record demonstrating that you haven't got what it takes.
I was hired from “out of town” about a month before finishing school. It wasn’t easy, I filled/sent out about 40 resumes/cover letters/ portfolios. In the end I found a good opportunity in a city I’ve grown to love over the past couple of months.
There was a period when I was having panic attacks about finding work. Not hearing from some firms really was demoralizing, you would think they would at say “no thanks, we’re not hiring”.
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