We’ve hired people over the years who looked perfect on paper. Tier one experience, the right project history, every box ticked before they walked in the door. Some of them left within months, the moment the job stopped being straightforward. We have also hired people with far less to show for themselves on paper, who stayed through the parts of a project nobody enjoys and worked out what needed to happen next without being told. Twenty years into running Westforce Construction has taught us that experience on its own rarely gets anyone through a hard project. Attitude does. And whether someone has both does not usually show up until the hard times actually arrive.
Construction in Western Australia does not stay still long enough for a CV to describe it accurately. A site in the Pilbara or the Goldfields can shift scope or timeline within a single week, and whoever is standing on it needs to adjust to it. Experience earned on a different project, in a different region, does not always translate. What matters more is whether someone is willing to learn something new when the job demands it, and whether they will still be there when the work gets harder rather than easier. We have watched both types of hire play out often enough now to know which one is usually still standing when a project gets hard.
When we take a step back and look at who leads teams and projects at Westforce today, very few of them arrived in a role that matched their background at the time. Most put their hand up for something they had not done before, stayed on a project through a stretch that was genuinely difficult, and were given room to learn on the job rather than being expected to already know it. Nobody was handed the responsibility they now carry. They grew into it, usually because someone backed them before they had proven they deserved it, and then they proved it anyway. A business does not end up with a leadership team shaped that way by chance. It takes years of choosing attitude over pedigree in hiring decisions that were not always easy to justify at the time. It is one of the few things we can say with confidence about how Westforce has grown.
We do not say this often enough, so it is worth saying plainly here. The people who have stayed with Westforce through twenty years of change deserve more credit than a hiring philosophy gives them. They have adapted to new sites and shifting demands more times than either of us could count, and they have mostly done it without much fuss. Some started in roles quite different from the ones they hold now. Others have stayed on site through stretches that would have sent plenty of people looking for the door. We are proud of the work Westforce has delivered over two decades, but we are more grateful for the people who delivered it, and that gratitude does not get said out loud often enough inside a business like ours.
As a business owner, you don’t always get it right. Hiring decisions aren’t always ‘on point.’ Sometimes the ‘gut feeling’ lets you down. Sometimes the glamour of someone’s supposed experience can cloud your judgement.
But after two decades in an industry that changes constantly, we have learned to trust attitude over credentials almost every time, and we suspect any business owner who has been at this a while has a similar story if they stop to think about it. The people who carried your business through its hardest years were probably not the ones who looked most impressive when they started. If you run a business that has been through its share of change, it might be worth asking who actually got you through it, and whether you have told them lately.
It’s not a profound thing to say that we genuinely wouldn’t be celebrating twenty years without the people in our business who have got us here; we get that. But one thing can be true - it’s a proud moment to take a step back and acknowledge it.
