Rob O'Keeffe Joinery
Pathways – What Rob looks for in an employee:
The joinery is a small family business, and employees have to be able to fit in with the particular requirements of the business and working environment.
"Firstly, you're not going to get in the door in a business like ours if you don't have pride in the finished product." Rob emphasises that the culture of a workshop defines the quality of the finished products.
"The ability to work as part of a team is very important. You can't go around making lots of rules for people, it just doesn't work. You can't say to somebody 'At 9 o'clock on Tuesday morning you'll grab the broom and follow that yellow line and the whole floor will be clean.' They have to be able to think for themselves and see that if something needs to be done it is done – on the spot. That's being part of a team."
"The ability to communicate is vital, especially when a lot of the time we're not working off specific plans. I need to be able to do sketches and give them to somebody and know that they can turn that into a job. Or alternatively they need to be able to tell me that they don't see that as an easy way of doing the job."
"Being well organised with good planning skills is the key to any trade. What you're really learning in your trade is how to organise a job. The more somebody is able to work independently the more marketable they are going to be."
"Also, a client is looking at your employees and judging your company by them, so being presentable is quite important nowadays. As a company we're selling ourselves all the time and we need people to be impressed by the quality of our workers. It can't always happen, people aren't perfect all the time but having that sort of a person helps a company a lot."
"It's not critical to have a good range of practical skills before working here. Sometimes it can be good to see projects that people have done, but not a necessity. You have to have good practical skills but they don't need to be proven – we can test out pretty quickly how good people are at picking up instructions and what sort of hand skills they have. Nor are we looking for experience with specific machinery. Sometimes people turning up with previous experience is not the best thing – they have preconceived ideas about how things should be done, and they're not that keen to listen to other ways of doing things."
