How to Hire Great OSP Designers

Our Methodology

Katapult Pro was built to help healthy teams scale quickly. This means our solutions need to help brand-new employees become valuable as soon as possible, preferably on day one.

Sometimes it makes sense to hire an expert. But experts are expensive and typically come with both good and bad habits from previous projects, workflows, and company culture.

Plus, when the industry is booming experts can be hard to come by. Clients typically expect low prices (due to high volumes) and work to be delivered yesterday.

Our default strategy has been to find great people who could crush the day-to-day demands of being an OSP designer, even if they've never looked at a utility pole before!

Getting The Right Person

There are two non-negotiables in hiring: getting the right person and making sure they’re in the right seat. 

If you can’t commit to getting these two things right, you should probably consider subcontracting. The impact of having the wrong people—even if they’re in the right seats—can be fatal to your culture and business.

Getting the right people requires you know your core values well. Core values aren’t a list of buzzwords or aspirational attributes. They’re the qualities present in all your staff. They’re the things that you hire, fire, reward, promote, and make tough decisions based on.

They aren’t found by accident. Just because you all use iPhones or fish on the weekends doesn’t make those things your core values. And permission-to-play items like “integrity” and “honesty” probably aren’t core values either.

Not everyone on your team will have the same impact on company culture as others—you have to determine what the bar is. However, holding all staff to the same standard is critical to building a lasting culture where all staff celebrate the same values that help the company reach its potential.

Here are 3 quick steps to make sure you’re looking for the right people:

1. Know your core values: If you don’t know what they are, you can probably get a sense of them by looking at the traits of your most successful and culturally impactful team members.

2. Communicate core values to candidates: It should be clear that if a candidate doesn’t share your core values, it'll probably drive them nuts to be on a team that emphasizes those things.

3. Be consistent: Hire, fire, promote, incentivize, reward, and celebrate staff based on core values.

Getting The Right People Into The Right Seats

Once you have the right person, it's time to make sure OSP Design is a good seat for them.

When using Katapult Pro, this means making sure your candidate is someone who can and wants to look at screens for 8+ hours in a day without suffering from screen fatigue. It also means they are curious about what's on a pole, and have the attention to detail and focus to follow annotation and make ready steps all the way through to completion. 

While there may be many more details, here is a list of what we look for in our OSP design candidates:

• is very comfortable with technology, especially desktop/Windows

• doesn't mind looking at screens for long periods of time (often has a love of TV, movies, or video games)

• is very comfortable performing repetitive tasks without checking out or turning their brain off

• is detail-oriented and safety-conscious

• communicates clearly and expects clear communication from others

• is hungry to follow up on their mistakes and doesn't get intimidated by regular feedback

Onboarding New OSP Designers

We recommend new OSP Design staff be onboarded with the following strategies: 

1. Start with the Basics. The first few days of work need to cover safety, software, and the fundamentals of overhead OSP. 

2. Master and Apprentice. We've found that it works best for new OSP Designers to work closely with experienced staff who can review their work and answer questions when they get stuck. We also offer Katapult Pro Office Apprenticeships out of Dillsburg, PA!

3. Begin with Existing Conditions. Annotation is the most valuable starting point for new staff. It lets them learn and document the existing conditions on the poles and in the midspans that their team has collected. Team members can easily review it while performing make ready and pole loading for the poles.

4. Graduate to Pole Loading Analysis. While the next piece of the process is typically make ready engineering, pole loading analysis is a better next step for new staff. Pole loading is a bit simpler to understand, as you can build out an analysis model that matches the existing conditions on the pole.

5. Make Ready Engineering. The Katapult Pro platform makes calling make ready more attainable for new designers by highlighting all clearance violations. It's still a tough job, and there often isn't a right answer; because it can be more of an art, this will take time and experience to master fully.

Thanks for reading! Over the years we've seen former blacksmiths, biologists, camp staff, and landscapers turn into experts OSP Designers! For more info about growing experts with Katapult Pro, or our Office Apprenticeships, give us a shout at hello@katapultengineering.com!